Dear Media Elites, Here’s How You Have Trump Completely Wrong - by Jim Hightower

Being a muckracking political writer often makes me feel like a custodian in a horse barn, constantly shoveling manure. It’s a messy, stinky job — but on the bright side, the stuff is plentiful, so the work is steady. Indeed, I’m now a certified equine excrement engineer, having developed a narrow but important professional specialty: cleaning off the horse stuff that careless politicos and sloppy media types keep dumping on the word “populist.”

As you might imagine, in this year of global turmoil, I’ve been especially busy. Populism — a luminous term denoting both an uplifting doctrine of egalitarianism and a political-economic-cultural movement with deep roots in America’s progressive history — has been routinely sullied throughout 2016 by elites misusing it as synonym for ignorance and bigotry:

When right-wing, anti-Muslim mobs in a few European nations literally went to their national borders to block desperate Syrian war refugees from getting safe passing into Europe, most mainline media labeled the boisterous reactionaries “populists.”

Flummoxed elites in Great Britain, frantic over Brexit, blindly blamed their people’s vote to exit the European Union on the “populist” bigotry of working-class Brits.

When in the United States, the unreal reality show “The Donald” spooked representatives of the corporate and political establishment, which denied that Trump harnessed public fury toward them, smugly attributed his rise solely to “populist” bumpkins who embraced his demeaning attacks on women, Mexicans, Muslims, union members, immigrants, people with disabilities and veterans, among others. Indeed, the power elites sneeringly branded Trump himself a “populist.”

Excuse me, but if that bilious billionaire blowhard is a populist, then I’m a contender in his Miss Universe contest.

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http://www.nationalmemo.com/dear-media-elites-heres-trump-completely-wrong/