(ANTIMEDIA) — The latest Bloomberg national poll has found that despite the fact that Donald J. Trump possesses one of the lowest approval rates of all time (41 percent), he is still more popular than Hillary Clinton, who has a net favorability of 39 percent.
The result is likely somewhat distressing and arguably inexplicable to Democrats and liberals. Donald Trump has banned poor Muslims from a host of countries the U.S. is actively bombing, has been accused of waging war crimes in Iraq and Syria, has implemented a war on the working class, tweets incessantly, and is supposedly a Russian lackey and traitor, to name a few – and yet he is somehow still more popular than Clinton, someone who has hardly made scandalous headlines at all this entire year. How can this be?
“Keeping up with the Trumps” may be a real life Kim Kardashian meets Game of Thrones reality TV show for the apathetic masses, but people generally have fairly decent memories and are not as forgetful as the media would like to think.
History will always remember that it was Hillary Clinton who gave us Donald Trump as a prominent presidential candidate in the first place through a sick and twisted “Pied Piper” strategy that sought to make Trump a top presidential contender.
In an email with the subject header “Friday Strategy Call,” archived by Wikileaks, the Clinton campaign concluded that they “need[ed] to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they [were] leaders of the pack,” also including a directive to “tell the press to take them seriously.” The Pied Piper candidates included Donald Trump, as well as Senator Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.
The idea was that by elevating Trump, the Democrats could completely undermine the Republican party and dismantle the remaining aspects of its prospects of winning the election, a strategy that backfired miserably.
As a result, Trump was given billions of dollars’ worth of free airtime, and his campaign took momentum in ways no one could have predicted.
A number of other emails also showed that the Democratic National Committee (D.N.C.) deliberately tried to derail the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders even though he was reportedly more popular than both Clinton and Trump.
And why was Trump’s campaign so successful? Clinton and her Democratic colleagues seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that it was Hillary Clinton’s policies that created Donald Trump and his cohort of Islamophobic nationalist buffoons from the outset.
It was Hillary Clinton who rallied the Obama administration to topple the Libyan government in 2011 even though she knew full well she was aiding jihadists in their takeover of the country.
Prior to 2011, Libya had the highest standard of living out of any country in Africa. Muammar Gaddafi was also instrumental in keeping a lid on migrants who wanted to flee Africa and into Europe. Now, the country is openly trading slaves, and migrants attempting to flee Libya are drowning. Those people who would not have connected the dots between Clinton’s regime change policy and the refugee crisis — as well as the rise of terrorist activity — were gifted this opportunity to educate themselves when Trump highlighted the issue many times in the lead up to the election.
Clinton also voted in favor of the Iraq war and was heavily involved in destabilizing Syria – a conflict that has led to one of the most infamous humanitarian catastrophes in recent history and a constant flow of refugees. The fact that hundreds of thousands of refugees are returning to areas reclaimed by the Syrian government shows Clinton was on the wrong side of history when she implemented a strategy to heavily weaken the Syrian president.
Clinton’s policies gave way to a flow of Muslim refugees that many Americans feared would threaten their way of life. This made Trump’s rhetoric appealing to his support base. Whether or not he was and is correct — and whether or not his support base makes the connections between Clinton’s foreign policy strategy and the crises unfolding in the world right now — remains to be seen. Either way, Trump supporters understood that Clinton had not provided them with the safety and security they wanted, and they warmly welcomed an alternative.
Let’s be honest: Hillary Clinton gave the world Donald Trump in more ways than one. The fact that Trump won the election merely bolsters the notion that Clinton is wildly unpopular as a human being and a potential world leader.
The Donald Trumps of this world, no matter how abhorrent, thuggish, racist and infinitely unwise, only exist because of the policies of the Clinton and Obama-style neoliberal eras.
Clinton and Trump’s unpopularity levels are ultimately tied together and will descend into the abyss as one collective entity. The more unpopular Trump finds himself, Clinton will always be just as equally lagging, as history will never forget her cruel and twisted legacy.