Buzzfeed Gets In the Smear Trump with George Wallace Game

January 11th, 2016 7:25 AM

The liberal media has collectively taken on what could possibly be described as a thinly veiled “journalistic” hit job on Donald Trump by trying to make personal and political comparisons to segregationist symbol of the south and three time democratic presidential failure, George Wallace.

Buzzfeed reporters Andrew Kaczynski and Nathan McDermott came out with a piece on Wednesday insisting “Segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace’s daughter and two of his former top aides said in interviews this week that candidate Donald Trump is squarely in Wallace’s racist, populist tradition.”

Has anyone heard Trump say “Segregation forever”??

Wallace’s daughter and the two former aides say they are now “reformed racists,” just like Wallace was when he admitted to being wrong about racism in the 1980’s.  Wallace’s claim to racist fame is the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door,” when he physically tried to block black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963.

Here are a few excerpts of Buzzfeed’s piece where Wallace’s daughter and two former aides try to make comparisons:

“There are a great deal of similarities as it relates to their style and political strategies,” said Wallace’s daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy. “The two of them, they have adopted the notion that fear and hate are the two greatest motivators of voters…Those voters tend to make decisions based on an emotional level rather than intellectual.”

“They both understood, my father and Donald Trump, that low-information voters, they tend to feed off of the threats to their livelihood and safety without really considering what that threat really is, or even if it’s real…”

“He’s very similar to George Wallace in a lot of ways,” said Wallace’s 1968 campaign executive director Tom Turnipseed. “Both of them use a lot of the same kind of scare tactics and fear.…That’s why he pushed the Mexican thing, and now he’s throwing the Chinese in there too. …. As far as the tactics they use, the scare thing, is a lot alike to be honest with you… In Trump’s thing it’s the Mexicans, the wetbacks that we used to call them, the Chinese too a little bit. Back in Wallace’s time it was African-American people,” said Wallace’s 1968 campaign executive director Tom Turnipseed.

Turnipseed’s wife Judy also weighed in:

“Their style is a lot alike…They’re both very charismatic. Their rhetoric is really powerful, and they don’t really talk that much about solutions, but the fear and anxiety.”

They acknowleged that Wallace's daughter was an early endorser of Obama in 2008, which might suggest a personal motivation for trying to bring Trump down. Turnipseed has been a liberal Democratic operative his whole post-Wallace career, and has been used for decades to attack Lee Atwater, the 1988 campaign manager for George H.W. Bush. (You might almost forget that these racists were all Democrats.)

The Buzzfeed reporting duo put their own two cents in, saying that Trump and Wallace “share a flair for the flamboyant. During campaign appearances, Trump, like Wallace, uses tough language on those who interrupt his events.”

Wallace’s daughter continued:

“Another thing that I think is similar is that, a lot of people are saying that Trump is saying out loud what people are thinking…They really said that about Wallace. That he articulated what people were thinking...”

Even comparing Trump’s campaign theme to Wallace’s “Stand up for America”:

“One of my father’s presidential campaign themes was ‘Stand up for America’, and Trump’s is ‘Make America Great Again.’ Well the message does not suggest how you do that. It just reminds us that the average Joe who thinks America is in the dumpster, which I feel it is not…”

Buzzfeed wasn’t the only “news” outlet to compare Trump to Wallace.  MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow did a whole segment on January 5 with liberal historian Michael Beschloss emphasizing how Trump’s campaign was similar to Wallace’s, and Politico, Slate, Salon, and the Daily Beast have all taken turns.

If these “news” organizations are all about comparisons, where’s their comparison of Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton? *crickets*