Chris Matthews: ‘Little Guy’ Rooting for Donald Trump Because He’s Taking On Elites

The Associated Press
The Associated Press

On Sunday, Chris Matthews said Donald Trump is resonating with the “little guy” because he is taking on the elites who have betrayed working Americans on issues like trade and immigration.

On Meet The Press, Matthews said there is a “sense of betrayal” because “the best and the brightest have given the country away on the border, on debt, on jobs.”

“They feel they’ve been betrayed by the elite and Donald Trump ironically is fighting the elite here and the little guy is rooting for him,” Matthews said. Host Chuck Todd also conceded that the “the more we in the media attack him the more powerful he gets.”

Those are exactly the points former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made in her exclusive Breitbart News op-ed last week. Pain wrote that “the elites are shocked by Trump’s dominance, but everyday Americans aren’t.”

“Everywhere I’ve gone this summer, including motorsport events in Detroit full of fed up Joe Six-Pack Americans, the folks I meet commiserate about wussified slates of politicians, but then unsolicited, they whisper their appreciation for Trump because he has the guts to say it like it is,” Palin wrote. “Trump’s unconventional candidacy is a shot in the arm for ordinary Americans fed up with the predictable poll tested blather of squishy milquetoast career politicians who campaign one way and govern another. But it’s not just how Trump says it, it’s what he’s saying.”

Palin praised Trump, who is leading in nearly every national and most state polls, for tapping “into America’s great populist tradition by speaking to concerns of working class voters”:

He talks about fighting to bring back our factories. When was the last time a candidate talked passionately about reclaiming our manufacturing base (and knew what he was talking about)? What other candidate chooses American workers over the multinational corporations donating to their campaigns? Who other than Trump is talking about the dangerous trade deficits deindustrializing America and stealing our jobs? The old Arsenal of Democracy that allowed us to win World War II is now such a distant memory that we can’t even build the parts for our own military equipment – we need China to manufacture them for us. How can a great nation maintain its greatness without a manufacturing base? Or without secure borders for that matter?

Palin added that “the more the spotlight-seekers smear Trump, the more popular he gets. A friend emailed, ‘Tell those smart alecks bashing Trump on TV, ‘I love him because YOU hate him!'”

“The GOP establishment would do well to listen to these voters and quit dismissing them. Reagan understood these blue-collar salt of the earth Americans,” she continued. “That’s why they gave him two landslide victories. If you want to win again, GOP, you need these good people.”

In a recent Breitbart News Sunday interview, Trump acknowledged that middle-income and poor people like him more than rich elites and h said that he gets along “much better with the middle class.”

“The people that like me best are poor people and middle-income people,” Trump said. “The rich people don’t like me.”

Trump suggested he knows how to play the political game better than anyone, and elites are afraid he’ll use his insider knowledge to put an end to them and support policies that favor the middle class.

“I would save the middle class,” Trump said on Breitbart News Sunday. “I know what to do. Our jobs are all being taken out of our country.”

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