Thursday on FNC’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” veteran journalist and Substack columnist Glenn Greenwald suggested the reason why the so-called Washington, D.C. elites were decrying the early actions of the Trump administration had little to do with how he was taking action but instead that it was serving the America First agenda over their interests.
“Glenn, how do you think people are grappling with the speed of the change?” host Jesse Watters asked.
“I think it depends who the people in question are,” Greenwald said. “If they’re the people who have been ruling Washington with the same dreary bipartisan ideology that has kept the United States in this state of inertia and on the wrong track, according to most people, those people are petrified as they’ve been of Trump for so long. You’re seeing the reasons why the establishment has both hated and feared Trump, because he doesn’t abide by the bipartisan consensus in Washington that has kept this country on that wrong track, according to most voters.”
“But if you’re the people who actually exercised your democratic right and voted for Donald Trump because you knew Washington wasn’t working and you wanted someone to go in and break it and actually do so with great speed and assertiveness and not be constrained by these artificial rules they create to safeguard the status quo, then I think you’re very happy,” he continued. “It’s really the first time I’ve seen an election where a candidate stands up and makes a whole slew of promises about what they’re going to do once they win, and then they win and they actually get into office and start doing exactly what they said they were going to do. That should be the norm, but it’s really the first time I’ve seen it in at least decades.”
Watters responded, “You’re so right about the fact that there was a consensus to stifle change. It was a conspiracy to stop the people from getting what they were trying to vote for, and now you have a guy who’s actually delivering on his promises and they’re calling him a king. Do you expect to see the king label slapped on him now for the rest of the term?”
“If he were doing things with as much force but that served the interest of Washington elites, they would not be calling him that,” Greenwald replied. “The reason they’re upset is not because he’s taking decisive action. We have a very strong presidency in the United States that has only grown in power. You can debate that, but that’s the reality of what it is. What they’re angry about and upset about is not that he’s using it, but that he’s using it for the purposes that he said he would use it for when running, namely to place America first, to stop worrying so much about what elites in European capitals and in Paris and in London and in Berlin think, but instead to start thinking about what’s best for the United States, even if that means breaking rules, even if it means zooming into Davos and chiding publicly Jamie Dimon and the CEO of the Bank of America for what they’re doing.”
“These are the kinds of things they’ve been so worried about because these are the things that are effective,” he added.
(h/t RCP Video)
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