Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified cited Tina Sfondeles as the author of the Chicago Sun-Times story cited below. In fact, it was by Neil Steinberg. Also, the Trump rally took place in Granite City, Illinois. Not Elkhart, Indiana.
As the midterm elections on November 6 draw ever nearer, liberal Democrats are attempting to boost their morale after being pounded unexpectedly by Republican candidate Donald Trump two years ago.
During Monday evening’s program of The Ingraham Angle, the Fox News Channel host and conservative guest Ben Shapiro pointed to two “imaginary stories,” one in which Trump wins re-election since the Democrats had no one who could beat him -- or he learned that “the normal rules of politics do apply to Donald Trump after all” when he loses to “Hillary Clinton clone” Elizabeth Warren.
He also hammered “people who think that jobs being lost of the New York Daily News is a national tragedy, but jobs being lost in the steel industry is totally fine because those are a bunch of rubes in the Rust Belt anyway.”
Ingraham began the discussion by pointing to a pro-Trump rally visited by Neil Steinberg, a columnist from the Chicago Sun-Times -- in Granite City, Illinois, where he came away with a changed opinion:
We need steel, Trump said. We need steel plants. I look at the faces of you people, I could be one of you. I like you guys. That struck me as either sincere or an amazing facsimile. The workers, for their part, couldn't give him a standing ovation because they never sat down.
I left the hall thinking [that] Donald Trump is going to be re-elected in 2020. The Democrats don't have anyone who can touch him. Bank on it. Don't hate me for being the one to tell you.
Ingraham added before talking about the rally and asking about the reaction of the people and “thinking Kamala Harris, or Cory Booker, are they really going to get the mojo going? What are your thoughts there?”
Shapiro responded:
I think that's exactly right. The culture war that has been raging in the country is really not a war between the elites and the non-elites. It is between the elitists and everyone else.
People who think that jobs being lost of the New York Daily News is a national tragedy, but jobs being lost in the steel industry is totally fine because those are a bunch of rubes in the Rust Belt anyway.
“Why President Trump really does better than virtually any other politician on the American scene,” Shapiro added, is “he conveys that he really does care about people that are in these industries, people who are doing the so-called dirty jobs that people on the coasts tend to think only illegal immigrants are willing to do.”
“I think, obviously, funding Democrats is not the answer” to any problem, the guest continued, but “I think is less policy driven than it is even cultural. The president obviously has a lot of sympathy for people who are in these industries that have paid a price due to trade.”
Next, the host asked for Shapiro’s opinion on “the opposite of what the Chicago Sun-Times columnist’s road. This was a piece published this morning imagining the day after Trump's re-election loss in 2020.”
That story began:
As Trump seethed and tweeted in defeat late Tuesday, and President-elect Elizabeth Warren celebrated, the arc of the Trump story is starting to make more sense than it has for much of his chaotic presidency. The normal rules of politics do apply to Donald Trump after all.
So now the time was up for Trump. They are already imagining his loss, which tells you, well, the derangement syndrome, whatever you want to call it, that cliche is already wearing thin, but they are not having to write about 2020 in 2018.
“I think they are desperate to take down President Trump right now,” Shapiro noted. “They are hoping obviously that 2016 was an outlier, and they are going to blame it on anything. They'll blame it on Hillary Clinton being a bad candidate finally, or they'll blame it on Russian collusion, which they have yet to prove.”
However, “they won't acknowledge that there is a systemic problem inside the Democratic Party, and screaming Medicare for all in running a “Hillary Clinton clone” like Elizabeth Warren is not going to fix the giant gap that they have with the middle of the country.”
“The bottom line in all this,” Shapiro noted, is that “the people in the middle of the country are doing work that is as important or more important than the people on the coast who are sitting in their coffeehouses writing scripts.”
Regardless of any “Blue Wave” that might or might not appear on November 6, we’ll probably have to wait until 2020 to find out whether Donald Trump will get another four years in the White House.
