Joe Scarborough Says Trump Won Because Voters’ ‘Were Looking At Their Wallet’ Not Trump’s ‘Frightening’ Rhetoric
Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough delivered a stunning post-election rebuke of Democrats for the belief that focus on President-elect Donald Trump’s “frightening” campaign rhetoric would “smudge over” voters’ concern about the “reality of inflation.”
As Democrats and liberals continue to contend with the reason for Vice President Kamala Harris’s electoral defeat, the MSNBC host argued that “while we were looking at all of the crazy things Donald Trump was saying” that Americans “were looking at their wallet.”
[New York Times opinion writer] Frank Bruni has also written an op-ed we’ll be talking about, and he talks about what Democrats missed, and talk about how Democrats will see the shocking things that Donald Trump would say on the campaign trail, and they would think that was going to be what made the difference: Him rambling about Hannibal Lecter, him rambling about electric votes, him rambling about sharks, him rambling about going after Nancy Pelosi, going after Liz Cheney, all of these other things.
And what Frank Bruni said is they weren’t paying attention to it. Even the big things they were paying attention to, the debates.
Rounding on what American voters were paying attention to he continued:
A lot of people and a lot of Democrats looked at those big media events, those big political events thinking that that would smudge over the reality of inflation, and how much groceries cost and how much gas costs, and how hard it was to get into a home, and like Frank Bruni says Democrats never got it.
While we were looking at all of the crazy things Donald Trump was saying on the campaign trail, all of the frightening things Donald Trump was saying on the campaign trail, they were looking at their wallet. They were looking at what groceries cost, what gas costs, what rent costs, and none of that really penetrated their conscience when they went to vote.
Scarborough’s co-host Mika Brzezinski joined in agreement.
She said: “It’s, I think, hard for a hardworking American who’s busy, who’s got kids, who’s got a lot of things to worry about, to even take a moment to comprehend ‘enemy from within’ or Hitler’s generals or things that really seem very jarring to students of politics who do this for a living, but I agree.”
Rounding on the Harris campaign, she added: “I don’t think the Democratic side was able to communicate that effectively or they over communicated on it, as important as it was, and left other areas for the Trump side to take, and then there was disinformation. President-Elect Trump successfully harnessed the anger and frustration felt by millions.”
Watch above on MSNBC.
