CNN's Fareed Zakaria was somewhat more independent minded than most of his CNN colleagues and what he said on his Sunday show, Fareed Zakaria GPS, could make many of them feel anywhere between slightly to extremely uncomfortable. Zakaria listed three reasons for why the Democrats lost the presidency: ignoring the border crises, weaponizing the justice system to attack Donald Trump via lawfare, and identity politics.
It was the first two reasons, and lawfare in particular, that would cause the most discomfort to many others at CNN.
In spelling out the reasons, Zakaria noted that Democrats missed the boat on the public's shifting attitude against the left's open border policies. He noted that instead of reflecting, Democrats just called those who opposed them racist:
The first big error was the Biden Administration‘s blindness to the collapse of the immigration system and the chaos at the border. An asylum system that was meant for a small number of persecuted individuals was being used by millions to gain legal entry. Instead of shutting it down, liberals branded anyone protesting as heartless and racist. They missed a massive shift in American public opinion in just a few years. In 2020, the percentage of Americans who wanted to decrease immigration was just 28%. By this year, it was 55%. When Kamala Harris went on ‘The View’ and was asked how she would have differed from Biden, instead of basically saying, ‘Nothing different,’ she should have said, ‘I would have shut down the border early and hard.’
On the second reason, he noted that the lawsuits against Trump "piled on in rapid succession gave the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump" and how much money it helped to direct to his campaign coffers:
The second error was an overzealous misuse of law to punish Trump. The most egregious of the cases pursued was Alvin Bragg‘s in New York, one that even he was once skeptical of, but was reportedly pressured by some on the left into pursuing. Some cases, like the Georgia one, were legitimate, but the host of them piled on in rapid succession gave the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump. It confirmed to his base what it had always believed: that over-educated, urban liberals are hypocrites, happy to bend rules and norms when it suited their purposes. It is worth noting that in this week‘s election, a CNN exit poll found that among those who believe that democracy in the U.S. is threatened, a majority supported Trump. Lawfare turned Trump from being a loser into a victor, and as his indictments grew, his campaign contributions surged and his poll numbers solidified.
The final reason Zakaria gave was the left's swan dive into wokeism and their identity politics:
The final error is a more diffuse one, the dominance of identity politics on the left, which made it push for all kinds of DEI policies that largely came out of the urban academic bubble, but alienated many mainstream voters. There is an irony in claiming to be pro-Latino by insisting that people use the term ‘Latinx,’ only to discover that Latinos themselves think the word is weird. This kind of obsession made Democrats view people too much through their ethnic or racial or gender identity, and it made them miss, for example, that working-class Latinos were moving toward Trump, perhaps, because they were socially conservative or liked his macho rhetoric or even agreed with his hard-line stance on immigration. One of Trump‘s most effective ads on trans issues had a tagline.
We already know that CNN's legal analyst Elie Honig was highly critical of the use of lawfare against Trump but it remains to be seen what the attitudes will be among others at CNN on the criticisms presented by Zakaria.
