Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, pushed back Friday against progressive YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen’s assertion that President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters lack principles. Speaking with Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk at AmericaFest (AmFest) on Saturday, Uygur addressed a conservative audience. Cohen, on his YouTube channel, suggested that Uygur’s remarks at the event were likely ineffective in swaying the crowd, claiming Trump supporters are solely loyal to Trump. However, Uygur argued that the president-elect’s supporters are authentically “anti-war” and “anti-corruption.”
“There are no long-standing principles that they abide by. This is the purported party of family values, the purported party of the Constitution, of law and order, of states’ rights, of fiscal responsibility,” Cohen said. “They will throw that shit out the window the moment, the millisecond, it becomes inconvenient for them and that’s what they did. But you’re saying these things to people as if they’re operating under some principle — that they should be against the establishment, that they should be against these donors — when they’re not.”
“The only long-standing principle is their allegiance to Trump. And so my worry is that like, you trying to get through to them on these issues of principle is falling flat because it’s not principle that got them there in the first place,” he continued. “There is no long-standing principle when you are a Trump supporter.” Uygur responded to Cohen by saying his analysis was both “right” and “wrong.” The Young Turks host acknowledged that Cohen was correct about how Trump supporters used to behave and their perceived “hypocrisy” regarding “family values.”
“Now where’s the part where I think you’re wrong? And this is the part where people — I think I’m a little ahead of people and people think I’m being naive. So what I’m sensing, Brian, is from their audiences — and I’m not just sensing it like through intuition — they’re literally doing polls while I’m on their shows,” Uygur said. “They were doing interactions, calls. When I went to AmFest, talked to literally hundreds of guys who are MAGA, as, you know, they came up to talk to me, etc. And this is not the same base as Trump 2016.”
WATCH:
Uber leftist Brian Tyler Cohen tries to claim that Trump supporters have no principles while defending the most unprincipled party ever to exist: Democrats. pic.twitter.com/2syT8Mzuxk
— USA Features Media (@UsaFeatures) December 28, 2024
He then said that some of Trump’s base is still identical to that of 2016, but that it is not monolithic. “The rest of MAGA are kind of bros and stuff, and they don’t really care about family values at all. In fact, a lot of the bros are pro-choice,” he said. “So like when you say that some people on the right agree with us on things like pro-choice or anti-corruption, the pushback I get from the left is, ‘No way, they’re all evil, they’re all a monolith, they’re all this, they’re all that.’ No, guys, that’s unsophisticated. Seventy-seven million people are not all the same thing.”
“And remember, we don’t have to win or care that much about the outer edge of MAGA on the right. You’re never going to win those guys over and that’s not the issue. You’ve got to win over people on the inner edge that voted for Obama, that voted for Biden and now have voted for Trump,” Uygur added. “And those folks are not radicals. Those folks need to be won over and they are different than what the base was before. And so what I’m sensing is on anti-war and anti-corruption, they really do mean it.”
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