About eight weeks before the 2016 election, soon-to-be loser Hillary Clinton delivered her opinion about Americans who supported her GOP opponent, Donald Trump. They were, said she, “deplorables.”
This year’s Democrat candidate, Joe Biden, appears to have learned nothing from Clinton’s mistake. On Saturday in Pennsylvania, 11 days from November 3, he called Trump voters “chumps.”
And not once, but twice.
Given Biden’s creeping dementia, one could generously assume the Sleepy One simply forgot Hillary’s unfortunate demonstration of what not to call your opponent’s supporters. But alas, whether he forgot or didn’t, it’s out there.
If you vote for Trump, you’re a chump.
How that will play in crucial swing states, a half-dozen of which Trump flipped from blue to red in 2016, remains to be seen.
The Speech
Looking at Biden’s sparsely attended “car rally” at Buckstown Community College in Newtown, about 45 minutes northeast of Philadelphia, one wonders who the chumps are, but anyway, Biden was miffed because Trump supporters showed up to heckle him.
We can do something about this. We better get it done. We better get it done. And by the way we don’t do things like chumps out there with the microphone, the Trump guys. It’s about decency.
Why admittedly vociferous Trump supporters are indecent, as opposed to Antifa supporters who burn down cities, Biden didn’t say, but then he dragooned Abe Lincoln into service.
Biden quoted the 16th president’s House Divided speech, then falsely claimed that Trump said “if you live in Pennsylvania, you’re not his problem, if you live in a Red State, Alabama, he may think about you.”
Then Biden repeated the chump smear. One can presume he wanted to make sure Trump supporters fully understand what the Democrat Party’s standard-bearer thinks of them.
I don’t see America that way. I’m running as a proud Democrat. But I will govern as an American president, for everybody, I’ll work as hard for those … I’ll work as hard for those who don’t support me as those who do, including those chumps at the microphone out there. Look, that’s the job of a president.
One news report said Trump supporters who lined a street outside the rally outnumbered Biden supporters. Inside the rally, Biden regaled the occupants of about 130 vehicles.
A chump, for the record, is a “foolish or easily deceived person.”
Deplorables Part 2
Definition aside, one must assume that being a “chump” is just as bad as being a “deplorable,” which is what, again, Hillary Clinton famously called Trump supporters four years ago.
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton snarked. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
The other half of Trump supporters, the non-deplorables, presumably, “feel that the government has let them down.” The non-deplorables, she said, are only “desperate for change.”
If true, “change” would not have been a vote for Clinton, a fact apparently lost on the headmistress of PantSuit Nation.
Anyway, if “half of Trump’s supporters” were in “the basket of deplorables,” that would have been somewhere around 31 million people. About 62 million voted for the president.
Clinton’s remark was about as popular as one of her husband’s interns at a White House Christmas Party, and might have cost her the election. She lost in the Electoral College because Trump flipped six crucial states and a congressional district in Maine that combined for 100 votes. The states were Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and, of course, Pennsylvania.
Given that Biden has promised to “transition away from the oil industry,” Pennsylvanians must decide whether he will be, as he vowed, a president for all Americans.
In 2015, the American Petroleum Institute estimated that the oil and gas industries support nearly 325,000 jobs in the Keystone State.
Oil and gas support more than 10 million jobs nationwide.
If Biden wants to get rid of those jobs, the obvious question is which candidate’s voters are the real chumps.
