President Joe Biden regularly derides the “ultra MAGA” supporters of Donald Trump, as the media makes broad-sweeping assertions about those who vote for the former president. But at least some on the left are starting to raise the alarm about the dangers of discrediting prospective Trump voters.
Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), who is running against Biden for the 2024 Democratic nomination, admitted that he attended a Trump rally in New Hampshire this week and left the event feeling like his Democrat Party is “completely delusional right now.”
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Victor Davis Hanson, author of The End of Everything, to discuss Phillips’ “brave” comments and what the left and media get wrong about Trump supporters.
Meeting MAGA
Phillips, who finished with 20 percent of the vote against Biden in New Hampshire, shared during an appearance on CNN This Morning on Tuesday that he attended one of Trump’s rallies in the Granite State.
He said he made the decision to stop by the event in Rochester on Sunday after watching people gather for it from his own campaign stop nearby. The experience proved to be illuminating:
PHILLIPS: I’ve got to tell you guys, I went to a Donald Trump rally a couple nights ago. I’d never been to one. I had an event across the street and I saw the line of people waiting in the cold for hours and I thought, ‘What the heck? I am going to be a leader who actually invites people, doesn’t condemn them.’
I met probably 50 Trump people waiting in line – every single one of them thoughtful, hospitable, friendly; all of them so frustrated that they feel no one is listening to them but Donald Trump. [It was] a diverse crowd, people who had never been to a Trump event before. My party is completely delusional right now.
While Megyn said Phillips “doesn’t have any shot” against Biden, she credited his “brave” and “insightful” candor. “[Democrats] are completely delusional in characterizing these people as something to be afraid of, silenced, defeated, avoided,” she noted. “They don’t get it. Dean Phillips is right.”
Us vs. Them
In Hanson’s view, there is a fundamental misunderstanding about voting demographics in the United States, which is what he believes Phillips was alluding to. Hanson shared that he had been out and about in his California neighborhood this week and spoke with plumbers, farmers, and salesmen who had one thing in common. “They were all for Trump,” he said. “But they are not judgmental people. They are open-minded.”
These people are voting for the former president, Hanson said, not because they are overly political. Instead, “they are just voting for him not because they feel that things were going their way three years ago and they are definitely not going their way now,” he said.
This stands in sharp contrast to the voters Hanson encounters on Ivy League campuses and in Silicon Valley. “They are ideologues. They are intolerant. They get angry. They get ad hominem,” he explained. “I think that’s what Phillips was trying to say: You people don’t understand that these people you demonize as ‘ultra MAGA’ and ‘semi-fascist’… are very rational, logical people who are just trying to find a way out of the dilemma that we’re in.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Hanson by tuning in to episode 709 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.