CNN's Van Jones Warns Democrats: Trump Is Winning Over Black Voters by Helping Them 'In Real Life'
Sounds like the “woke” need to “wake up” some themselves.
That was the message from CNN analyst Van Jones after President Donald Trump’s stirring State of the Union address on Tuesday that put an emphasis on appealing to black voters.
Democrats captivated by the party’s far-left drift and liberals inside the Washington bubble might not realize it, Jones said, but Trump’s message is resonating with voting blocs Democrats have long taken for granted.
CNN’s Van Jones: President Trump is helping African Americans “in real life in his budget”https://t.co/pYRe5755Md pic.twitter.com/K6VU8PhmLo
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 5, 2020
In particular, Jones cited Trump’s work in job creation and education — two topics that are vital to every community.
They also happen to be two topics that Democrats treat with disdain, given that they’re committed to a job-killing environmental agenda and in thrall to teachers unions — which gave an astounding 93 percent of their political donations to Democrats in the 2016 campaign season, according to Fox News.
“What he was saying to African-Americans can be effective,” Jones said on a CNN panel after Trump’s speech.
The Trump administration is committed to “Opportunity Zones” — economically depressed areas targeted for job-creating development through tax incentives for businesses.
As Trump emphasized during his speech, it is also committed to school reform at lower grade levels — a popular cause in inner cities plagued by failing school systems — and using federal money to support struggling historically black colleges and universities.
“You may not like it but he mentioned HBCUs. Our black colleges have been struggling for a long time, a bunch of them have gone under. He threw a lifeline to them in real life in his budget. He talked about that. He talked about criminal justice reform. He talked about Opportunity Zones,” Jones said.
“Listen. Wake up.”
Check out a longer segment of the video here.
As the panel’s clearly cool reaction to Jones’ points showed, Democrats don’t seem to want to wake up.
Apparently believing their own mainstream propaganda, they’re dreaming of ousting Trump from the White House by stoking racial divisions, and refusing to accept the obviously good news the economy under the Trump administration has brought to minorities, with unemployment in the black American workforce at or near historic lows.
Democrats, Jones said, can’t rely on the media message that Trump is some kind of racist. He brought up last year’s brouhaha when liberal outlets — including, of course, his own network — tried to tar Trump with saying some immigrants came from “s—hole countries.”
“The thing about it is, and we’ve got to wake up, folks, there’s a whole bubble thing that goes on. Well, he said, ‘S-hole nations, therefore all black people are going to hate him forever.’ That ain’t necessarily so. And I think what you’re going to see him do, you may not like my rhetoric, but look at my results and my record for black people. If he narrowcasts that, it’s going to be effective,” Jones said.
The stunned look on the faces of the other members of the panel was priceless, but Jones wasn’t finished.
“As we move through this primary process, we’ve got to pay a lot more attention both to what’s going on with the Latino vote — are we going to get a benefit in terms of having them respond? And with the black vote — is it going to be a split-off, especially for black male voters?
“We’ve got to be clinical about this stuff,” he said. “We get so emotional about it.”
And then came the bottom line.
“That was a warning to us. A warning shot across the bow of Democrats that he’s going after enough black votes to cause us problems,” Jones said.
“It’s not just the white, suburban voters. He wants the black vote.”
No, it’s not just the white, suburban voters Trump and his supporters want — because no American president is the elected leader of just one race or demographic segment of the population.
According to The Hill, a recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll shows Trump with not only a 49 percent approval rating overall (near its all-time high) but with 22 percent approval among black Americans.
If Trump gets 22 percent of the black vote in November, Democrats are going to have a tough time finding enough well-off white women to make up the difference.
Democrats and the media have spent the years since Trump’s upset victory in November 2016 making a determined effort to divide the country by race, hoping to recapture the White House with a coalition of splinter groups.
As Jones warned — and Trump’s State of the Union made clear — that obviously isn’t the tack Trump is taking.
For all their claims about being “woke,” Democrats need to wake up to the fact that what the president is doing is working.
If they don’t know it, many of their traditional do — and they know it “in real life.”
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