Wishful thinking is the enemy of rational analysis — and the media know the struggle all too well.
Up to the very day of the 2016 election, the press worked diligently to portray Donald Trump as a clueless political amateur who had no chance of defeating Hillary Clinton. They wanted Clinton to win so badly that they couldn’t recognize the political revolution taking place before their very eyes.
More than two years later, liberal journalists are still suffering from the same delusions, obsessively trying to sell the same pessimistic outlook ahead of President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.
According to a recent report from Politico, key Republican donors are said to be concerned that the president’s campaign “lacks a strategy to win in 2020.”
The Politico report is just the tip of the iceberg, though. The internet is already littered with dozens of opinion articles and reports claiming that Trump has no real strategy when it comes to foreign policy, healthcare, border security, and just about every other policy or political issue imaginable.
But if Trump is, as the media suggest, incapable of acting strategically, then his continued ability to achieve unprecedented success, upholding hundreds of key promises that he made to the American people in 2016, would be even more remarkable.
Obviously, the truth is that, contrary to the media’s tired narrative, Trump has a strategy for everything he does — especially when it comes to winning elections and fighting for American greatness. But unlike establishment politicians in Washington, Donald Trump doesn’t need an army of high-priced political strategists to do all the heavy lifting for him.
Trump won the 2016 election because of his unique ability to communicate directly with the American people. His unscripted eloquence resonated with millions of voters who were sick and tired of the polished lies and refined posturing of conventional candidates — a strategy that will prove just as successful in 2020.
In fact, the president has had a reelection campaign committee since the day he took office, has guided a fundraising strategy with the RNC that has raised over $250 million, the vast majority of it from over one million new donors who have given $200 or less each — an unprecedented feat — and has a growing, professional campaign operation with a digital strategy and ground game plan that is unparalleled in modern American politics.
Most media outlets are loathe to acknowledge that fact, preferring to denigrate the president’s voters as out-of-touch racists as reporters latch on to manufactured stories of “collusion” with Russia to explain away the results of the 2016 election.
That approach may fit nicely with the anti-Trump narrative that media outlets have been pushing for nearly four years now, and it surely helps to calm the nerves of frustrated Democrat partisans, but it’s hardly a sound basis for political prognostication.
On the same day that Politico published its report about the Trump campaign, The Hill released an article detailing how Trump is “ramping up his formidable digital operation nearly two years before the 2020 election, doubling down on a playbook that helped pave his path to the White House.”
Two articles — two completely different outlooks. One is based on wishful thinking, and the other reflects objective realities.
Claims that Donald Trump and his team lack a strategy should sound very familiar. Yet, wishful thinking didn’t bring about the mainstream media’s preferred outcome in 2016, and it’s not going to prevent Donald Trump’s re-election in 2020.
Mark Serrano (@MarkVSerrano) is the president of ProActive Communications and a senior adviser to Donald J. Trump for President Inc.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.