“Getting rid of Trump is the easy part, cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else.”
– ABC News Political Director Rick Klein, in a tweet he later deleted.

This sums up the sentiments that inform America’s establishment media, its corporate elite, Big Tech, academia, most of the public sector, the entire Democratic party, and most of the Republican party leadership. What do we do with 74,222,593 people? How will we reeducate these troglodytic haters? How will we control these dangerous insurrectionists?

Despite virtually every powerful special interest lined up against them, this “cleansing” will indeed be tough. Because, first of all, we are not talking about 74 million Trump supporters. We’re talking about over 150 million Trump supporters. To say that only 74 million Americans support Trump rests on an impossible assumption: That every American who didn’t vote for Trump, or for Biden, automatically is supposed to have supported Biden.

Unfortunately for the tastemakers and kingmakers of America, that’s not how reality works. A careful examination of the official election results by state yields several fascinating facts. For example, assuming the 1.8 percent going to 3rd party candidates splits equally between Trump and Biden (with such a small fraction, it doesn’t matter much anyway), then Trump voters spoke for 47.7 percent of the population, and Biden voters spoke for 52.3 percent of the American population. That would be, for Trump, over 157 million people.

Why wouldn’t this be true? On what basis would anyone assume that Trump would not command the support of as many non-voting households as Biden? Moreover, in the 25 states where Trump won, a larger percentage of the population is under age 18, 24 percent, than in the 25 states where Biden won, 22 percent. That’s a slim difference, but it puts to rest the notion that the states where Trump won are filled with aging hillbillies.

In fact, one of Trump’s most decisive victories came in Utah, where he earned 61 percent of the vote despite the unhelpful influence of Mitt Romney. Utah is America’s youngest state, with 30 percent of its population under age 18.

Another indication that the Trump Nation is closer to half of all America instead of just the 74 million number that keeps getting tossed around has to do with the turnout of eligible voters. This statistic is more meaningful than the conventional “turnout” percentage which only measures turnout of registered voters, because it indicates not only success in getting out the vote, but it also takes into account efforts to register eligible voters. And the numbers are revealing.

In the states where Trump won, 59.4 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. In state where Biden won, the figure was 62.0 percent. And in the six contested swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – a whopping 65.0 percent of eligible voters cast ballots.

This disparity of 5.6 percent when applied to the 38.7 million eligible voters living in those six swing states equates to 2.2 million more people voting. The cumulative margin of victory for Biden in those six states was a mere 312,288 votes.

The point here is not to contest the result of the election. That’s been done, that’s being done, and that debate will live on across the pages of history. But this data plainly shows the impact of the decision by Mark Zuckerberg to spend $400 million to register voters and get out the vote in these swing states. It shows the impact of last minute laws and rule changes designed to facilitate ballot harvesting, mail-in ballots, same day registration, combined with that avalanche of pro-Biden money. And Zuckerberg was just the biggest wave, part of a tsunami of pro-Democrat billions that bought the presidency.

But while money may facilitate collecting extra votes from America’s most politically disengaged in Democratic strongholds, it is reasonable to assume that money could also facilitate collecting more votes from the apolitical masses across the Red expanses of America. But even if they didn’t go to the polls, and they didn’t, because there was no Mark Zuckerberg to pay someone to drag them to the polls (or harvest their ballot), their sentiments likely reflect the sentiments of their neighbors. And these sentiments are not racist, or sexist, or hateful. They’re common sense, pro-American sentiments that Trump, for the first time in over a generation, spoke to without apology.

There were good reasons to vote for Trump. He was the first president since Jimmy Carter to not start a new war, while at the same time, and unlike Carter, he built up the American military deterrent. He encouraged the Europeans to provide more for their own defense, and negotiated peace agreements in the Middle East. He approved the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines. He deregulated the economy and brought jobs and capital back to the United States. He stood up to the environmental extremists. He rejected “critical race theory.” He fought for realistic, pro-American immigration policies. He renegotiated trade agreements. He fixed the VA. He did as well as anyone would have done dealing with COVID-19 including developing vaccines in record time. There’s more. It’s a long list. Trump did a good job, while enduring more sustained harassment than any president in history.

Ideologues like ABC News Political Director Rick Klein, and his photogenic stooge ABC News Anchorman David Muir, are playing with fire. Along with their counterparts across America’s entire media complex, conventional and online, they have stoked the flames of division and resentment. They have told so many lies, and have displayed such obvious bias, that nothing they say can be believed any more. And the number of awakened people who don’t believe anything coming from sources like ABC is not 74 million, it’s well over 150 million.

Trump was a polarizing figure, and his enemies took advantage of that to endlessly use every negative utterance he ever made, invariably presented out-of-context, to terrify low-information voters, or voters who only consume conventional media (nearly synonymous groups). And despite this endless war against Trump by every establishment institution in America, he was gaining ground towards the end of the campaign, not losing ground. If the election had been held even a few weeks later, all the money and dirty tricks in the world may not have been able to prevent his victory.

What America need now is not a “cleansing” of Trump supporters. What America really needs is a thorough reformation of voting laws across the country, combined with an acceptance of online freedom of speech. Sadly, the powers that be are doing the exact opposite. But they are not alienating a small minority of clingers. They have already alienated at least 157 million people, and every time they tell another lie, or silence another voice, that number grows.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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