Liberals are breaking out in flop sweat that impeachment is going to backfire and that Donald Trump will be re-elected in November. So if you need someone to shake you out of your fears, there's always pseudo-conservative David Brooks of The New York Times. On the Friday "Week in Politics" segment on NPR's All Things Considered, he said Democrats are "crazy" to think Trump can win again.
Brooks was matched with red-hot race-hustler Jason Johnson of The Root, who insisted the biggest issue of 2020 would be "voter protection and voter suppression." Republicans are always suppressing the minority vote in this conspiracy theory, and Johnson said " the popular will will not be represented in next fall's election unless the Democratic Party and well-meaning Republicans and state officials take voter suppression and voter ID seriously."
The "popular will" equals a Trump loss. They've believed that since 2016.
AILSA CHANG: David, do you agree with that, that if election security, election integrity are preserved, that we would see Donald Trump out of the office of the presidency?
DAVID BROOKS: I think that'll happen either way. You know, I think, you know, I keep having Democratic politicians come up to me say, secretly, you know, I think Trump is going to win this. I think they're crazy. I mean, since 2016, since Trump was elected, there have been 300 elections around the country - governorships, House races. Republicans have done terribly in pretty much all them. They've lost 10 governorships. They've lost their House majority.
They're just -- the voters want to move on…. there's going to be a fundamental restructuring of the Republican Party. And that'll be the big story of 2020.
The two pundits were asked what was the "most underappreciated political story of 2019." Brooks said "everything happened and nothing changed, that we had all these events -- impeachment, Mueller, everything, 51 weeks of news-packed weeks....And we're exactly where we were a year ago. Trump's approvals are basically the same."
So how does he think this matches with Trump losing ignominiously and the GOP fundamentally restructuring?
Johnson picked the news that Trump was denounced as a racist for tweeting "go home" about Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and AOC:
JOHNSON: I think one of the most underreported stories this year was back in July, when the House had a resolution to basically say the president of the United States is a racist. That's not a small thing....
The president of the United States, the majority of the public never wanted him, right? I mean, he lost the popular vote. But for this to no longer be a discussion of virtue signalling by white liberals, OK, maybe he's a bigot, but for an entire House of government to say this is a problem, I think that's significant. And I think that sort of thing can't be discussed enough.
