They still don’t get it …

The election’s been over for a couple of weeks.  Trump won. 

That result seems to be lost on many people.  Nobody they know, nobody they hold in high esteem, voted for him. So how could he have possibly won?  

The mayors and newspapers of the major cities were all against him.  Celebrities such as Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Jay-Z and Beyoncé came out against him.  So did actors such as Robert De Niro. Civil rights groups opposed him. Immigrant-rights groups opposed him.  President Obama and Michelle campaigned against him, repeatedly calling him unfit.   

How on Earth could he get elected?  Every right-thinking person was against him.  It wasn’t just Democrats – the Bush family opposed him, as did Mitt Romney, John McCain and a wide range of other prominent members of the Republican establishment. 

And now that Trump will be President, they fear that all the progress their country’s made over the past decade could be wiped out. 

Let me share something they clearly don’t get:  very few Americans outside their cultural bubble give a rat’s ass what they think. In fact, it’s the “progress” liberals think they’ve made that drove so many Americans to vote for Trump – they wanted that “progress” to stop.  To most voting Americans outside of the major cities, liberals had gone way too far at their expense.

While liberals railed against the rich and said they felt for the working man and woman, the reality on the ground was much different. Liberal policies in recent years actually made the rich richer, illegal immigrants more emboldened, and the poor so gifted with entitlements there was now a disincentive for many to get a job and lose those benefits.

To many Trump voters the country had gone from a hard-working nation that manufactured things to a food-stamp nation that instead manufactured more benefits for people who chose not to work, or didn’t have any legal right to be here.  

Democrat and Republican establishment politicians, instead of focusing on rewarding work, bringing back jobs, and creating new good-paying jobs, fought over things Trump voters didn’t care about one way or another.  Like same-sex marriage.  Funding Planned Parenthood.  Transgender rights.  Climate change. Hate speech and safe zones.  Protecting illegal immigrants from deportation.    

None of these things really mattered as much to many Americans as rebuilding the economy.  Only the chattering class and the media talking heads thought these did. But because our news media are concentrated in major cities – where political correctness is created and worshipped – ordinary folks outside those cities were fed a steady diet of what mattered more to the media and politicians than to people worried about keeping or getting a job to feed their families.   

Trump voters saw America as a house on fire. Putting the fire out was the only thing that mattered.  All the rest was simply background noise – solutions to problems that didn’t matter nearly as much. Wasting time on whether some business could refuse to make a wedding cake for someone, or if some church should be required to provide birth control, or taking down the 10 Commandments from government property seemed a luxury the country could ill afford when it had more pressing problems like terrorist attacks, joblessness, declining incomes, and skyrocketing deficits.  

They wanted their government to do something – something real, not just symbolic. They had been trying to send this message for at least three election cycles.  They elected Obama because he promised change.  When that didn’t happen – and instead they got ObamaCare – they elected a Republican majority in the House and Senate.  Still nothing changed with either party, so they voted for Trump in the primaries – against the wishes of the Republican establishment and to the horror of Democrats – and then voted Trump into the Oval Office.    

Frankly, voters were tired of being told what to do, what to think, and what to believe shoved down their throats by people apparently more focused on which bathroom kids should use than whether those same kids could read and write.  Or whether gun violence was caused by guns or the people using those guns.  Or whether “undocumented” was the politically correct way to describe people who have entered our country illegally. 

The people in power and the media obsessed over these things and couldn’t see what was really happening outside their narrow frame of reference.  Finally, enough people were pissed enough to come out and vote to overturn the status quo.  They never saw it coming. 

Voters rebelled against policies and endless regulations that cost them jobs, reduced their incomes, and raised their healthcare costs. They saw what liberals believed was “progress” as a continuing erosion of the values they held dear – mainly having a steady job, minding your own business, paying your bills, and being responsible for yourself and your family. 

More to the point, they rebelled against being ignored and taken for granted.

After all the hand-wringing by the media and Democrats over the election, and the protests and riots by disgruntled activists, and the blame game over who was really responsible for such an unexpected outcome, the media and the left still don’t get it.

That’s how out of touch they were, and sadly still are. 

Trump won the Electoral College vote by a wide margin.  Republicans increased their seats in the House, retained their majority in the Senate, and increased the number of Republican-held governorships and state houses.  That’s what’s known as a change election, not a fluke. 

The left, cultural elites and the media apparently can’t fathom that. They still think they can call the shots because they have the real power in America.  They don’t.  And they don’t realize that whatever power and influence they thought they had was in truth only with each other.   

They cheered when VP-Elect Mike Pence recently went to a Broadway show and many audience members booed him. At the end of the same show one of the actors came out and lectured Pence on what the cast expected Pence and Trump to do for them.  The media was enthralled.  Then the New York media breathlessly reported that New York fashion designers were refusing to design clothes for Melania Trump, as if that was a real blow to the Trumps.

Seriously? 

What planet are these people on? 

Their arrogance and condescension cost them this election. They still don’t get it.