Following the latest Trump campaign shake-up, The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes — one of the many conservatives aghast at Trump’s hiring of Breitbart News CEO Stephen Bannon — explained that the move means Trump is retreating further into his alternate reality:
The campaign overhaul means that Trump is choosing to end his campaign living in the alternate reality that Breitbart creates for him on a daily basis — where everything he does is the best, where everyone who questions him is an idiot or a traitor, where big rallies portend electoral victories, where House speaker Paul Ryan is the problem with modern conservatism, where polls that find him down are fixed, where elections he loses are rigged, where immigration and trade are the nation’s most pressing issues, and where, truly, Trump alone can fix it all.
A few hours later on CNN, Michael Cohen, an executive vice-president and attorney at the Trump Organization, summed up this mentality with just two words. When Brianna Keilar noted that Trump is currently losing, Cohen interjected, “Says who?” “Polls. Most of them. All of them,” Keilar answered. Cohen repeated, “Says who?” and demanded to know which polls Keilar was referring to. “All of them,” she said.
After the exchange became a viral hit (even bigger than his classic “you cannot rape your spouse“), Cohen revealed the seriousness of his break with reality. In a conversation with Yahoo News, Cohen boasted that he had “controlled the interview” with Keilar, adding “I think I unraveled her.”
Cohen went on to explain that he disagrees with the findings of all polls, which pretty uniformly show that Trump is trailing Clinton. His evidence: While polls show Trump’s support among black voters is almost nonexistent in some parts of the country, Cohen has personally spoken to more than 100 African Americans who are voting for Trump.
“When they say that Donald Trump has a 1 percent favorability amongst the African-American community, I know from my own interactions that that number is absolutely and unequivocally inaccurate,” Cohen said. “I speak on a weekly basis to more than 100 African-American Evangelical preachers who are all committed to ensuring Donald Trump becomes the next president of the United States.”
Like other Trump supporters attempting to “unskew” their guy’s bad polls with “facts” that come straight from their gut, Cohen went on to note that lots of people show up to Trump rallies.
“I think Mr. Trump and Secretary Clinton are substantially closer than the polls indicate,” Cohen explained. “The proof is the massive 20-, 25- and 30,000-person rallies that he is attending on a multiple-time-per-week basis. In all honesty, Hillary Clinton can’t fill a Starbucks even if they offered free ventis.”
Okay, so how would he explain this?
Probably by repeating, “I know you are, but what am I?”
