“The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur pushed back Friday against progressive YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen’s claim that President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters are unprincipled.
Uygur spoke with Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk at AmericaFest (AmFest) on Saturday, addressing a conservative audience. Cohen, on his YouTube channel, suggested Uygur’s remarks at the event were likely futile in persuading the audience, claiming Trump supporters only believe in Trump, but “The Young Turks” host asserted the president-elect’s supporters are genuinely “anti-war” and “anti-corruption.”
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“There are no long-standing principles that they abide by. This is the purported party of family values, the purported party of the Constitution, of law and order, of states’ rights, of fiscal responsibility,” Cohen said. “They will throw that shit out the window the moment, the millisecond, it becomes inconvenient for them and that’s what they did. But you’re saying these things to people as if they’re operating under some principle — that they should be against the establishment, that they should be against these donors — when they’re not.”
“The only long-standing principle is their allegiance to Trump. And so my worry is that like, you trying to get through to them on these issues of principle is falling flat because it’s not principle that got them there in the first place,” he continued. “There is no long-standing principle when you are a Trump supporter.”
Uygur told Cohen that he was both “right” and “wrong” in his analysis. “The Young Turks” host suggested Cohen was correct about what Trump supporters used to be like and about their “hypocrisy” about “family values.”
“Now where’s the part where I think you’re wrong? And this is the part where people — I think I’m a little ahead of people and people think I’m being naive. So what I’m sensing, Brian, is from their audiences — and I’m not just sensing it like through intuition — they’re literally doing polls while I’m on their shows,” Uygur said. “They were doing interactions, calls. When I went to AmFest, talked to literally hundreds of guys who are MAGA, as, you know, they came up to talk to me, etc. And this is not the same base as Trump 2016.”
“The Young Turks” host said some of Trump’s base is still identical to 2016, but that it is not monolithic.
“The rest of MAGA are kind of bros and stuff, and they don’t really care about family values at all. In fact, a lot of the bros are pro-choice,” he said. “So like when you say that some people on the right agree with us on things like pro-choice or anti-corruption, the pushback I get from the left is, ‘No way, they’re all evil, they’re all a monolith, they’re all this, they’re all that.’ No, guys, that’s unsophisticated. Seventy-seven million people are not all the same thing.”
“And remember, we don’t have to win or care that much about the outer edge of MAGA on the right. You’re never going to win those guys over and that’s not the issue. You’ve got to win over people on the inner edge that voted for Obama, that voted for Biden and now have voted for Trump,” Uygur continued. “And those folks are not radicals. Those folks need to be won over and they are different than what the base was before. And so what I’m sensing is on anti-war and anti-corruption, they really do mean it.”
“The Young Turks” host said he does believe Trump is corrupt, but that he provided supporters the chance to recall that they are “supposed to be anti-corruption” and that the president-elect caters to his donors.
“Remember, they’re not watching mainstream media. They’re not watching our shows, right? And their right-wing media hosts are not overly incentivized to point out Trump’s hypocrisy … So, like for example, on anti-war, they are definitely anti-war. Definitely,” Uygur said. “They’re not even hypocritical about it. And so if you don’t believe me, I love you. It’s okay. I get it. We’ve all been burned hundreds of times, right? But if it turns out I’m right, what I’m hoping people go [is] ‘Oh yeah, Cenk told us this. I remember yelling at him about it, but it turns out, holy cow, they are anti-war.’”
“On anti-corruption, I think that the instincts of some portion of their base are correct. But we’ve got to show them — without like ripping their face off — that maybe Trump is also corrupt,” he added.
Uygur criticized both President Joe Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris during their 2024 presidential campaigns and recently condemned the Democratic Party’s focus on “identity politics.” However, he recently asserted that “there’s absolutely no chance” he would become “a fully-fledged member of MAGA” when British journalist Piers Morgan asked him about the prospect.
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