Democrats ‘resist’ Trump but go nowhere
Democrats are like hamsters on a wheel, running furiously and going nowhere. The more they “resist,” the farther they slide from retaking political power.
The party of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton has never been more unpopular. A new NBC poll shows the party earning its worst marks of all time. While 46% of respondents said they are “very” or “somewhat” positive on Donald Trump, only 27% said the same about Democrats – the lowest score ever recorded and down from 39% last September. By comparison, some 39% in the survey said they were positive on Republicans.
Asked recently by NBC’s Kristen Welker why he thinks Democrats are failing to connect with voters, the Connecticut senator and progressive hotshot Chris Murphy, said Democrats aren’t doing enough to oppose President Donald Trump. “The broad middle of the public… wants to see our party fighting in exceptional ways.” Really?
Murphy, like other Leftist Democrats, is resisting everything the president proposes, and wanted to shut down the government rather than sign onto the spending bill proposed by House Republicans. That was supposed to be an “exceptional way” to fight Trump. Never mind that government shutdowns have typically hurt the party engineering the closure of federal agencies and services, as well as the country. Murphy, and others like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren wanted to do it anyway. The country be damned.
Other recent exceptional “resistance” acts by Democrats include firebombing Cybertrucks, doing interpretive dancing (seriously), rallying for a Hamas-sympathizer who led a mob to break laws and spew hate on Columbia University’s campus, voting against the Laken Riley Act, which allows criminals to be deported, suing to stop vicious Tren de Aragua gang members being sent to El Salvador, voting against allowing continued pursuit of criminals who stole hundreds of billions of dollars in COVID relief aid, and conjuring up a whole new Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.
How mortifying.
Adding to Democrat angst, the party has no credible leadership. Open warfare has broken out, with progressives furious at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for helping to pass a continuing resolution that kept the government open; some are calling for progressive darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to challenge Schumer in a primary. Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who sits on only one committee in the House, has sponsored few bills since she was first elected in 2018, garnered few co-sponsors and passed but one – having to do with geothermal energy. That’s not exactly what you might call a powerhouse leader.
Otherwise, the leading contenders to run for president in 2028 include Gavin Newsom and Jay Pritzker, governors of California and Illinois, respectively, two of the worst-managed and most troubled states in the country. Former Vice President Kamala Harris has all but disappeared from view; after burning through more than $1billion in campaign cash, she is not likely to get another run at the Oval Office. And then there’s Pete Buttigieg, known mainly for taking paternity leave while the country suffered a supply chain crisis and for proving incapable of building out the country’s network of EV chargers.
Some Democrats are beginning to see the light. Democrat think tank the Third Way recently launched a project aiming, according to Axios reporting, to craft a “singular narrative that is simple, memorable, and resonant” and that addresses voter concerns (at long last). Third Way acknowledges that anything “that seems performative will be tuned out or backfire.” So much for interpretive dance.
But Democrats have yet to acknowledge that they are on the wrong side of many popular issues, like banning biological men from competing in women’s sports, ridding the federal government of waste and fraud, and cutting taxes, all of which they oppose.
In the NBC poll, over two-thirds of those surveyed thought Trump was bringing “real change” to the nation; 46% thought he was engineering the “right kind of change” while 30% disagreed. Sizeable pluralities specifically applauded the changes he was making to immigration, cutting down the size of the federal government, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, trade policy and inflation.
More impressive, the same survey showed that 44% of Americans think the country is heading in the right direction, indicating the highest optimism level since January 2004. This is a huge jump from the 27% scored last November and reflects a meaningful shift in public sentiment. The improvement is in marked contrast to other readings, like the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey, which shows the country increasingly worried about inflation. The NBC poll was conducted March 7-11, which coincided with some of the worst days in the stock market, and likely reflects Trump supporters’ confidence in his long-term agenda.
The NBC poll and others have sensible Democrats reassessing their positions on many issues, including tariffs. Axios reports that some Democrats are beginning to take a softer line on tariffs, acknowledging that middle-class voters who defected to Donald Trump like his economic plan to bring manufacturing and other businesses back to the U.S. and that they need a similar message.
Unions are prodding the change of heart, with the UAW (which endorsed President Joe Biden last fall) saying last month, “We are glad to see an American president take aggressive action on ending the free trade disaster that has dropped like a bomb on the working class.” Pennsylvania Rep. Chris Deluzio recently published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled: “I’m a Rust Belt Democrat From a Swing District. Anti-Tariff Absolutism Is a Mistake.”
Deluzio wrote, “Democrats need to break free from the wrong-for-decades zombie horde of neoliberal economists who think tariffs are always bad.”
Here’s the reality: Democrats need to break free of a whole bucketful of “wrong-for-decades” policies. Until a real leader emerges, it is not clear they will.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/democrats-resist-trump-nowhere
Published on Fox News
