Donald Trump acted like this as a businessman. And a TV star. And a candidate, And President-Elect. So what made anyone believe he would suddenly transform into a prototypical politician once he took the presidential oath of office?
What you are seeing from this President is exactly what the voters saw throughout the seemingly endless and exhausting presidential campaign of 2016. Chaos as a friend, not an enemy. No surprises here.
Indeed, the President’s stunning beatdown on the media late last week should remove any doubts about whether Donald Trump will start acting like any president we’ve ever seen. I’ve personally witnessed ten of them previous to number forty-five, and this one defies every single norm established by those ten and the thirty-four that proceeded them.
At the same time, anyone who believes the left and their soulmates in the media will let up on their unprecedented assault on President Trump should be quickly disabused of such a notion.
We know all about what the left has been doing to stop Trump at every turn: anything and everything they possibly can, including but not limited to: unending obstruction on Capitol Hill, including the playground tactic of boycotting committee hearings on his cabinet nominees, unanimous Democrat votes against almost all of them, leftist senators essentially calling their colleague Jeff Sessions a racist, organized and violent protests by the hard left using rent-a-mobs funded by the George Soros cash machine, employing fascist tactics and exercising the heckler’s veto on conservatives attempting to speak on college campuses, unrelenting talk of the President as a Nazi, a Fascist, an anti-Semite, Hitler incarnate. We have seen all of this and more.
But here’s the question about the left’s scorched-earth strategy that few have had time to even contemplate amidst all the chaos: how is all this likely to affect the left’s standing with the voters? Does this make the Democrats, look better or worse in the eyes of the people who turned the heartland from blue or purple to deep red by repudiating the very things they now see playing out in even greater measure than before they voted to remove these people from power?
We need look back no further than the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s for the answer.
Yes, the country has changed since then, but not nearly as much as the left would like to believe. After all, it was those blue collar, blue dog Democrats thought by their own party to be neither worthy of their attention nor relevant to the electoral process who put Donald Trump in the White House.
As expressed in a recent column by Pat Buchanan, what we’re seeing on Capitol Hill and campuses across the land is alarmingly similar to what we witnessed in the late 1960’s when academia was overrun by hippie protests, cities all over the country were set on fire and leftist rebellion was in the air. Democrats chose to align themselves with the radicals.
The result was Richard Nixon — like Trump, an explosively controversial figure – winning the presidency in 1968 on the strength of the so-called silent majority of decent, hard-working, law-abiding Americans who felt threatened by the toppling of the culture and the norms of American society. And while Nixon won with fewer votes in the electoral college than Trump – 301 – it must be noted that rabble-rouser George Wallace ran as an independent – attacking the radicalized culture — and picked off five southern states that Nixon almost certainly would have won were it not for Wallace.
But to put an exclamation point on their judgment, the voters delivered Nixon a landslide reelection in 1972 against the poster child of the radical left, George McGovern, thus doubling down on their utter rejection of the very same culture that has been rising on the left for the last eight years.
1968 was strikingly similar to 2016. So, will 2020 turn into another 1972? Let’s consider the critical states that were either toss-ups which went heavily for Trump or previously reliable Democrat strongholds: Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
The Democrats proved in 2016 that they cannot win a presidential election if they can’t win those states. Pure and simple. So the question before us is equally simple: do the actions of the left since they lost the election make it more or less likely that the Democrats win back those states in the next presidential election?
That is essentially a rhetorical question, one that answers itself. Which by itself demonstrates the futility of the left’s strategy.
Forgetting their kneecapping of Trump on a daily basis which makes clear what they oppose, how have the Democrats chosen to define themselves in the eyes of the public? A reliable answer will come in the form of their choice to head the Democratic National Committee. They will decide this coming weekend.
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), candidate for DNC Chair
Almost all of the leading candidates for DNC Chair come from the hard left. The putative front-runner, Keith Ellison (D-MN), is a radical leftist, confirmed ant-Semite and the only Muslim in Congress who has been endorsed by no less than Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and progressive darling Bernie Sanders (D-VT). Another candidate is Sally Boynton Brown, Chair of the Idaho Democrat Party, whose pandering to the progressive wing of the party was epitomized by her statement, “my job is to shut other white people down.” The most “mainstream” candidate in the field is Thomas Perez, consumer advocate and civil rights lawyer who served as President Obama’s Secretary of Labor for the last four years of his administration.
This is indeed very revealing about the direction the Democrats have chosen to head.
The party might have tried to attract some candidates who could do what seems obvious for a party that has been slaughtered at every level of government for the last eight years – losing control of many state governments, both houses of Congress and the presidency. They could have tried to encourage or prod someone, anyone, who would speak directly to those disaffected voters in the heartland who used to be a critical part of their base but turned on them in the last election. They could have listened to the one lonely voice in the Democrat wilderness, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), who right the election warned of the party’s self-destructive march to the left before he was evidently silenced.
Instead, they appear committed to doubling down on the progressive ideology that turned them into a party of bi-coastal let-them-eat-cake elites, a party of the very rich and the very poor, and which sent them packing at the hands of Donald Trump.
It is in one sense easy to understand, because most Democrats truly despise Trump and his deplorable followers, and believe in open borders, Black Lives Matter, the abridgment of free speech and the rest.
What is impossible to understand is how no one in the ranks of party leadership seems to have enough of a grip on reality to realize this is a losing strategy. Even a suicidal one. Have they not learned the elementary lessons of the late ‘60’s and early 70’s?
The average Joe out there, repulsed by politicians, just living his life and hoping that the government will at least not serve as a roadblock to his happiness, wants to see what this president can do, whether they voted for him or not. They want him to succeed, if only because they want the country to succeed. And if you think that average Joe is responding positively to this unrelenting scorched-earth, sky-is-falling, end-of-the-world bullhorn we’re hearing every day from the left, then I’ve got a terrific bridge in Brooklyn I’m prepared to sell you.
Put simply, the left appears to be engaging not just in political malpractice, but political suicide, and none of their leaders either realize it or seem to care. Shame about that.
