House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) thought he came up with a real zinger on Feb. 18, during an interview, when he christened President Donald Trump with a new nickname. But the joke is on him, his party, and its various media messengers. Captain Chaos, as Jeffries referred to him, has been back in the White House for exactly one month. During that time, an incredible transformation took place. No, it is not the transformation of America – which, granted, appears to be proceeding apace. Rather, it is The Resistance dissolving from a supposedly cohesive and coordinated campaign of obstruction – designed to save democracy and humanity from Trump – into a herd of hapless hollering harpies with seemingly no plan and no direction. Chaos is indeed an apt barb, but Jeffries pointed it in the wrong direction.
It’s not the first time the word “chaos” has been used against the 47th president. Back when he was the 45th commander-in-chief, Democrats and left-wing journalists constantly alleged that the Trump White House, the economy – and the country as a whole – were in chaos.
Captain Chaos Is Pretty Cool, Says MAGA
Presumably, the representative from New York thought he could breathe new life into this narrative. That in itself is an indication that Trump’s political opponents and detractors are grasping at straws. Even worse for Jeffries, the MAGA world immediately decided that Captain Chaos made Trump sound cool.
Within about a week of Trump being declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election, stories about The Resistance 2.0 began to appear. Establishment media reporters breathlessly described plans being laid by activist groups across the country, as well as by Democratic officeholders at the state and local level, to cripple the Trump agenda. There seemed to be almost an air of excitement – a real sense of, hoo boy, are we going to make him pay for beating Kamala Harris! We’ll use our brilliant strategy and our unity to stop him in his tracks – the will of the voters be damned!
Perhaps they are keeping their powder dry, one might suggest, if one were inclined to give the anti-Trump forces more credit than they probably deserve.
One month into the Captain Chaos presidency, however, and The Resistance has been reduced to cringeworthy attempts at protest chants, ridiculous accusations, childish insults, and outright easily disproven lies. Songwriter extraordinaire Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) leading a crowd of perhaps five in his moving – nay, haunting – chorus of “We will win! We will win!” was truly one for the ages. Various Democrats and “journalists” claiming Captain Chaos is somehow making planes fall out of the sky has been entertaining and also a rather heartless politicization of real tragedies.
It gets more bizarre, though. CBS’ Margaret Brennan, trying to take a swipe at JD Vance’s recent dressing down of European officials in Munich, managed to dream up the bewildering idea that, in 1930s Germany, “free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.” Meanwhile, the Associated Press has been banished from White House briefings because one of its reporters, in a fit of pique, refused to go along with Trump’s renaming of the former Gulf of Mexico.
ABC is all over the place. On Feb. 18, the network was pondering the question (its own question): Who, if anyone, is in charge at the White House? That seems a bit ironic after the past four years. But, by Feb. 19, “[T]he Republican president is asserting control at every opportunity, backed up by loyalists at all levels of government,” the network asserted.
Resistance Is Futile?
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), an up-and-coming Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – only with less of an idea about what’s going on – claimed on The View that Social Security payments would soon be stopped.
On top of that – and these are only a few of the outlandish claims made over the past few weeks – there are the expected assertions that Trump is an authoritarian and a dictator, because such leaders always slash the size and power of government, of course. And then there are the insults and the attempted ridicule, which have even extended to Elon Musk’s youngest son. We won’t even get into the numerous and unambiguous calls for physical violence.
Trump’s whirlwind first month has seen Democratic approval numbers sink perilously low, and they have no cohesive strategy to counter what the new president is doing – with record-high approval. The plan now, it appears, is to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.
Nothing is sticking.
For The Resistance forces, no one is at the helm. Captain Chaos certainly is a good monicker. Trump has reduced his critics to chaos, at least for the time being, and things are likely to get a lot more entertaining before the opposition gets its act together – assuming it does, which is by no means a sure thing. Trump may have broken the Democratic Party beyond repair.
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