CNN host Fareed Zakaria listed three major reasons Vice President Kamala Harris came up woefully short against Donald Trump in last week’s election – and even knocked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in his takedown of Democrats on Sunday.
Zakaria claimed the Biden administration’s poor handling of the southern border, an “overzealous misuse of the law to punish Trump,” and the left’s infatuation with “identity politics” all fueled Trump’s victory last Tuesday in which he nabbed 312 electoral votes.
The first error committed by the Democratic Party was its “blindness to the collapse of the immigration system and the chaos at the border,” Zakaria said on his cable television show.
“An asylum system that was meant for a small number of persecuted individuals was being used by millions to gain legal entry,” he said. “Instead of shutting it down, liberals branded anyone protesting as heartless and racist. They missed a massive shift in American public opinion in just a few years.”
When Harris, 60, appeared on “The View” and infamously said she wouldn’t do anything different from the Biden White House, she should have said she would’ve “shut down the border sooner,” Zakaria argued.
Zakaria also insisted the “overzealous misuse of law to punish Trump” strengthened his stature in the eyes of voters after public opinion had soured on him following the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The CNN host said the “most egregious” example was the case pursued by Bragg, the lefty district attorney in Manhattan. He noted that while Bragg was once skeptical of prosecuting the case over falsifying business records, he faced pressure from the left to launch the indictment.
“Some cases, like the Georgia one, were legitimate, but the host of them piled on in rapid succession, gave the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump,” he said.
“It confirmed to his base what it had always believed — that over-educated urban liberals were hypocrites, happy to bend rules and norms when it suited their purposes.”
Trump, 78, was convicted of 34 felony counts in the Manhattan case this past June and still faced two federal trials and a state case in Georgia that accused him of unlawfully interfering with the Peach State’s 2020 election result. Those remaining cases are no longer expected to proceed.
Zakaria finally slammed Democrats over the “dominance of identity politics on the left” that he argued has alienated many Americans outside the urban academic bubble.
He said Latinos found it weird when liberals started using the gender-neutral word Latinx.
“This kind of obsession made Democrats view people too much through their ethnic or racial or gender identities and it made them miss for example that working-class Latinos were moving toward Trump, perhaps because they were socially conservative or liked his macho rhetoric or even agreed with his hardline stance on immigration,” he said.
The CNN host added the left’s focus on identity politics and its alleged battle on free speech via “cancel culture” has become “illiberal.”
“Liberals cannot achieve liberal goals — however virtuous — by illiberal means,” Zakaria said.
