CNN’s Michael Smerconish said Friday that relentless media coverage and the criminal cases against President-elect Donald Trump likely played a significant role in his victory.
The media has faced allegations of bias against Trump and he also got indicted four times during his 2024 presidential campaign. Smerconish, on “Press Club,” argued that these factors ended up helping Trump rather than hurting his appeal with voters.
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“I don’t want it all distilled into this one sound bite or conclusion, but at the top of my list, I’ll say it that way … It’s like a parenting lesson. The more that you tell people what they can’t do, what’s intolerable, you must not do this, you should not do this, the more they’re going to rebel,” Smerconish told Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin. “Maybe they would have ultimately come to their own conclusion and rejected Donald Trump. I don’t know.”
“But I think that the constant browbeating and the combination of the media influence and the four indictments, one conviction, and showing that god-awful joke from Madison Square Garden a week in advance of the election on a loop — and I felt it, and I said it,” he added. “I can’t sit here, Aiden, telling you, well, this is the way I called the election, but I definitely felt the potential for a boomerang effect, and I think that came true. I really do.”
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe performed at Trump’s Oct. 27 Madison Square Garden rally, calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and receiving significant media backlash. However, Trump ended up winning a majority of Hispanic male votes nationwide in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Republican voters in Georgia told MSNBC during a May segment that Trump’s legal issues have made them more passionate about supporting him.
“It’s actually caused me to support him more,” a voter named Antonio Jones said. “I just don’t believe that it’s a coincidence we have a trial happening in Atlanta, we have one happening in New York, so the question people are beginning to ask themselves like I did, is like, why now?”
Trump leads Harris in the popular vote by 2% with over 76 million votes as of Friday morning, according to The Associated Press.
After Trump’s election victory, his two federal cases will be dropped and his state cases probably will too, though there’s a possibility that ambitious local prosecutors could extend the battle, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. For instance, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis signaled during a Wednesday interview with Atlanta News First that she intends to proceed with her case against Trump. which accuses him of attempting to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
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