“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” then-candidate Donald Trump declared on the 2016 campaign trail eons ago.
As it turns out, he’s not entirely wrong.
CNN held a roundtable of what the network described as “swing voters” from Pennsylvania, during which CNN host Alisyn Camerota spoke to six women about the ballooning House impeachment investigation into Trump’s Ukraine scandal.
Near the end of the segment, Camerota turned her attention to Trump supporter Crystal Arlington, who had shrugged off the President’s attempt to pressure Ukraine into digging up dirt on his political rivals.
“So Crystal, is there anything that he could do or anything that could happen that would make you not vote for him?” asked Camerota.
“No,” replied Arlington.
“If he shot someone on 5th Avenue, would you vote for him?” the CNN host asked incredulously.
“You’d have to know why he shot him,” responded Marian Taylor, one of the other pro-Trump panelists.
“Yeah, why did he shoot him?” Arlington asked defiantly, leading to several seconds of stunned silence from the rest of the group.
Watch the panel below:
Pennsylvania "swing voter" response when asked if she'd still support Trump if he shot someone on 5th Avenue: "You'd have to know why he shot him." pic.twitter.com/X4w2Ryp8n7
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) November 6, 2019
And this, my friends, is the end of the line of decoupling beliefs from reality or any external factor. Which is where we were headed. Final stop on the train of America as a great nation, time to get off.
No more words necessary:
Panelist: “Yeah, I mean, maybe he shot me because I did something bad and deserved it.”
OY… almost makes me ashamed to reside in PA. These ‘deplorables’ have to be sent to re-education camps.
I think CNN needs to work on its definition of “swing” voter. Maybe it’s just me, but when someone tells me that under absolutely no circumstances will they vote for anyone other than their preferred candidate, that is not a swing voter. She maybe from a demographic that includes swing voters, but she is not a swing voter.