MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes declared that “public opinion still matters” on Wednesday as he pointed to challenges that Donald Trump and Republicans could still face despite the president-elect’s election win.
“The most important thing, to those of us who are committed to stopping them, is to remember their success is not foreordained in any way,” Hayes said. “They’re going to try and there are going to be a lot of people who try to stop them. And the outcome of that is as yet undetermined.”
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Hayes, who noted that Trump’s win showed voters’ “rejection of the status quo,” said Trump and Republicans are interested in interpreting the win as a “mandate for all of their worst governing impulses, all the Stephen Miller-style Project 2025 dark fantasies of smashing the administrative state.”
“But those ideas were never popular,” said Hayes, who added that Trump tried to “distance himself every chance he had” from the conservative policy blueprint.
The MSNBC anchor later turned to Trump’s first term where the president-elect tried to “do lots of bad things and failed to do them.”
“Because he is completely distractible and in constant because he’s a vortex of chaos because he can not be stopped from doing stupid, self-destructive things all the time,” Hayes said.
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“None of that changed because he won the election. They’re all the same people, he’s the same guy. Are Republicans better prepared this time? Are they more loyal? Is the judiciary more in their favor? Yes, yes and yes. But does that mean the outcome is foreordained? No.”
Hayes then cited Democrats’ “full rejection” of the Trump’s “monstrous” family separation policy at the border during his first term.
Trump would eventually sign an executive order to stop the practice in 2018 and, as the MSNBC anchor noted, later tried to take credit for getting rid of the “heinous policy” he implemented.
“But in the end, they had to abandon it because it was so unpopular,” Hayes said.
“That’s just one example. There will likely be things he doesn’t abandon but in the face of that, it really is important not to concede in advance that politics don’t matter. They do, public opinion still matters.”