Ever since last year’s election, the liberal media continues to wax eloquent about the strength, size and threat posed by Trump’s MAGA brand, a so-called ‘movement’ which has now become even more fearsome since the Capitol riot of last week. After all, is there anyone other than Trump who could bring thousands of angry, threatening protestors to D.C. by simply pushing out a couple of tweets?
And even in the somewhat more mild video that was played multiple times on Fox, while he deplored violence, Trump still managed to refer to MAGA as his ‘movement’ and vowed to continue the good (non-violent) fight.
While the liberal media may not have Trump to kick around after next week, at least they’ll have the MAGA movement to write and spiel about for the next couple of years. And when you want to keep a group alive in order to give yourself an easy target for your click bait and Nielsen ratings, you’d better make sure that the group is as big and as widespread as you can make it out to be.
Have you noticed that there hasn’t been one, single story about how Joe and Kammie polled more than 81 million votes? Have you noticed how nobody seems the slightest bit interested in how or why the national Democratic ticket increased its total numbers from 2016 by almost 30 percent?
To the contrary. All everyone wants to talk about is whether MAGA will replace the GOP and whether Trump will be a Presidential candidate again in 2024. Right now, this guy can’t even go into a bank and cash a fifty-dollar check. But he’s a strong contender to head the Republican ticket in 2024, right? Gimme me a friggin’ break.
For all the adoration of his MAGA fans, Trump wasn’t so popular even when he was President, never mind if he’s even going to be remembered once he can’t do anything except sit on his fat ass. Of the 104 bi-weekly surveys in which Gallup asked voters to approve or disapprove of Trump’s behavior as President, his approval rating never hit even 50% and only four times did it even get above 45%. No other President except Jimmy Carter did that badly in the Gallup poll, and you recall what happened to Carter when he ran a second time.
Trump’s attempt to explain away his November loss by claiming election ‘fraud’ testified to his ability to make himself an indispensable resource for the mainstream media regardless of whether anything he said even remotely qualified as ‘news.’ And alongside the continued verbal assaults on the ‘enemy of the people’ was the promotion of his MAGA brand. After all, how do you otherwise explain 74 million votes?
I don’t know how to explain his 21% increase in total votes compared to what he racked up in 2016, just as I don’t know how Joe and Kammie increased Hillary’s 2016 numbers by almost 30%. But I’ll tell you this. If you take a look at state-level returns from the most reliably red states, what jumps out is not all those new Trump voters, but the new voters who voted for Kammie and Joe.
The 16 reddest states, i.e., the states which gave Trump at least 58% of the statewide vote in 2016 are pictured below:
From 2016 to 2020, these states saw an increase in Trump votes of 11%. These same states saw an increase in votes for Hillary to Biden-Harris of 18%. Or to put it another way, in 2016 Trump received 63% of the total votes cast in these states; in 2020 his percentage was slightly above 60%. In other words, the increase in votes for the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 wasn’t just in blue or purple states. It was even in the states where the MAGA movement is allegedly strongest of all.
If I hold my breath until the liberal media abandons its obsession with Trump, I won’t be breathing very well in the months ahead.