President Trump: Man of the People

For the third year in a row, President Trump will not attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  Instead, he will hold a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin.  Last year, he held a rally in Washington Township, Michigan as the Correspondents’ Dinner took place in Washington, D.C.  President Trump spent the first White House Correspondents’ Dinner of his presidency in the state of Pennsylvania.

Given a choice between spending the evening with people who hate him (the press) and the people who love him, it makes obvious sense why he would choose to spend time with the latter.  He already spends plenty of time with those who hate him by answering impromptu questions as he leaves the White House and he has to spend time with those who hate him every time he tries to negotiate with Congressional Democrats.  He could definitely use a break.  The White House will have representatives on hand at the Correspondents’ Dinner.  Last year, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders attended the event; only to have to endure “comedian” Michelle Wolf ripping her to shreds.  The White House Correspondents’ Association has announced that it will not have a comedian on hand this year, which kind of makes sense after last year’s debacle. 

Besides heading to the border, President Trump could not have picked a better venue for his rally.  In the three times that he has held (or will hold) rallies concurrently with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, they have all taken place in the three states crucial to his victory.  President Trump should definitely rejoice that he won the states of Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and North Carolina in 2016 but he won those states quite comfortably; especially considering the fact that Mitt Romney lost three of the four states four years earlier. If he loses all of those states next year, then he will probably lose his bid for a second term in the White House.

President Trump could have won all four of those states and still lost the White House.  Only by winning the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, states that had not voted Republican since the 1980s, did he reach the number of electoral votes necessary to capture the Presidency.  It seems likely that President Trump will spend the fourth White House Correspondents’ Dinner of his first term with his supporters as well.  Which state he decides to spend that evening in will provide a clue as to his strategy for winning a second term.

More than halfway through his first term, President Trump has reasons for concern in all three states; especially following the 2018 midterms. Republicans had opportunities to pick up Senate seats in all three states and they fumbled all three; although they came much closer than expected in Michigan.  Then again, each of the Senate seats had incumbents running.  All three states also had gubernatorial races; Republicans lost all three.  Republicans lost the open gubernatorial race in Michigan and Scott Walker, the Republican Governor of Wisconsin, narrowly lost re-election. Republicans also failed to unseat the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania.  Republicans ended up losing House seats in two of the three states; although court-ordered redistricting likely caused at least some of the losses in Pennsylvania.  Republicans lost four House seats in Pennsylvania and two House seats in Michigan.  Republicans held on to all of their House seats in Wisconsin despite Democrats’ best efforts to flip a handful of them but failed to flip the 3^rd District, which Trump carried in 2016.  Michigan chose to elect a radical leftist as Attorney General; although this race the closest of all of the statewide races.  The Democrats appear to have their eyes on recapturing these states in 2020; as demonstrated by their decision to hold the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. On the other hand, Republicans maintained control of the legislatures in all three of the states. 

The President’s presence in Wisconsin contrasts nicely with the left’s gathering in the heart of the Swamp.  His decision to spend the evening with the rank-and-file American people as opposed to the elites committed to preserving the status quo that has left many in the rest of the country behind should not come as a surprise. Just last week, President Trump travelled to San Antonio and Crosby, Texas to meet with those affected by the border crisis as well as union workers.  While he actually tried to solve the problem on the border, the Democrats gathered for a retreat in Leesburg, Virginia; a rapidly growing western suburb of Washington, D.C.  The retreat supposedly celebrated the first 100 days of the new Democratic Congress but their actual time in Washington, D.C. amounts to far less than 100 days.  Nonetheless, guess who joined them at their retreat?  None other than Hollywood power couple John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, who definitely have their fingers on the pulse of America.  They might as well have called their retreat the “one percent family reunion.”  Legend and Teigen used their platforms at the retreat to trash President Trump and when asked by Melissa Harris-Perry what word women should say more, Teigen responded “f**k you.”  For the record, that’s not a word.  It’s a phrase.  In addition to the aforementioned obscenity, Teigen apparently likes to throw around another phrase quite casually: white supremacist.  She attached that label to Fox News host Laura Ingraham, after the host questioned her worthiness of her presence on the list of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. Perhaps Teigen should have done a little more research before smearing Ingraham.  Ingraham has adopted a daughter from Guatemala and once dated Indian-American Dinesh D’Souza and Filipino-American George Conway.  Every time the Democrats try to tell you that they represent the working people of America, think of the ending of this scene from “Airplane II: The Sequel.”  If the Democrats really cared about working people, they surely would have invited people like the union workers President Trump met with during his trip to San Antonio.

Don’t get me wrong.  Making a lot of money does not make someone a bad person.  It just makes the Democrats look like phonies when they try and portray themselves as the party of working Americans, in contrast to the Republicans, who they always portray as the party of the rich.  As I have pointed out before, their depiction of Republicans does not hold up under scrutiny.  In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats carried 79 of the 100 wealthiest Congressional districts.  The Democrats swept every single district with a median income greater than $100,000 while President Trump lost all but two of them in the 2016 Presidential Election.

The district that Legend and Teigen hail from, California’s 33^rd Congressional District, ranks 12^th of the 435 Congressional Districts in terms of median income. The median income there comes in at nearly double the national average. Hillary Clinton captured roughly two-thirds of the vote there in the 2016 Presidential election.  The district also ranks first when it comes to educational attainment, with more than 85 percent of its residents having attended at least “some college,” according to the 2018 Almanac of American Politics. As for the nation as a whole, only 59 percent of Americans have attended at least “some college.”

In contrast, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin serve as microcosms of America.  Each state has their college towns (Ann Arbor, State College, and Madison) that vote overwhelmingly Democratic; in addition to the major urban centers that not surprisingly consistently vote Democratic (Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee).  Each urban center in those states has wealthy suburbs surrounding it (Oakland County in Michigan; Berks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties in Pennnsylvania; and Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha Counties in Washington.)  All of those counties saw a noticeable drop in their support for the Republican Presidential candidate from 2012 to 2016; as the affluent have begun to swing towards the Democrats at a national level. 

On the other hand, all of the states have vast rural areas that tend to favor the Republicans.  No election illustrated this better than 2016, when former industrial powerhouses voted Republican and many “Reagan Democrats” returned to the Grand Old Party for the first time in decades.  President Trump flipped Pennsylvania’s 17^th Congressional District, renumbered as the 8^th District following court-ordered redistricting, a Scranton-based district with a long history of voting Democratic.  President Trump also captured Wisconsin’s 3^rd Congressional District, a primarily rural district that President Obama carried twice. To think that people predicted President Trump would lose in a 49-state landslide.

In terms of educational attainment, Michigan and Wisconsin almost precisely mirror the national average; with roughly 59 percent of its residents having attended at least “some college.” Pennsylvania has a slightly higher share of residents with a high school diploma or less; with that number coming in at 47 percent. 

Legend and Teigen’s corner of the world, Coastal California, has seen an economic boom in recent years because of the growth of Silicon Valley and the tech oligarchy.  At the same time, the corner of the world inhabited by the self-righteous attendees of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner have also weathered the storms of the Great Recession and America last trade policies quite well.  The growth of the federal government has enabled the Washington, D.C. area to become one of the epicenters of wealth and prosperity.  Contrast the economic conditions of “the Swamp” with the economic conditions of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  For years, the auto industry served as the backbone of the Michigan economy. Eight weeks before the 2016 Presidential Election, then-candidate Trump pointed out how the situation has changed for the worse: “It used to be cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint.”  Trump promised to “turn this around” and the voters of Michigan rewarded him for it.

As far as Pennsylvania’s economy goes, coal and steel have provided the main source of income for most of its residents.  President Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton promised to put “a lot of coal miners out of business.”  That comment caused her to face a landslide defeat in West Virginia while suffering a narrow loss in Pennsylvania; where the large population of the left-leaning Philadelphia area cancels out the votes of those living in coal and steel country.  Should Democrats decide to embrace the Green New Deal, which promises a death blow to the coal industry as well as the fracking that has provided economic relief to the northern part of the state, then they can certainly kiss Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes goodbye in the 2020 Presidential Election.

So let the elitist Trump haters in the mainstream media have their fun at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  President Trump does not want to rain on their parade.  He will be having a lot more fun in Green Bay, Wisconsin, one of many stops on the parade route to his second term. Based on the fact that the Democrats would rather court Hollywood than the voters in states crucial to capturing the Presidency, it looks like their elitism may prevent them from winning the race to the White House once again in 2020.