The liberal media has got its knickers in a twist. In fact-checking Donald Trump’s moving appeal to ordinary Americans who have been burned by what he calls a “rigged system,” they’ve had to defend NAFTA, pretend that 2015 was a banner year for the creation of manufacturing jobs, and defend Bill Clinton’s corrupt business dealings with foreign tyrants and the favors his wife showered on them as Secretary of State.
Despite their valiant efforts, even a CBS morning news anchor, while presenting the speech derisively to viewers, had to admit that Mr. Trump’s statements were “mostly true.” Her only quibble: the 282 source notes released along with the speech “just didn’t provide much context.”
{mosads}That seemed about the best that even Media Matters, the Hillary Clinton research outfit subsidized by George Soros, could do. (They half-heartedly reproduced tweets from pro-Hillary partisans calling the speech “dark” and “ugly,” but that hardly counts).
Any reader can go to the full text of Mr. Trump’s speech and click on the footnotes, which conveniently link to online resources.
How about those lost manufacturing jobs? Donald Trump linked to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official source of employment indicators. When I opened the link, it showed a loss of two million manufacturing jobs, about a 14% drop – but that is based on a starting date of 2006.
If you reset the graph to the year Donald Trump cited – 1997 – indeed, we have lost nearly 1/3 of manufacturing jobs since Bill Clinton’s presidency, a devastating shift in how America works.
How about the explosion of the murder rate in Chicago under Obama’s watch? The speech links to official year by year statistics from the Illinois State Police.
Mr. Trump pledged early on to “present the facts plainly and honestly,” without the sugar-coating of political correctness. This is part of his appeal to ordinary Americans.
“If you want to hear the corporate spin, the carefully-crafted lies and the media myths, the Democrats are holding their convention next week,” he noted. “But here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.”
Donald Trump’s willingness to confront the decline of America, which is evident to anyone watching the news or driving the roads and bridges of just about any major city these days, has struck a nerve with fellow citizens.
He has awoken the sleeping giant of the American people, fed up with the lies and the spin.
President Obama has nearly doubled the national debt in seven years, from $10 trillion to over $19 trillion. As Mr. Trump says, “what do we have to show for it?” Ordinary Americans ask the same.
Donald Trump’s genius is to show himself, as some commentators have said, as the “blue-collar billionaire.” That’s the theme that came ringing through his entire speech.
He outlined a full spectrum of government reforms that common-sense Americans – and even a few politicians – have been advocating for some time: a simpler tax system that dramatically lowers rates, quickly eliminating government regulations that are choking the economy, and a foreign and national security policy based on “Americanism, not globalism.”
But it’s his appeal to working class Americans that is most unusual for a Republican. And it shows how politics and demographics have shifted dramatically over the past twenty years.
“Big businesses, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place,” he said. “She is their puppet. They pull the strings.”
Instead, Donald Trump pledged to defend “the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice.
“I AM YOUR VOICE,” he roared. (Yes, it was in caps in the printed speech).
This is much more than a replay of Ronald Reagan appeal to the patriotism of union workers who were fed up with the fecklessness of Jimmy Carter’s response to the taking of U.S. hostages in Iran. These so-called “Reagan Democrats” gave him crushing victories over his Democrat opponents.
It is more than Richard Nixon’s appeal to the “silent majority” or his claim to be the “law and order” candidate. While Donald Trump is certainly using the same term, it has a much different meaning today, because he explicitly includes among the victims he will defend the black and Latino communities in America’s inner cities who are bearing the brunt of the lawlessness our government has encouraged.
Mr. Trump has displayed in his personal life, and in his brief but stellar political career, an authentic connection to the “little” people of America, the families victimized by lawlessness and sanctuary cities who “have no special interests to represent them.
“There are no demonstrators to protest on their behalf. My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain…These wounded American families have been alone. But they are alone no longer.”
Critics call this a “dark” or even “terrifying” vision of America?
Really? I call it the revival of America. Finally.
Timmerman is a Donald Trump supporter. He was the 2012 Republican Congressional nominee for MD-8 and is the author of Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary & Obama Blamed for Benghazi, released this week by Post Hill Press.
The views expressed by Contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill