Trump pulled a bait-and-switch on 'forgotten' middle-class voters: conservative

On Saturday, writing for MSNBC, conservative writer Charlie Sykes outlined how President Donald Trump threw the "forgotten" middle-class voters he promised to give a voice under the bus, and made the 2020 election all about himself instead.

"Four years ago, President Donald Trump billed himself as the voice for the 'forgotten man.' In 2020, he forgot about him," wrote Sykes. "While Trump cast himself as a candidate who could channel the grievances of average Americans in 2016, in 2020, the grievances he channels are squarely his own, and many of them are incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t marinated for months in Fox News, Hunter Biden’s laptop, pizzagate or other conspiracy theories."

At the final presidential debate, wrote Sykes, "Trump clearly preferred to talk about how unfairly he has been treated rather than how he can help the average American. The IRS, he complained, treated him 'very badly,' and 'very unfairly.' He was 'put through a phony witch hunt for three years. It started before I even got elected. They spied on my campaign. No president should ever have to go through what I went through.' If undecided voters were looking for a flash of empathy from Trump, they were watching the wrong channel."

Moreover, Sykes pointed out, Trump seemed genuinely irritated when Joe Biden used the debate platform to talk about the struggles of working-class Americans — a group Trump and his allies, and some in the media, have long erroneously claimed are in his coalition.

"The same day as the debate, more than 70,000 new coronavirus cases were reported; nearly a thousand Americans have been dying every day from Covid-19; and millions of people are without jobs. Millions may be about to lose their health insurance," wrote Sykes. "But these are not Trump’s problems. Instead, he wants to talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He wants to compare himself to Abraham Lincoln. He wants to bask in adulation of fans who think he has made America great. He wants sympathy for all the mean and unfair things that have been done to him."

"Please don’t bother Trump with stories about what average Americans who once voted for Trump are dealing with as they sit around the kitchen table," concluded Sykes. "In Trump’s 2020 America, they are the forgotten ones."

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