Here's the News: Trump Wins Iowa & The Legacy Media Are FURIOUS!
As Donald Trump wins the Iowa caucus by a landslide, networks like MSNBC continue to point to the dangers of an authoritarian leader who is running “against politics”. But why is Trump so far ahead in the polls, and could it have anything to do with the Democrats’ purge of working-class voters of all colours? --💙Support this channel directly here: https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-SupportWATCH me LIVE weekdays on Rumble: https://bit.ly/russellbrand-rumbleVisit the new merch store: https://bit.ly/Stay-Free-StoreFollow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
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And amidst the blizzards of Iowa, Trump stands triumphant.
Difficult to say that he is not popular in Iowa after an astounding victory like that.
I'm curious as well the nature of Trump's victory speech.
It is a definite modulation.
Gone is the bombast and casually attacking, dissing and cussing Donald Trump.
The more conciliatory, Nikki Haley did well, Vivek's a good guy, Donald Trump.
Extraordinary.
The legacy media are falling apart, assuming that Trump 2024 is an inevitability.
How can they maintain that Joe Biden, visibly waxing and cadaverous before our eyes, can oppose this force?
Iowa seems to be the beginning of the end for Biden.
Ten months to go yet but it seems like an insurmountable surge of popularity.
Is Trump the biggest threat American democracy faces or is he an inevitability of institutional corruption, banality and hypocrisy?
Interjector I'm sorry I just have to do a little bit of business just for a second.
Certainly one person who seems to be terrified of a Donald Trump victory and even Donald Trump verbiage is Rachel Maddow who says that Donald Trump's speeches cannot be broadcast presumably to protect us or just in case he does a misinformation or he slips out a malinformation or an untruth but of course anyone that knows anything about MSNBC knows that they regularly broadcast misinformation whether that's around the pandemic the medications that grow Throughout that era, the Russiagate hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop, it's just which flavour of misinformation and which flavour of authoritarianism you, or indeed they, prefer.
When you watch this, does this make Trump less appealing to you?
Or does it make him feel like some sexy elixir that can't even be shown on TV?
Particularly if you actually watch the speech where he's just like, Nikki Haley, nice lady, we understand this, well done.
I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together.
We're all having a good time together.
And I think they both actually did very well.
Very smart people, very capable people.
It's not like he's saying, smash the state, fight the power, blah, blah.
At this point in the evening, the projected winner of the Iowa caucuses has just started giving his victory speech.
He's not Voldemort.
We do not speak his name.
You can't name him.
The projected winner, he that must not be named, has got, oh my god, 51% of the entire vote!
Anyway, we can't broadcast his speech in case he's so damn charismatic, even dyed in the wool, liberal voters turn over.
The best thing that their liberal establishment could do right now if they wanted to damage Donald Trump is say, let me tell you something, I like Donald Trump.
You should vote for him.
You should get out there now and vote for Donald Trump.
Then it'd be like with UFOs.
What?
They're putting UFOs on the news now?
UFOs, they ain't real.
That's a hoax.
I don't know if you could make him sound any more sexy if you tried.
there is a reason that we and other news organizations have generally stopped giving an unfiltered live
platform to remarks by former president trump. I don't know if you could make him sound any more
sexy if you tried. He's somewhere between a bourbon, a new strain of cannabis and jimmy
hendrix. We cannot give you unfiltered Donald Trump. Better put some water with that Donald
Trump. He might come out and thank Vivek for a bravely fought campaign. And honestly, earnestly,
it is not an easy decision. But there is a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly
broadcasting untrue things.
Uh, Rachel?
It stops with you.
You take this thing, it stops.
Is it still on YouTube?
It's still on YouTube.
Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.
A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else.
In a sense, we have the problem in microcosm right here.
It's not misinformation, it's misinformation that's inconvenient to the establishment.
It's not authoritarianism, it's authoritarianism that's inconvenient, if not to the establishment, their version of the establishment.
It's absurd that you show a speech by Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley and not by Donald Trump, particularly if you've watched that speech.
It simply could have been done by Jimmy Stewart.
He's just sort of like, hey, thank you.
I'm trying my best.
It's Christmas.
We will monitor them and let you know about any news that he makes.
Also, you're giving him so much power, even if I was advising strategy.
Don't say he makes news.
Don't say he's so sexy and cool.
You're making him into an outlaw, you lunatics.
You're making him more appealing than ever.
Stop indicting him.
You're indicting him all the way to the White House.
It's because the basis of his candidacy is he's running against politics.
He's running against politicians.
He's running against policy.
He's running against the whole idea that a Congress does a thing.
In a way, I actually agree with that.
And I also feel that why would you not analyse, why would you not scrutinise, with the same degree of disdain, the activity within the Biden administration?
Why would you not say, possibly the reason that people are against politics, policy, the function of Congress, is because there has been so much corruption, so much deception.
How do we feel about the ongoing vilification of Donald Trump because, like, oh, those kids in cages?
Let's find out that Barack Obama built those cages.
How can we deal with the constant vilification of Trump because build a wall, build a wall, build a wall, when Joe Biden's gonna build that wall anyway?
The whole thing seems like hysteria, tribalism, favoritism, an inability to face the emergent id of the angry working American people.
And why are they angry?
Why are they angry?
It's because of this stuff.
In a country that has a strong man leader.
He's running for a situation in which he is the leader.
There is no government.
There isn't a policy process.
It's weird though, because Donald Trump has actually been president for four years.
So there's data available, some of which we'll share with you, about what actually happened while Donald Trump was in office.
He didn't go, right, you're all under arrest.
Okay, Don Lemon, you're out.
I mean, people weren't lined up against the wall.
What happened was is there was a rise in some jobs.
There was a fall in unemployment broadly comparable to the preceding Obama administration.
There was a lot of late night talk show riffs and gags.
it's very difficult if you ask me to make significant change within the turgid system
of conventional American politics. That's certainly my position, is you're not going
to change it that much because there's so many layers of infrastructure. Indeed, Maim
Gouri, who's a brilliant source on this and a liberal democrat, broadly speaking, he wrote
the amazing book The Revolt of the Public, said, "If you expect to become an authoritarian,
you have to wield absolute control over a key institution of government such as the
military, like Franco, Perón or Pinochet, from Spain, Argentina and Chile, of course,
a mass movement with a paramilitary wing like Lenin, Mussolini or Mao.
Neither condition applies to Donald Trump.
Every federal institution is ferociously set against him.
What would happen if Trump ordered the FBI or the 101st Airborne Division to start shooting Democrats?
It's ridiculous.
Donald Trump does not have a paramilitary wing at Mar-a-Lago.
The hysteria around Trump has reached a pitch where you have to ignore it.
From the same article, Martin Gurry, what kind of person becomes an authoritarian?
Well, it may look like fun, but authoritarianism is really hard work.
You need to be in the prime of life in your 30s or 40s like Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Mao and Castro.
Very rarely an exceptional person such as Julius Caesar is granted literal dictatorship.
The Romans invented the entire idea in his early 50s.
So there you are.
And isn't it more likely Basically, the reason that Trump is so appealing is because of his vitality, vivacity, rhetorical skill, ability to reach the emotional heart of Americans everywhere, and because what the Democrats are telling you the solution is a waxen cadaverous near-zombie in the form of Joe Biden, who had this to say.
Looks like Donald Trump just won Iowa.
He's the clear frontrunner for the other side at this point.
But here's the thing.
This election was always going to be you and me against extreme MAGA Republicans.
It was true yesterday and it'll be true tomorrow.
In short, the legacy media and the establishment themselves are doubling down on the idea that this is an extremist movement rather than a populist one.
Populist is opposite to extremist.
It means it's spread out across a vast population.
If we are worried about the rise of authoritarianism in this country, we are worried about the potential rise of fascism in this country.
We're worried about our democracy falling to an authoritarian and potentially fascist form of government.
It's all black people that have worked within the Democrat Party, all people that are clearly affiliated with the Democrat Party, sort of pretending to be the sort of goodies, and this is the sober, sombre analysis.
But really, this is just more hysteria, more propaganda.
People have seen through that now.
What they are doing is making the situation much, much worse, continually.
And the American electorate is made up of two major parties.
One of those parties has been flirting with extremism on the ultra-right for a very long time.
They've brought them in in a way that they haven't been central to Republican electoral politics ever before, and I know because I've been studying this.
It's very interesting to make such sweeping statements about taxonomies and use terms like extreme right while simultaneously indulging post-structuralist ideas like there's no such thing as identity or masculinity or femininity, all ideas that I'm absolutely open to in the infinite morasses and molasses of space.
But if you say there is an absolute thing called extreme right rather than democracy, because what's just happened is a Republican candidate has gone up against a bunch of other Republican candidates in Iowa and every single district has gone, that guy!
That's, I think, democracy.
And yes, Trumpism is sometimes what we call it.
MAGA movement is probably a better way to do it.
But there is an authoritarian movement inside Republican politics that isn't being bamboozled by Trump.
They are pushing Trump to get more and more extreme, because the more extreme things he says, The more they adhere to it, yeah.
And that is coming from a very large proportion of the American right that adheres to the Republican Party.
And that's why this is a Republican Party problem more than it is the problem of one man and his leader.
Doesn't that tie together the— Prior to Trump, we had four years of Obama.
Since Trump, we've had four years of Biden.
If Trump is as extreme as the legacy media are saying, surely we will have seen extreme fluctuations and extreme changes.
Let's compare some of the data between these administrative periods and see if there's another reason why the Democrat Party might have gone into decline.
Looking at the three years before COVID-19 made a mess of things, the US economy under Trump performed about the same as it had during the last three years under President Obama.
The last three years of President Obama's administration saw an increase of 8.1 million jobs and a 2% point drop in the overall unemployment rate, decreasing from 6.2% in 2014 to 4.9% at the end of 2016.
Under Trump, the number of jobs increased by 6.5 million in his first three years and unemployment dropped from 4.4% to 3.7%.
Similar.
Comparable.
Not a massive swing in either direction.
So whether you're fervently pro-Donald Trump and you love him and his charisma and his easy style, or if you love Barack Obama and his classiness or whatever, you have to say that looking at these numbers, it's not that different, is it really?
After losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton variously blamed WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders, misogynistic voters, white women, former FBI Director James Comey, and above all, the Russian government for her defeat.
And certainly the legacy media that won't show Donald Trump's victory speech in Iowa supported all of those stories pretty vociferously.
Many of her supporters, not least those in the media, leapt to embrace her excuses.
Just as many of Trump's supporters convinced themselves that the Biden campaign stole the 2020 election from their candidate, Democrats have found comfort in explanations for their failures that place the blame on others.
But Clinton's 2016 defeat, in fact, was the culmination of a slow decay that first took hold within the Democratic Party half a century ago.
So, none of these problems are being addressed.
None of the scrutiny that's being applied to Trump, and even if Trump goes, and is he authoritarian, and what will he do if he wins in 2024?
No one's saying, should we have a look at this party that we're unquestioningly supporting 24 hours a day?
What are they doing?
What have they done?
If this guy's so bad, why is it that we have to ban him in order to defeat him?
Surely you would just go, do you want this guy?
Or, you know, like, apparently he's so bloody charismatic, intoxicating and alluring, you can't even show him giving a polite appraisal of an Iowa caucus without all of us sort of losing our minds and following him into the forests.
The Democrats today are increasingly becoming a party of upwardly mobile professionals and creatives.
The party has shed much of its traditional working class base, which has started to show up in its legislative priorities.
When you look at that panel of people, do you think, oh, these are working class Americans, these speak to ordinary working class people.
You see Rachel Maddow or Jen Psyche, I don't know anything about their backgrounds.
They might be from blue collar backgrounds, they might.
But they don't appear to be talking about, I don't know, fuel costs or infrastructural failure
or the deterioration of American society or many of the issues that, from what I gather,
concern ordinary American people.
The white working class exodus from the party has been particularly severe,
putting states like Ohio, which former President Barack Obama won twice,
out of reach for the party.
In 2020, less than a third of white working men, the very backbone of the old New Deal coalition, voted for Biden.
And that was an improvement over the meagre 23% of white working men who backed Hillary in 2016.
In the 1990s, the Democrats were in free fall.
After losing the biggest landslide election in American history to Reagan, they had suffered 12 straight years of Republican control of the White House.
Much of their industrial white working class base had defected to the GOP, alienated both by the cultural radicalism of the new left professional activists who had commandeered the party's intellectual infrastructure, and by a democratic economic ideology that was increasingly indistinguishable from that of the Republicans.
I think we all remember that Bill Clinton primarily became out, look it's going to be basically the same steps, I've got a saxophone and there's going to be some crazy stuff going on in the Oval Office kids!
Desperate for a new strategy, Democratic operatives formed a centrist pro-business network called the Democratic Leadership Council to build the Democrats back into a nationally competitive political party again.
Similar things happened in our country under Tony Blair.
And similarly, it's created a kind of homogenized political space where no one feels that they really identify, I think, with either party.
I don't think there's anyone that's passionate about like, I really love them.
There is no British equivalent to Trump, even, where you'd go, oh, this guy really is speaking to ordinary British people.
It's just a banalised space of career politicians who you feel would prefer to be at Davos than in Parliament.
The DLC sought to co-opt the Republicans on economic growth and free trade while countering the New Left's radicalising influence on the party's social and cultural agenda.
The DLC found a perfect champion in Bill Clinton, when he wasn't on holiday.
Clinton was a free market true believer with enough affinity to the politics of the 60s to bring the new democratic intelligentsia under his wing.
As a candidate that corporate CEOs and former student revolutionaries alike could get behind, Clinton forged a new electoral majority and brought the Democrats back into the White House.
And from an outsider's perspective, it seemed like, oh, this guy is really charismatic and good in front of a camera and people seem to like him, rather than this person is invested in serving American people.
It was part of the show businessification of American and subsequently British politics.
Where, oh, as long as you've got someone who's good on camera and sounds alright, it doesn't really matter what they believe in.
And I think that Clinton was like that, Obama's like that in our country, Blair's like that.
They say a bunch of stuff and seem kind of lovely when you're looking at them and listening to them.
And then it comes to, like, the 2008 crash and they're like, Wall Street, we're on your side, baby.
And that has made ordinary people think...
I don't trust this lot.
Donald Trump, as Dave Chappelle is fond of saying, came out and goes, you know that stuff you think we're doing in there?
That is what we're doing.
I know all these tax loopholes because I use them.
He said, I know the system is rigged because I use it.
I said, God damn!
All of her donors is using me like oh my god this is amazing if you can't see
why that would be appealing after the preceding 20 or 30 years then that's a deep
strain of myopia that is a much more likely the problem than Donald Trump's evident charisma.
In office however Clinton bungled his careful balancing act.
In his campaign he had purported to speak for the forgotten middle class.
But as president, he seemed to speak more loudly for Wall Street.
He pushed for NAFTA, the founding of the World Trade Organization, financial deregulation, and permanent normal trade relations with China.
China.
China.
In part, thanks to Republican overreach, Clinton persevered through two terms in the White House.
But his new Democrat rebrand did nothing to bring white working class voters back to the party.
Eight years later, Barack Obama met and even surpassed Clinton's electoral success, but likewise failed to stem the blue-collar bleeding for the long term.
And again, in office, doubled down on the betrayal of ordinary people, legislated for and governed for elite and establishment interests.
The kind of perspective that you probably have and that I have is of like, you can't trust these people.
And when Rachel Maddow says they're anti-political candidates, that's why that's happened.
Because I made my bones publicly in my country, the UK, saying there's no point voting for anyone on a political TV show.
You can't trust any of them.
They're all the same.
I basically said that.
Why vote?
We know it's not going to make any difference.
We know that already.
I say when there is a genuine alternative, a genuine option, then vote for that.
But until then...
Don't bother.
There was a lot of outrage and controversy around it at the time, absurdly enough, but now I know we are the biggest constituency.
Elsewhere in there, Rachel Maddow says that America is made up of Republicans and Democrats.
No, it isn't.
People are just like, oh, is this what we've got to deal with?
That's why RFK is polling so spectacularly, because there's a significant number of people in your country, in my country, and I think across the world, that want something actually different.
Obama twice ran on an even more explicitly populist message than Clinton, but like Clinton, staffed his cabinet and administration with Wall Street ideologues.
We've seen that happen again and again.
We've seen people under Biden from Big Pharma getting jobs, from Wall Street getting jobs, from Big Tech getting jobs, and all these contracts being awarded.
We know what the game is now.
That's the real problem here.
This is why I think Rachel Maddow and the legacy media have to amplify their hysteria, because so many of us now go, Yeah, but it doesn't really make any difference.
You can't trust any of these people.
They're all in the clutches of establishment interests.
And now we have to go, no, no, the Democratic does mean something.
Congress does mean something.
Don't you dare invade the Capitol.
They have to sort of invest it with meaning because the meaning is drained out of it because of conduct, because of behavior, because of history, because of what we've all seen.
This betrayal was even starker than it was with his predecessor, coming as it did in the immediate wake of the global financial collapse.
Obama prosecuted no high-level financial executives for the crimes that led to the meltdown, and allowed his Wall Street advisors to mismanage his economic recovery plans.
Unlike Clinton, he succeeded in creating the Democrats' long-sought universal health insurance program, but the law was a barely coherent patchwork of regulations written by healthcare lobbyists, which provided inadequate subsidies and drove up premiums for millions of middle-class Americans who weren't covered by their employers.
Again and again you hear pledges and promises made.
We beat Big Pharma this year.
We beat Big Pharma this year.
WE BEAT PHARMA THIS YEAR!
And then you find out that what it means is a few drugs are going to be capped from 2025 or whatever.
Or that no one is prosecuted for Wall Street.
Or healthcare is actually quite sort of temperate really.
Since the meaning has drained out of the type of politics that Rachel Maddow is advocating for.
So anyone that is anti that is more appealing.
That's my analysis.
And that's why the results are in every single district in Iowa against Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, Donald Trump all the way.
And based on that, he's going to be the candidate.
And I would say similarly, based on that and looking at the total lack of trust in Joe Biden, even among Democrat voters, 69% of them say that Biden does not have the mental sharpness to be president.
It's unlike It's likely that Biden can beat Trump fairly.
Hillary Clinton shared Obama's reverence for Wall Street, but none of his talent for pretending to be a populist.
Indeed, she didn't even try.
Instead, she ran a campaign that was explicitly scornful of white working-class voters, maligning them as racists and misogynists.
In sharp contrast to Obama's unifying message, Clinton directly appealed to the identity-based grievances of various constituency groups largely centered in the prosperous post-industrial metropolitan regions of the country.
While accusing her opponent Donald Trump of campaigning on hate, she ran the most polarizing campaign in living memory.
Clinton rallied the educated professionals of the new American knowledge economy to her side by leading their culture war against the denizens of the dying manufacturing towns and agricultural rural and ex-urban swathes of the country that had been emptied of jobs and stripped of community and social purpose by decades of
de-industrialisation championed by both parties. In that paragraph you get an
economic understanding of the social realities that have led to Donald Trump's rise and the
deterioration of the Democrat party.
And in a character like Clinton with her inability to reach people through charisma,
the problem becomes calcified because prior to her there was Obama and Clinton, Bill Clinton,
who knew how to perform on camera and Donald Trump knows how to do that.
And if you look at even his Iowa victory speech, it looks like he's adopting a more conciliatory tone, and I would suggest learning the lessons of the Robert F. Kennedy campaign, that there's a lot of anti-establishment people out there that aren't down with the high revs type of aggressive populist politics but open for a kind of convivial,
conciliatory, statesman-like return to anti-establishment populism that's somewhat more
inclusive. Certainly that seemed like a different side of Donald Trump in that speech. She couldn't
have been a more useful foil for Trump if she had tried. While frequently spilling over into
hyperbole or even outright bigotry, Trump merely played the other side of the culture war
Clinton was waging. He lambasted the professional class's moral crusades on immigration, race
and criminal justice as cynically as Clinton celebrated them. But he also excoriated the free market
orthodoxies of both parties, a critique that resonated with every working and middle-class
voter who had lived through the Great Recession. Trump embraced
protectionism.
and an industrial policy to restore American manufacturing.
He rallied against the cultural elites, especially their loudest spokespeople in the media,
and white working class voters, including ones who had voted twice for Obama, rewarded him for it.
This isn't the kind of analysis that you see on legacy media, is it?
Because it's inconvenient.
And one of the things I've had cause to reflect on lately is Albert Mays's famous claim that
tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.
Well, the nuance is always stripped away in this new puritanical establishment legacy media
propagandist machine.
When they're talking about Trump, it's always He's dangerous, he's racist, he's awful.
They don't describe the circumstances of his rise, they don't describe his appeal, they don't describe their own culpability, they don't describe why they cannot amend and adjust because of their affiliations and funding and because of lobbying and because they're ultimately owned by financial interests comparable to the financial interests that have traditionally owned the Republican Party.
They can't have those conversations so there's nothing they can do except continually condemn Donald Trump, continually Lambast anyone who might be interested in Donald Trump's appeal without ever addressing the causes of this problem.
It was principally Trump's mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic that led to his loss to Joe Biden, who in his campaign distanced himself from the avant-garde professional class social justice politics that had come to dominate his party.
Democrats hoped that Biden's everyman appeal might win back some working class voters to the party.
That hasn't happened.
In fact, now the Democrats are losing non-white working class voters.
Every election cycle, Democrats lose more and more of this demographic.
Despite his virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric between 2016 and 2020, Trump gained support among Latino voters.
Joe Biden did 16 points worse among Latinos than Hillary Clinton had four years earlier.
The Democrats have an increasingly tenuous hold on the Asian vote, and their support even from black non-college educated voters has begun to slip.
As of last summer, Biden fell short of earning the support of a majority of non-white voters without a college degree.
A third of these voters prefer Trump.
Today, the Democrats and the Republicans are virtually tied in voters' perception of which party is best for the middle class.
Americans as a whole no longer take the Democrats for granted as the party that fights for ordinary people and are just as likely to regard the Republicans as such.
This is a historical sea change.
So you have a historical result in Iowa where Donald Trump, the most indicted president in history, is on the rise.
You have a Democrat party that is flailing.
You have a legacy media that is unwilling and unable to offer a mere culper.
You have a Democrat party that's unwilling To give a meaningful and viable candidate at this point.
So the way things look after the Iowa caucus is Trump victory 2024.
