Glenn Greenwald on Who’s to Blame for Trump’s Election

The Democratic Party is blaming everyone but itself for Donald Trump’s election, says Glenn Greenwald. (Evan Vucci / AP)

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald has called out the Democratic Party and the elite class of the U.S. to reassess their role in the world’s changing political climate.

Many were shocked in June, when the U.K. voted for Brexit, but the U.S. didn’t seem to learn any kind of lesson. Pundits, politicians and mainstream media alike assumed that a Trump presidency would not actually happen.

As WikiLeaks documents showed, the Clinton camp and the Democratic National Committee and their mainstream-media friends (including organizations such as CNN) helped legitimize Donald Trump. Dubbed the “Pied Piper candidate,” he was part of the Clinton strategy to force the Republican Party to become ever more extreme.

By March, Trump had received $2 billion worth of free media exposure. Greenwald points out that in recent times, there has been a complete destruction of economic welfare for hundreds of millions of people, yet politicians, pundits and top business executives have engorged themselves with unparalleled levels of wealth from globalism, trade deals, Wall Street and war.

The response of the Democratic Party and media institutions such as MSNBC (which on Tuesday night repeated multiple times that third-party candidates were taking away votes from Hillary Clinton) is denial. Greenwald writes:

… Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing defeat of their party.

You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, The Intercept) that sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in words.

When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.

Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.

But that’s just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.

Below is an interview with Greenwald on Democracy Now!, in which he discusses the media, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Brexit and Trump’s election.

—Posted by Donald Kaufman