By John Harwood\Zeteo
Photos: YouTube\Wikimedia Commons
When he interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris last week, Fox anchor Bret Baier asked a question designed to elicit a politically embarrassing answer.
It came after Harris noted that top former aides in Donald Trump’s presidency have pronounced him dangerous, unstable, and unfit for office.
“Why, if he’s as bad as they say, [is it] that half of this country is now supporting this person who could be the 47th president of the United States?” Baier asked. “Are they stupid?”
The question was disingenuous on two levels. Baier must know full well that Trump is as bad as they say; he also knows one reason voters support him is the dishonesty of his own network. But he aimed to lure Harris into offending voters with an impolitic answer, akin to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 reference to many Trump voters as “deplorables.”
Harris tactfully dodged: “Oh God, I would never say that about the American people.”
But what’s a fair answer from someone not running for office?
The Republican Party has once again nominated the most repellent figure in modern US history – a pathological liar, unabashed racist, convicted criminal, and adjudicated sexual assaulter who incited a violent insurrection against the United States. But that doesn’t necessarily make his tens of millions of supporters stupid.
Tom Nichols, a retired Naval War College professor who left the GOP over Trump, says many simply want to lash out at a modern world that has left them behind. “Resentful and detached from reality,” Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, they nurture “heroic fantasies of redeeming a supposedly fallen nation.”
Yet some of them have rational justifications. …
