Veteran political analyst Pat Caddell thought much more highly of Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention than much of the media, where the word “dark” was almost universally applied as an adjective, and comparisons to fascist dictators of yore were made.
“They’re all gonna be like they were on Brexit,” Caddell predicted to SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily. “They haven’t got a clue.”
Caddell said that when Trump told the audience he would “tell the truth about the country,” he was saying “what 75 percent or more of Americans believe.”
“People talk about, well, you know, 67 percent of the people think the country is on the wrong track. Uh-uh, folks. 67, 68 percent believe America is in decline,” he pointed out, adding:
The 80-some percent that believe the system is rigged, the system works for those with power and influence, the anti-political class feeling – what I saw last night was, what he did is, he connected to all of those feelings out there, and he made a powerful case, and he made it in a broad way.
“He was the first presidential candidate I can think of, in ever, to use the word ‘corruption’ in his acceptance speech,” Caddell noted. “That word, you will not hear in Philadelphia next week.”
He also said Trump’s speech was “much more inclusive than I think anyone expected,” which made some of the negative commentary seem wildly off-base to him.
“The political class is bound and determined to try to destroy him,” Caddell declared. “He doesn’t really threaten their power. The voters threaten their power. This was a powerful evocation of that.”
Caddell went on to say:
I thought the whole night was a huge success, including Peter Thiel, who I thought was really good, Ivanka Trump, who was brilliant in terms of, about her father, and Trump himself – you know, you can criticize it was long, but it connected to the American people – at least, the people who watched the speech, according to CNN, and that must have choked them, to have to report their own numbers.
Bannon clarified that while the media were hammering out its denunciations of Trump’s speech as “dark” and alienating, flash polls were rolling in that showed 56 percent of respondents were more likely to vote for him after hearing it, while only ten percent said they were less likely. Caddell added that 75 percent thought it was an “optimistic” speech, which must have been a particularly difficult number for the Dark Trump media chorus to swallow.
Caddell derided the panels assembled by the media to perform instant commentary as including Republicans who were “Bush people who hate Donald Trump, and who, watching it in a bar, root for Hillary Clinton,” along with extreme leftists like Van Jones, whom Bannon described as going through a “meltdown” during Trump’s speech.
Over on MSNBC, Caddell found Mike Murphy serving as an analyst – “the man who destroyed the campaign of Jeb Bush, and ran off with millions of dollars, had the worst campaign, spent the most money, the most disastrous campaign in primary history, probably.”
“The thing about the political class is, not one of them has understood this country, and what’s happened this year,” Caddell declared. “I have been on your show many times talking about the paradigm change, the country rising up. They can’t see that. They keep arguing the conventional wisdom that is being destroyed this year, and being turned on its head, and they still can’t get it.”
“He wasn’t running as the Republican candidate for president,” he said of Trump’s strategy. “He’s running as the independent Republican, or independent American, candidate for president. … He’s running as an insurgent candidate against a system that has failed the American people.”
Caddell said his favorite line of the speech was when Trump said, “I’m going to tell you the facts that they edit out of their nightly broadcasts, and out of the coverage in their papers in the morning.”
“That, to me, is what he did,” pronounced Caddell.
He said Democrats were responding as expected, painting Trump as “unqualified” and talking about “dark hints of Hitlerism.”
“They are going to make their case that he is dangerous,” Caddell predicted. “They have just spent forty-two-some million dollars in the key swing states, in the last 60 days, and have moved nothing. In fact, have declined.”
He anticipated a Democrat failure similar to what befell the heavily funded Jeb Bush campaign, as massive advertising expenditures prove far less effective than the political class expects because, he said, “This is not about money. It is about message. It is about big message.”
“We were far more successful in 1980 at trying to box in Ronald Reagan, until we debated him – and when I say, ‘We,’ I mean the Carter camp,” Caddell recalled, speaking as a veteran of that campaign.
In 2016, he found Democrats fumbling to excuse Hillary Clinton’s enormous negatives, such as her email scandal, which he noted the majority of Americans still regard as an indictable “crime,” not a “mistake.” Caddell saw this as a symptom of dissonance that will make it very difficult for Democrats to impose their narrative on the election.
Pat Caddell is a regular on Fox News’ Political Insiders, regularly seen on Sundays at 7:30 p.m. Eastern. He can be seen in the one-hour Political Insiders special this Saturday at 8:00 p.m., which will repeat several times thereafter.
He said this special broadcast will examine “the leftward turn of the Democratic Party, and the movement away, I argue, from what has been the traditional view of the Democrats.”
“It’s a preview of the convention to come,” Caddell said. “I urge everybody who’s interested to watch it. I think you’ll see things, comments and discussion, that you will not see anywhere else, including with the media in Philadelphia.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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