CNN host says liberal media’s ‘constant browbeating’ about Trump is a top reason for his big win

CNN host Michael Smerconish admitted that the mainstream media’s "constant browbeating" of conservatives backfired and contributed to President-elect Trump’s big win last week.

During an interview with Mediaite.com editor Aidan McLaughlin on the "Press Club" podcast, the CNN pundit said that voters rebelled against the media’s constant demonization of people who support the president-elect.

"It’s like a parenting lesson. The more that you tell people what they can’t do, what’s intolerable, you must not do this, you should not do this, the more they’re going to rebel," he said. 

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McLaughlin asked Smerconish what he believed the big takeaway from the 2024 presidential election was. The CNN host began by admitting, "I’ve had to think a lot about it," and declared that the way the media was overbearing about Trump as a threat to the country was "at the top of my list."

He wondered that perhaps if people were left to make their own decision about Trump without the media telling them how to vote, "they would have come to their own conclusion and rejected Donald Trump." 

"But I think that the constant browbeating and the combination of the media influence and the four indictments, one conviction, and showing, you know, that god-awful joke from Madison Square Garden a week in advance of the election on a loop — and I felt it, and I said it," he told his Mediaite host.

Smerconish was referencing the controversial anti-Puerto Rican joke made by roast comic and Trump supporter Tony Hinchcliffe during Trump’s New York City rally last month, in which he called the U.S. territory a "floating island of garbage."

The media characterized the joke as a huge insult to the Puerto Rican community coming from Trump’s campaign just days before the election.

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President Biden would go on to make the moment more controversial for the Democratic Party when he appeared to call Trump supporters "garbage" in response to the joke, a soundbite which the Trump campaign used to its own advantage.

Smerconish noted that he hadn’t made any predictions about whether Trump would win in the lead up to the election, but said the media’s relentless naysaying about Trump gave him a feeling it could backfire.

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"I can’t sit here, Aiden, telling you, well, this is the way I called the election, but I definitely felt the potential for a boomerang effect, and I think that came true. I really do."

Back in August, Smerconish said on Friday that Trump held a significant advantage over Vice President Harris on policy. 

"So the question is one of the race going to be about personality. If it is, he loses," Smerconish said of Trump, adding that Trump, however, "probably wins" in a battle over policy with Harris. 

Fellow liberal pundit, HBO host Bill Maher recently gave the reason he believes Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Trump, namely that the Democratic Party is too radical. "You wear ‘Queers for Palestine’ t-shirts and masks two years after the pandemic ended. And you can't define a woman. I mean ‘person who menstruates,'" he said during Friday's episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher." 

He added, "You're the teachers' union education party and you've turned schools and colleges into a joke. You just lost a crazy contest to an actual crazy person."

– Fox News' Jeffrey Clark contributed to this report.