New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman resigned in disgrace after multiple women accused him of domestic abuse. So, there’s a vacancy. Four Democrats are vying for the nomination; the primary will be held on September 13. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney has tossed his hat in the ring. He’s been holding a series of running town halls, according to City and State. He plans on holding 30 in 30 days. So, you get to run with this guy and he takes questions. The publication added that Maloney is portraying himself as the man with a baseball bat trying to protect his home from invaders—those being the Trump crowd. The New York AG’s office has been the point of the lance of the legal wing of the Trump resistance, filing lawsuits left and right before Schneiderman’s resignation. If Maloney loses this primary, he still plans to run for re-election of his congressional seat in the 18thdistrict, which went for Trump in 2016. The issue: will this hurt him with Trump voter outreach. Mr. Maloney’s response was simple: they’re a**holes and I don’t give a f**k what they say.
It’s that idyllic homestead that Maloney vowed to protect in his first TV ad, released on Tuesday. “I feel like there’s a group of men led by Donald Trump who have shown up in the front yard and they’re getting ready to tear this house apart,” he says in the ad, seated in his kitchen. “And I’m going to stand in the hallway with a baseball bat. Because I don’t have any choice. My kids are upstairs, asleep.”
I asked Maloney to explain the ad as we ran through Brooklyn Bridge Park. “The baseball bat is about defending your home and your family when someone’s coming through the front door and you have nowhere to run,” he said. “That’s not violence, that’s self-defense. That’s making a decision that you’re going to make a stand or go down swinging.”
Maloney isn’t backing down from the home invader metaphor. But he is running, ultimately, for a statewide position. And even if he doesn’t win the Democratic primary, Maloney plans to defend his congressional seat, in a district that voted for Trump in 2016. Does he expect any Trump supporters to criticize his rhetoric?
“I don’t give a f**k what the Trump fans say. That’s not what this is about,” Maloney said. “This is about speaking from the heart. About a family I’ve built for 25 years that’s in the crosshairs of these a**holes. And doing something about it.”
Maloney is among a growing number of national Democrats – most notably California Rep. Maxine Waters – who have called for an end to civility, and the need to respond to Trump on his own rhetorically nasty terms. But even as U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is making headlines for strategically timed expletives, Maloney’s own cursing stands out.
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I mean this is par for the course for Democrats. For a brief period, there was a side that was suggesting heavily that they needed to win back white working class voters, and that this voting bloc was winnable. It’s true. They have voted for Democrats and Republicans in recent elections. Job creation, protections, and better trade deals can’t get them an audience. Instead, the Democratic Party doubled-down on the cities, political correctness, and bashing middle America for dragging the rest of the country down—in their minds. In reality, the Left is the true cancer of the country. And this screw the rural voter mindset is seeping elsewhere. The acting spokesperson Tennessee Democratic Party made that sentiment quite clearand how he feels about Trump voters, even in a state that went for him in 2016. Then again, it’s not like we knew how these left-wingers really feel about us.
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