Conservative SE Cupp: ‘Donald Trump Is Setting Us Back’
SE Cupp, the young conservative commentator who took part in the Republican party’s now famous declaration of what it would have to do to move forward, including appealing more to minorities and women, is not voting for Donald Trump.
In fact, she believes that the populist candidate has set the conservative movement in America back, and she also believes that she knows how he’s doing it.
Stopping by the Axe Files Podcast this week to speak with President Obama’s former campaign strategist David Axelrod, SE Cupp said she believed it was a perverted form of “nativism,” and that the guy she knows is a considerably more tolerant person.
Nevertheless, she will not be voting for him in November.
The most damning part of the interview comes at around the 32-minute mark when Cupp first comments on how nativism — or pride in one’s own culture — is a good thing on the surface.
“Nativism is not all bad,” SE said. “It’s rooting for a team. It’s how you have a healthy self-sufficient economy. But the nativism that ‘the Donald’ is tapping into is not, and I worry deeply like you do about some of the policy proposals that he is offering.”
.@secupp says Donald Trump “wears the Republican Party like a rented tuxedo” https://t.co/ZAiXtGNiJw #AxeFiles pic.twitter.com/tCSmguY0LH
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 25, 2016
SE Cupp went on to say that she was flabbergasted how the GOP nominee “seems to think he needs the white supremacist vote.”
At this point, Axelrod asked her if she really believed that the GOP nominee believes a lot of the things that he is saying, to which she replied, “No, I don’t because the Donald Trump I have known has been a Democrat. The Donald Trump I know believes in gay marriage. The Donald Trump I know is a very tolerant person.”
She then returned to the talking point of how he believes that the white supremacist vote is the key to victory and how it blew her away that he didn’t have smart strategists around him advising against it.
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While SE Cupp may not believe the strategy to be “smart,” it has been somewhat effective. Following the Republican candidate’s well-received speech accepting the Republican nomination at the RNC, he bounced to a seven-point lead in national polling against Hillary Clinton, who struggles with trustworthiness issues and an increasingly divided Democratic party.
Nevertheless, if the Republican party doesn’t get a handle on its representative in this year’s election, it will have a lot of catching up to do with the general population, she attested.
“We have to appeal more broadly. We have to do better with women and young people,” Cupp said.
She continued.
“After 2012 we were making really good inroads between minorities, women and millennials. I felt good about each of those 17 candidates up on that stage even though I didn’t prefer all of them. I thought, ‘this is good, we’re offering a good thing here.’ Trump has completely exploded the progress we had made and really set us back with a lot of his rhetoric.”
The problem, she believes, is that no one, save for Bernie Sanders, was ready to have a national dialogue regarding the divisions that still exist among different minorities and classes of Americans. While she credited Sanders for trying, she did note that his policy proposals were “failing” in other parts of the world and causing a lot of fear and hysteria over multiculturalism.
“Donald Trump is using that anger and fear,” she added.
And just so it can’t be said that SE Cupp is a Democratic shill in the GOP, she recently penned a scathing takedown of how Obama is clueless when it comes to addressing the things that Trump is tapping into successfully.
#Obama showed he’s out of touch with the anxiety of voters who may back #Trump, by @secupp https://t.co/wz6U7OS4Ze pic.twitter.com/yevCJddKE4
— CNN Opinion (@CNNOpinion) July 28, 2016
Do you think SE Cupp is right in her comments regarding Trump or is she less “conservative” than she claims to be? Sound off in the comments section below.
[Image via Gage Skidmore | Flickr Creative Commons | Resized and Cropped | CC BY-SA 2.0]
