The old, crusty, grizzled, elitist political establishment is a thing of the past. Their days are numbered and dwindling fast. Even if they don’t yet realize it.
The Saturday morning headline blared from FoxNews.com, “Bold Prediction: Paul Ryan weighs in on the likelihood Trump will win GOP nomination in 2024.”
In short, Ryan said Trump will not win the Republican nomination because his “unelectability will be palpable” by the time the party nominates its 2024 standard-bearer.
“We all know he’s much more likely to lose the White House than anybody else running for president on our side of the aisle,” Ryan said in the piece. “So why would we want to go with that?”
Has Ryan not seen the slate of Trump-backed candidates winning nominations across the country this year? Does he not see them lined up across the board, in an excellent position to beat their Democratic challengers in a few short weeks?
The GOP grassroots have eschewed establishment figures in favor of more MAGA options, such as Kari Lake in Arizona, J.D. Vance in Ohio and Harriet Hageman in Wyoming. Just to name a few. And these political outsiders very well might portend the looming fate of the ruling political establishment.
Dr. Steve Turley joined episode 297 of Inside the Numbers with the People’s Pundit on Friday, to discuss the growing populist sentiment sweeping the nation and world.
The program’s host, Richard Baris, began by asking about reports that President Joe Biden, in essence, asked the Saudis to help keep gas prices lower until after the U.S. presidential election.
“How would the media have reported this if it was Trump?” Baris asked his guest.
“Biden represents the wishes and the dreams of the permanent political class. He wasn’t speaking on behalf of himself. He was speaking on behalf of all the dolts in D.C.,” Turley said.
“We have to understand what made Trump so special is he really was an outsider. I mean, he’s even an outsider among billionaires. This is one of the things Rush Limbaugh was so brilliant at seeing because Rush himself was an outsider. Rush was very populist. He was never, you’d never see him at the cocktail parties among the rich and famous and so forth. He never felt comfortable with that. So when he saw Trump coming into the race in 2015, 2016, he recognized that he had something here that he could relate to and that we all could relate to.”
And it’s not that the populist rising is taking place solely on the right side of the aisle. Banished are the Bushes and Clintons. Rising to the forefront are Trump and Sanders, who more closely align with the groundswell emanating from the base of their parties. Much like Trump stands in opposition to the ruling elites in his own party, Sanders represents a major populist faction in his own.
“George Carlin, the late comedian, was just brilliant in being able to define modern-day politics as a big party to which none of us are invited. The door’s been closed to every one of us, including Donald Trump. And so whenever he would do anything even remotely controversial, whatever it was, the permanent political class was all over him, including Republicans,” Turley quipped.
The host of the Turley Talks podcast said the political establishment is intent on punishing their opponents, increasing their power and intimidating all outsiders.
“What Trump did with Ukraine was bad because it was done by Trump. By definition, someone outside the permanent political class that’s trying to bring it down,” Turley said. “Whereas what Biden did is he did it on behalf of the permanent political class. The permanent political class does not want an ultra-MAGA tsunami in three weeks.”
With the Turley Talks podcast approaching an astounding 1 million subscribers, Dr. Steve has often discussed the current dynamics of the establishment versus the people.
“They want to keep it controlled. They want to keep their donors happy. They want to keep Davos happy. They want to keep the whole globalist system, and that’s key. Globalism is not a civilization, it’s a system,” Turley said. “And therefore can be imposed on all cultures around the world, as it were, through its unique politics, its economics and its woke human values and the like.”
For his part, Baris has consistently reported the trends from his polling research this year, which indeed indicate sweeping populist sentiment bubbling up across the country. And for his part, Turley thinks the trend is not only growing, but also inevitable.
“As we all know, the permanent political class operates according to its own rules, according to its own values, its own concerns, at the disdain and dismissal of the values, interests and concerns of the people,” Turley said.
“So the hypocrisy is glaring. It’s not going to help them, that’s for sure. Again I think their days are numbered, there’s no way around it. The trends are moving in the populists’ favor all over the world. But in the meantime, they’re just continuing to make utter fools of themselves.”
Rick Schultz is a former Sports Director for WFUV Radio at Fordham University. He has coached and mentored hundreds of Sports Broadcasting students at the Connecticut School of Broadcasting, Marist College and privately. His media career experiences include working for the Hudson Valley Renegades, Army Sports at West Point, The Norwich Navigators, 1340/1390 ESPN Radio in Poughkeepsie, NY, Time Warner Cable TV, Scorephone NY, Metro Networks, NBC Sports, ABC Sports, Cumulus Media, Pamal Broadcasting and WATR. He has also authored a number of books including “A Renegade Championship Summer” and “Untold Tales From The Bush Leagues”. To get in touch, find him on Twitter @RickSchultzNY.
