Charlamagne tha God: Trump Won ‘Because of Dinner Table Issues’

KARL: What do you make of the the, the demographics here? I mean, Trump got one out of every three voters of color.

CHARLAMAGNE: No.

KARL: Yeah.

CHARLAMAGNE: One out of —

KARL: 33%. Really? Yeah.

CHARLAMAGNE: When you say color, you mean like black, brown, everything. Oh. Well, I think that, you know, people have different issues that they care about, and I think that there’s nobody out there that’s a single-issue voter. I think some of this is a backlash to race and gender and identity politics. But, man, most people, they just care about keeping food on they, on they table and keeping a roof over their head. And I think sometimes people forget about that. I think that they forget about, you know, the working class. And I, for whatever reason, Donald Trump speaks to the grievances of the working class in a real way. And I keep telling folks, people forget what you did, they’ll forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. And when you go back to 2020, even though it was a pandemic and it was COVID.

KARL: Yeah.

CHARLAMAGNE: People don’t care. All they know is they got stimulus checks with his name on it. And that’s what they remember. And so people think about that when you have conversations with folks, they’d be like, “yo I remember how 2020 felt!” And they think that they’re going to feel that, you know, and this in this next this next term.

KARL: Yeah. I mean, how do you explain I mean, he obviously swept the battleground states. He drove up, you know, turnout around the country in Republican areas. But he did much better than Republicans– than he had done before in places like Chicago, Brooklyn, Queens.

CHARLAMAGNE: Because of dinner table issues. It’s– yo it’s literally that simple. Every day people wake up and all they want to do is have more money in their pocket and they want to feel safe. I don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, straight, whatever religion you are, those are the two things that you’re thinking about every day. How can I keep some money in my pocket and how can I stay safe? And when you look at, you know, issues like the economy, when you look at the border and that’s what I was telling people, we had this conversation back in February. I was having conversations with folks and they was telling me, “my God, these gangs are coming into our neighborhood. And I know it’s because of the border. We’ve got to close the border. ” They were having these conversations. And I told you, Jon, this was the first time in my life that I heard people in my community, black people, brown people, having those conversations. So that was going to be an issue. They felt like things were safer. They felt like the border was safer, you know, under Trump. And by the way, it’s not like the Democrats didn’t want border security. They just didn’t know how to message it right. “Build the wall” may sound elementary, but you know what that signals to people? Border security. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. Don’t complicate it by saying, “we’ve got to have the most comprehensive border plan and you know that there’s a bipartisan, you know, border bill that Democrats and Republicans couldn’t agree on, and Donald Trump shot it down.” No, Trump is saying build the wall. And when they were telling you that it was a problem, y’all were say, “no, it’s not a problem. Let’s create sanctuary cities and let’s bring, you know, the people into our cities.” And so when they started putting those, you know, illegal immigrants on the buses and on the planes and sending them to those sanctuary cities, what did they say then? “No, don’t come.” So it looked like the Republicans were right and Democrats were wrong, and nobody knew that that was going to be one of the big central issues that people thought about when they went into that voting booth.