Megyn Kelly as an unofficial campaign surrogate for Donald Trump? That’s how Washington Monthly blogger D.R. Tucker cast her when he posited that this year’s presidential contest boils down to “a fight between Rachel Maddow’s America and Megyn Kelly’s America.”
“The presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential candidates embody the distinctive traits of” Maddow and Kelly, contended Tucker in a Sunday post. “Hillary Clinton has all of Maddow’s wisdom, chapter-and-verse policy knowledge, and courage,” whereas “Donald Trump is the male Kelly, someone who has become famous as a result of irresponsible and undeserved media hype, someone who has been able to fool millions into believing he has substance.”
Tucker indicated that Kelly and Trump may suffer from status anxiety vis-à-vis Maddow and Hillary:
You have to think that Kelly is resentful of Maddow’s journalistic credentials, contemptuous of the fact that Maddow has reached a level of respect and credibility among serious news observers that is permanently inaccessible to her. Similarly, it must grate at Trump’s soul to know that he could never achieve the public stature that Clinton has earned through her decades of public service.
Tucker opined that “the outcome of the 2016 election will determine whether the decades-long right-wing effort to dumb down the United States has finally succeeded” and concluded, “A decade ago, Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly embodied the wisdom vs. wingnut divide in US politics. Today, Maddow and Kelly represent the divergent visions that will confront America at the ballot box this fall. Will the voters choose to lean forward, or embrace a machine that is backwards?”
