academia, against Hollywood, and of course against the national news media.
Interestingly enough, the country class uprising Codevilla had identified wasn’t limited to the United States. The same phenomenon was emerging in other nations. Many of the same issues, including unfair trade practices, uncontrolled illegal immigration, and Islamic terrorism, were triggering populist uprisings, and just as with the Trump phenomenon, the American news media chose sides.
It started with the elections in Israel on March 17.
The manufactured conventional wisdom and polling predicted a tight race and rough sledding for conservative prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. NPR’s Emily Harris reported from Jerusalem, “We might not know for days or even weeks who the next prime minister of Israel will actually be.” Instead the conservative won quickly and decisively, and that triggered a media explosion with the usual sore-loser outbursts about racist campaign tactics and how Mideast peace was dead. CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour channeled the hostility of Arab Israelis who, she said, “feel that the Likud Party and the right wing do have a, sort of, racist policy towards them and it’s very scary for them.”
Ring a bell?
Next came the British parliamentary elections on May 7. On NBC’s Meet the Press on May 3, host Chuck Todd proclaimed the race between Conservative Party prime minister David Cameron and Labour Party leftist Ed Miliband “too close to call.” Channeling the usual Democrat analysts, Todd declared, “There’s been commentary that if Cameron loses, the Republican Party ought to learn something from that.”
On MSNBC, anchor Andrea Mitchell brought on “senior political analyst” David Axelrod to make a fool of himself: “I think that the polls are accurate. This is a very, very close race, highly likely that this drama extends beyond tonight.” Wrong on both counts. Cameron defied the “experts” and won a clear majority in Parliament.
Like Obama field organizer Jeremy Bird, who had worked diligently in Israel to defeat Netanyahu only to fail, Axelrod had traveled to London to work for Labour, and like a good Obama strategist, he blamed others for the failure of his predictions: “In all my years as journalist & strategist, I’ve never seen as stark a failure of polling as in UK. Huge project ahead to unravel that.”
The defeats for the ruling class just kept coming. In June, the media were shocked again when Britain voted to leave the European Union—for a “Brexit”—over trade and immigration concerns. As in Israel, Team Obama was meddling with Britain’s country class, with Obama writing an op-ed against Brexit that appeared while he was visiting England in April. Only CBS quoted British politicians such as like Boris Johnson criticizing the interference. “The U.S. guards its democracy with more hysterical jealousy than any other country on Earth,” he stated. “It’s a breathtaking example of do as I say, not as I do.”
Speaking of breathtaking, the New York Times actually complained that British tabloids were “pushing an agenda,” dwelling on their “nationalist and anti-European tendencies.” As another omen of things to come in the States, the “Remain” [in the EU] side on the center-left led in the polls, but the polls were wrong, and the “Leave” side won, 52 percent to 48 percent.
How to explain the inaccurate polls? Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney argued that people had been intimidated by the elites and were loath to express their beliefs publicly: “People who wanted to get out of the European Union were shamed into saying ‘Well, I’m not sure. Maybe we should stay.’ Because, in Britain if you wanted to get out, you were labeled a bigot. You were labeled an Islamophobe. You didn’t like foreigners. You were a hater.”
The media’s reaction to the Brexit victory confirmed Varney’s theory. Over at the New York Times they were especially nauseated by the results. Columnist Roger Cohen said Brexit was a “colossal leap in the dark,” and columnist Paul Krugman called for readers to “grieve for Europe.” Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic, announced the Brexit polling didn’t capture enough hate. It was “a clear signal, albeit not surprisingly, for increased skepticism when it comes to all polling that involves xenophobia and racism.”
Julie Bort at the Business Insider website summed it up for the ruling class: “Britain is broken beyond repair and the ignorant are officially running the world.” A Financial Times editor tweeted, “I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue!”
Trump, the Race-Baiting, Clinically Insane, Neo-Fascist Sociopath
All of this was an early indicator of how badly the elites were going to misjudge Trump. They dismissed him as an unsavory character. They missed the uprising he was leading. In the infamous Republican debate on CNBC in the fall of 2015, lead moderator John Harwood began by asking Trump: “Let’s be honest. Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?” But Harwood wasn’t alone. The other CNBC “moderators” got into the act and proceeded to ridicule one GOP candidate after the next, until Senator Ted Cruz reached the end of his tether over their nonstop insults: “The questions asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media. . . . You look at the questions. Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, can you insult those two people over here? Marco Rubio, will you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?” The audience roared its approval. The CNBC crew returned to Washington, D.C., and New York thoroughly humiliated, a case study on how to completely screw up a national debate.
CBS’s Face the Nation brought on Slate writer Jamelle Bouie to smear Trump voters as racist: “Trump’s supporters show all the hallmarks of people with high levels of racial resentment. They are—you know, they seem—a good number believe that President Obama is un-American or maybe even a Muslim and connected to terrorists. A good number referred to him as arrogant and elitist which, for myself, reads very much like ‘uppity’ as an old insult towards African Americans who have achieved some sort of stature in mainstream society.”
PBS host Tavis Smiley threw the race card with more velocity on ABC’s This Week: “Trump is still, to my mind at least, an unrepentant, irascible, religious and racial arsonist,” he screamed. “And so, when we talk about how Trump is rising in the polls, you can’t do that absent the kind of campaign he’s running, the issues he’s raising.”
As Trump’s chances of winning the nomination grew, the historical analogies grew more ridiculous—and offensive. On February 26, the Washington Post editorial board decided to compare Trump’s proposed crackdown on illegal immigration to murderers of millions: “He would round up and deport 11 million people, a forced movement on a scale not attempted since Stalin or perhaps Pol Pot. . . . He routinely trades in wild falsehoods and doubles down when his lies are exposed.” The Post’s editorial writers repeated this Pol Pot slur (equating deportation and execution) on April 22: “Remember that Mr. Trump promised to round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and deport them, in what would be the largest forced population movement since Pol Pot’s genocide of the Cambodian people.”
CNN commentator Sally Kohn lit some warning flares of her own. Even if you couldn’t vote for Hillary, “the woman who’s running with the impeccable and vast record of experience, if that’s not enough for people, at least stopping us from being Nazi Germany would hopefully get Democrats and others to turn out.” CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota left the Nazi smear unchallenged. Three days later on CNN, Kohn drove the hyperbole into Fantasyland. She worried: “When he [Trump] institutes internment camps and suspends habeas, we’ll all look back and feel pretty bad.”
The Nazi smears were all the rage for the outraged. New York Times columnist David Brooks cracked on Meet the Press: “If we’re going to get Trump, we might as well get the Nuremberg rallies to go with it!”
George Stephanopoulos threw Hitler at Trump on Good Morning America. “The number of prominent people comparing you to Adolf Hitler is actually growing by the day. . . . I can’t remember that kind of comparison being used against any other presidential candidate. Does it suggest to you that you should tone down your rhetoric and