In the midst of a crucial midterm election year, setting the stage for a post-Trump era after 2028, the Democrat Party has just demonstrated to any conscious American that it is an inept political organization, incapable of running itself, let alone a vast federal government and country.
The totally botched release of a half-baked autopsy report on its disastrous showing in the 2024 election in itself helps explain why someone as controversial as Donald J. Trump could make history as only the second president in 250 years to lose a reelection bid and then bounce back for a convincing victory just one cycle later.
And then launch a second term with an overwhelming blizzard of reforms and change that is reshaping the office, the government, and the powers of the presidency, and its relationship to Congress, all while confounding Democrats.
That party's mishandling of its attempted self-examination is just the latest compelling evidence of members' pathological obsession with the man who was once a donor and what it has driven them to attempt – complex hoaxes, lawfare, show trials, punitive penalties, and political prosecutions.
This is not good for the political balance and long-term functioning of our two-party democracy.
We can hope, however, that in the short term this fall and in 2028, enough voters, including even automatic Democrats, will see this crazed ineptitude for what it is and will steer clear of handing governing responsibilities to this crowd until new, smarter, and younger leadership takes control and steers a new course.
In theory, this would be facilitated by the absence of Donald Trump's name on any future ballot. But Democrats seem addicted merely to opposing anything Trump, as if that's an adequate policy to gain leadership.
Last year in February, the Democratic National Committee elected a new chairman, Ken Martin, a little-known state party chair from Minnesota. That's the same state where Kamala Harris dug up her vice-presidential partner, Gov. Tim Walz.
Minnesota is a nice place with lots of lakes, black flies, and reliably liberal voters; it was the one state of 50 that did not vote for Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984. But as Walz’s zany antics displayed on the national stage, it is the bush league of politics.
As part of Martin’s platform to clear the odor of the 2024 defeat and presumably learn some lessons, he ordered an “after-action report,” promising transparency on the results. He commissioned a friend to do it, a little-known Democrat strategist named Paul Rivera.
Rivera worked on it only part-time, some early mornings and evenings, around his regular client work. And it shows.
The 192-page document contains vast empty sections with someone's scribbled notations in red about what it’s lacking. How, for instance, could someone even pretend to examine the disappointing 2024 outcome for Democrats and leave out any mention of Joe Biden’s advanced age?
The report's observations about the Harris campaign could be described as keen grasps of the obvious. She did not, for instance, differentiate herself from Joe Biden’s doomed, abandoned campaign. Do ya think?
Upon reading it, Martin announced that on second thought, he would not release it as promised. As any first-grader knows, announcing you have a secret that you’re not going to reveal only heightens everyone's desire to know what it is. Martin's decision ignited widespread suspicions about the contents.
This led to predictable months of needless and unresolved party argument and controversy. Clearly, Martin was hiding something seriously awful. He was, but not what people suspected. He was hiding how seriously awful his promised autopsy report was; calling it half-assed is far too generous.
Then, recently, CNN obtained a copy and confronted Martin, forcing the release.
READ MORE: DNC Autopsy of Disastrous '24 Election Released, and It's As Pathetic As You'd Expect
As you might imagine, genuine autopsies are messy things with details that make readers cringe. Since the DNC’s autopsy is incomplete, here’s my dissection of the party's actions and the remains of that body:
To any honest eye, signs of Joe Biden’s mental fatigue were obvious in the 2019-20 campaign.
The Iowa Democrat caucuses that year were easily won by Pete Buttigieg, the Indiana garden gnome. Ex-vice president Biden finished an embarrassing fourth. A smiling, fresh-faced college girl in New Hampshire asked him later about that poor showing. His overreaction was to call her “a lying dog-faced pony soldier,” whatever that is.
Biden was usually escorted from public appearances by unidentified aides, guiding him by his elbow quickly past media. Avoiding an opportunity for free media exposure is a strange maneuver in political campaigns whose lifeblood is publicity.
Dodging media is what people do when trying to hide something, as in perp walks. Turns out, they were hiding something.
Biden spent much of that campaign in the basement of his Delaware home, decorated like an office. His official schedules often ended by mid-morning, another strange campaign choice when you're purportedly trying to reach the most voters. Yet, sympathetic liberal media did not investigate this obvious mystery.
Meanwhile, most days, Trump spoke at length to two or three large campaign rallies in as many states.
Democrats and sympathetic media excused Biden's regular gaffes, lackluster primary debate performances, and poor fundraising as “good old Joe.” NBC News called him “The unsinkable Joe Biden.”
After his long Senate tenure and unremarkable vice presidency, Biden was the best known in a crowded Democrat field that included Kamala Harris.
After a brutal skewering by Tulsi Gabbard in one debate, Harris dropped out before any voting.
And there was the looming specter of a second term for an impeached Trump. No Democrat had expected him to win in 2016 when he shockingly denied Hillary Clinton her Oval Office inheritance. That ignited a never-ending hostility that blinded the party to everything else, including performing as a responsible opposition instead of a vengeful gaggle.
Polls found 70 percent of Biden supporters were actually voting against Trump, not for the former vice president.
At a March debate with Bernie Sanders in 2020, Biden committed to selecting a woman as his VP partner, someone who “would be ready on Day One to be president.”
Instead, he picked Kamala Harris for reasons that had nothing to do with intelligence or executive competence. She became the first woman and African American vice president.
Harris also became well-known for not paying attention to preparation or her policy portfolio of addressing the flood of illegal immigrants across the southern border, and for her uniquely confounding way with words:
It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.
Or when the vice president of the United States shared her foreign policy insight:
So Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong.
The list of disturbing Biden behaviors included speeches where he froze, read stage directions out loud, got lost exiting the stage, sought to recognize a dead congresswoman, fell down, walked out in mid-ceremony, introduced foreign leaders who weren’t there, wandered off, or retold impossible stories that had already been debunked.
More importantly, Biden screwed up the Afghan troop withdrawal that saw 13 American service members killed, willfully opened the border with Mexico, and spent so much money wildly on progressive policies that he ignited inflation that soared to nine percent. That was the worst rate in 40 years since a previous Democrat president lost reelection.
Party leaders knew of Biden's mental and physical decay all along but insisted publicly he was ”sharp as a tack” for their own selfish political ambitions. Which makes them accomplices.
And they enabled his ridiculous desire to seek a second term, which was aborted only after Biden’s mental collapse in front of 55-million viewers during a nationally-televised debate he had sought to destroy Trump once and for all. Aides could have prevented that.
Media, which has constitutional protections to serve as government watchdogs, saw it too. But as Chuck Todd would later admit, they apparently decided that honestly detailing the commander in chief's worsening mental and physical infirmities would help Republican Trump, a political no-no in the incestuous DC media world.
Some even used that inside knowledge to cash in later on lucrative now-it-can-be-told book deals.
Ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Harris as the party’s replacement candidate, either in vain hope of a possible win or to terminate her political career and finally put Harris out of the party's misery.
Harris proceeded to spend $1.5 billion in 15 weeks without articulating any policy specifics while claiming she could think of nothing she would change about Biden’s failed presidency. Donors of that vast sum were disheartened and remain so.
They're all still coasting on antipathy toward Trump. That's what has led to Democrats’ lack of alternatives heading toward the midterms, which, history shows, should be an easy win against the party of an incumbent president.
Democrats, however, have caused two lengthy federal government shutdowns over budget issues, seeming to encourage violence in the streets while using the same old attacks on Trump, and while actually vowing revenge on the president’s supporters should Democrats win political control in November.
Potential 2028 candidates do not sound happy about the report. Rahm Emanuel, a skilled political operative scouting 2028 for himself, told the New York Times, “It’s not worth the paper it’s written on.”
Calls for Party Chairman Martin’s resignation have sparked, but not from within his real constituency, the 448-member DNC consisting largely of state-party workers. The former state party chair has been careful to keep his campaign promise to routinely distribute funds to state parties.
Martin has criticized his own campaign autopsy as inaccurate and incomplete. Yet he released the negative news at a time that actually distracts media and the public from President Trump’s own troubles, including the stalled war on Iran and prices that remain stubbornly high.
Fresh fundraising numbers from Chairman Martin’s 16 months of leadership show that, as of this month, the DNC is financially underwater. It has nearly $18 million in debts but only $14.4 million in cash.
Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee just reported $123.9 million cash in hand and no debts at all.
Other than all that, though, the Democrat Party seems really good to go for 2026 and beyond.
