Summer used to be a slower time of year. Not just in the news business. And not just because of the heat: Vacations. Picnics. Baseball. And there was nothing called social media.
One summer early in my journalism career, I got a story on the front page of a big-city newspaper about a dog who found his owner’s lost wallet and brought it home. I might have been more excited than the owner.
That was then. This is now: Los Angeles. Iran. Israel. Ukraine. Gaza. Donald Trump. TDS. China. In the old days, members of Congress would go home for the summer. Now, they mostly live in Washington and make trouble year-round.
Instinctively, a N.Y. Times newsletter writer in the northeast, dramatically overstating the country’s divisions, opined: “The nation is a cauldron of anxiety and anger as it enters the weekend at a moment recalling some of the darkest periods of its history.”
As usual, it’s the coastal cauldrons, both East and West, making the most dramatic news, not the sturdy Heartland that steadies the nation — and, oh, by the way — elected the president and government now attempting to clean up the rotting mess so willfully inflicted by the thankfully departed previous president.
A significant part of that ongoing mess is being maintained and intentionally inflamed by the Democrat Party, the country’s oldest party and acting like it is.
American political history suggests that liberal grouping will eventually shuck off its contemporary ancient leadership and progressive paralysis to discover new leaders and new priorities. As Dems finally did eventually after their abiding 19th century support of slavery that caused the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, and decades of resistance to black freedoms.
From 1860 to 1932, there were 15 men elected president. Only two of them were Democrats.
From 1968 to 1992, Republicans ruled again; voters chose the GOP in five out of six presidential elections. That long-running dominance was ended by Bill Clinton, who forced Democrats to the ideological center. There, they won five of the next eight elections.
So, it can be done. It's not rocket science. At the moment, however, things look grim for the party of Jefferson. First, the billionaire Trump is a unique political phenomenon, one of those extraordinary comets that rarely streak across the sky.
He launched his candidacy and political career just 10 years ago this week. As a complete rookie then, he was unaware of the impossibility of turning the long-running party of business into the party of American workers. So, he did it.
Among 17 GOP opponents in 2015-16, most of them party veterans, the real-estate mogul who literally lived in a Fifth Avenue penthouse, was the only one to grasp the Heartland’s pent-up anger and frustration with the bipartisan cynicism, broken promises, and empty blather of the country’s way-too comfortable political establishments in Washington.
He sensed it, bottled it, spoke it, and promised change. Trump, you may have noticed, is not a usual politician, which is why I think so many voters believe him. Perhaps to his own surprise, in 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, whose two New York Senate campaigns he helped finance.
And then – are you sitting down? — to cement the fierce fealty of his newly-heard political followers, Trump actually kept his campaign promises. He actually did. Who does that once they get to Washington?
Trump’s doing it again this time, too. And well past the traditional first 100-day benchmark.
Trump can be loud, vain, and profane. But, by golly, the man did what he said he would, as successful deal makers keep doing. And then, of course, he told us about it several times.
Despite their personal disdain for Trump and for their own benefit (which is how politics work), congressional Republicans like Mitch McConnell (KY) engineered not one, not two, but three Trump Supreme Court justices.
After 49 years of Republicans saying they would overturn Roe v. Wade, Trump’s Supreme Court actually did it.
And now, that court has become a legal backstop against Democrats’ frantic efforts to stop everything, anything the incumbent president tries.
One of Trump’s strongest super-powers is actually out of his control. Just by being, Trump inhabits opponents’ minds. He’s there when they wake up, when they lunch, when they look in the mirror, or try to sleep.
Even mainstream media, which hates him, is obsessed with Trump. They can’t help themselves. Trump is like a never-ending mosquito bite for them. You hate it. But, man, it can feel good to scratch it, sometimes so hard it hurts.
As a result, Trump seems to be everywhere every day. This fuels Democrat anger and fears, Trump’s ego, and his supporters’ perverse delight. Democrats and the Cheney crowd cannot purge him.
It also helps explain Dems’ recent four years of ultimately futile and patently unfair efforts to break the man, his finances, his campaign, his reputation. All of which built sympathy and admiration for Trump, and that makes them even madder.
Trump’s continuing mental presence has forced obsessed Democrats to do not only stupid things, but self-destructive things.
The threat of a Trump 2020 reelection caused them to rig the primary process and implant a useless dufus like Joe Biden, whose greatest appeal was not being Donald Trump.
That “appeal” caused Democrats and those who bought media’s drum-rolls of fear to glaze past the growing signs — then and throughout his besotted term — of Biden’s decaying mind, which was never that strong to begin with.
The second serious affliction of the Democrat Party is its ongoing delusion about 2024’s results. Its leaders are too old to realize.
It would take a divine lobotomy for them to understand that their years of lies and coordinated collusions covering up the mental and physical incapacitation of America’s commander in chief and then their undemocratic attempt to fob off a mental midget as his successor constituted a greater danger and scandal than Watergate.
In the early 1970s, Watergate forced an historic resignation, and elected the opposition party in the next presidential election, just as occurred last fall. It also saw criminal convictions and prison time.
But Watergate never endangered national security.
And now, instead of moving on to rebuild their brand with the next Bill Clinton, Democrats have decided they lost because they were not progressive enough and failed to fully explain their disastrous economic policies with sufficient force.
Now, let’s examine Democrats’ logic in Los Angeles, Ground Zero for 2028:
For unexplained but suspected reasons, Biden’s Democrat administration willfully allowed and facilitated millions of illegal immigrants to flood across the open southern border, along with narcotics and nationals from adversarial powers, namely China.
Trump was elected promising, among many things now underway, to implement the largest deportation program in history, beginning with criminal illegals.
As in 2016, he’s begun fulfilling those promises. Trump has restarted border wall construction and arrested thousands of illegals, despite numerous attempts to stop him in courts. Polls show Trump’s actions are widely approved.
Democrats and their hired agitators began rioting in Los Angeles and then elsewhere to resist arrests and Trump’s deportations. Some masked protestors were filmed waving the flag of a country where Trump would like to return them.
LA Democrat Mayor Karen Bass, who addressed January’s devastating wildfires and their aftermath with truly impressive ineptness, is loudly resisting Trump.
Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, who would happily agree to become president in 2029, is also supporting illegal immigrants’ right to remain illegally in California with full taxpayer-funded benefits.
When rioting and destruction of public property became less than the “mostly peaceful” events described by media, President Trump activated the state's National Guard, as previous presidents have done.
He also dispatched several hundred federal troops to protect federal property, as previous presidents have done.
Newsom and Bass are resisting the president’s efforts in courts and voicing angry rhetoric to their media, which shows Trump can inhabit California minds too. Mobs are assaulting police, burning cars, and they have elected Democrats' support.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman seems to be the only Democrat not inhaling something:
This is anarchy and true chaos. My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement.
This is a public fight that even President Trump’s dog would take on, if he had one.
This weekend is the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army’s founding, highlighted by a military parade in Washington. It was impressive and surprisingly emotional for me. Unfiltered C-SPAN video replay of the complete parade here. (The fireworks and musical finales are pretty good, too.)
The parade was the first of many national celebrations building to the United States’ 250th birthday on July 4th 2026.
Democrats also had plans to demonstrate, not new policy ideas for 2028 or next year’s midterm elections. Instead of looking to the future or celebrating the nation’s history, the troubled party with no real national leadership has fallen back on familiar plans. Which have failed to derail Trump for a decade. But that's all they've got, it seems.
We are nearly 249 years out from declaring independence from a British king. With zero new to propose, flailing Democrats have reverted to their go-to national strategy of protesting Donald Trump.
Simply being against anything Trump says or does is comfortable and familiar for them and requires no real thinking, which is convenient. That theme hasn’t worked for 10 years, but maybe 11 will turn the tide.
Remember Democrats' pathetically sad holding of protest signs during Trump's address to Congress last winter? That accomplished nothing. So, they're doing it again.
Democrats’ latest protest theme and signs declare, “No Kings.”
It’s OK. It’s OK. The idea drew applause during internal planning, which is good enough for them.
