'Never-Trumpers,' liberal media were living in 'blue bubble' before Trump's victory, says veteran journalist
Veteran political analyst and best-selling author Mark Halperin told "The Brian Kilmeade Show" that he warned liberals and "Never Trump" Republicans that Trump was likely to defeat VP Kamala Harris. Halperin reacted to the mainstream media, including MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezezinski, preparing to cover a second Trump presidency.
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MARK HALPERIN: I really pleaded with everyone I knew who was a Never Trumper, someone with Trump Derangement Syndrome or super opposed to Donald Trump. I said he's going to get 47% of the vote and he might get 50. But the difference between 47 and 50 is, you know, several million Americans. You have to respect the fact that tens of millions of people are going to vote for him. And you have to be prepared for that. And some people listened to me, but most of them didn't. There's something about Donald Trump that sets them off. Now, he brings a lot of it on himself through his behavior, through his rhetoric, through his conduct. But it goes beyond that. And, of course, it's particularly exacerbated by what I call the dominant media, which creates this fantasy world of Joe Biden doesn't have an acuity problem. Kamala Harris should be given the nomination without any question. The open border is not an issue that people really care about. All these things, the prosecutions of Donald Trump, the attempts to keep him off the ballot. The attempts to keep Bobby Kennedy off the ballot. All of these things, the failure of the president and the vice president to express outrage at the murder of American citizens by people in the country illegally. All these things add up to a blue bubble that they just can't see.
I see this all the time. I'll say to a Trump supporter, why does the left not like Donald Trump? And they can explain it very easily. … And some of them feel the same way, but they still think he'd be a better president than Kamala Harris. But most people on the left, if you say, why do people like Donald Trump? They're paralyzed. They can't answer the question. And the litany you and I just did together is a big part of the explanation, not the whole thing, but it's a big part of it. And they just, for some reason, can't appreciate that tens of millions of their fellow countrymen and women feel differently than they do.
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The MSNBC morning show hosts triggered outrage inside the liberal network after revealing to their audience that they had traveled to Mar-a-Lago to talk with President-elect Trump.
"Cowardice," one MSNBC employee reacted to Fox News Digital. "Doing exactly what [anti-Trump historian] Tim Snyder warns on our air not to do: obey in advance. It’s disgusting but frankly unsurprising."
The source said MSNBC's rank and file are now "largely disdainful" of the network's morning stars, saying it "feels like they are just opportunistic."
Others have taken to social media to voice their objections. MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin called it "disgusting" on Bluesky, the X-like social media site growing in popularity with progressives. MSNBC host Katie Phang offered an indirect swipe, posting on X, "Normalizing Trump is a bad idea. Period."
Fox News' Joseph Wulfsohn contributed to this report.