President Donald J. Trump delivered the longest speech to a joint session of Congress in American history last week. It was a clear shot across the bow of the Democratic Party’s ship: I won, and you won’t stop me this time. It was a drubbing of epic proportions, ripping apart the Democrats’ failed agenda that was pushed by a mentally incompetent president in Joe Biden. All Democrats could do was cope and seethe. They wouldn’t even clap for the kid fighting brain cancer or the steelworker who’s raised 40 foster children; the man also has several biological children of his own. Because Trump is president, everything must be opposed, even children with cancer. It exposes one simple thing, and reporter Michael Shellenberger summed up this issue in three words: they got nothing. The Democrats absolutely have nothing.
The polling after the speech proved it. Despite Rep. Al Green (D-TX) getting kicked out, people with paddle signs, and others leaving midway through the address, CBS News found that 76 percent of American voters viewed the speech positively. On CNN, that figure was 69 percent. It’s why the ‘dark vision’ narrative never resonated and died on the vine that very night. When three-fourths of the country says to the media, ‘you’re on crack if that’s your take,’ you know the legacy press was left naked. There is nowhere for Democrats to go—every narrative they’ve used against Trump for the better part of a decade has been neutralized since he won the 2024 election. Everyone heard it on overdrive, and he still swept all the swing states, won the popular vote, and the Electoral College—89 percent of all counties shifted to the right.
Independent reporters Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag dissected this messaging void afflicting Democrats. The dearth of new ideas and cultish attachment to old ones that have become election poison for the party. One of the reasons Democrats are struggling circles back to latter: they cancel and ostracize anyone who challenges the party ethos. If Democrats are mad at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk, they have only themselves to blame; they pushed them into the MAGA camp (via Public):
…the Democrats’ messaging on even their core issues was confusing and all over the place. The problem isn’t simply that they can’t decide whether to frame Trump as a liar, authoritarian, or cruel. It’s that they have lodged those accusations against him for eight years, voters still elected him president, and he hasn’t done anything to change their minds since taking office. The flip side of the same problem is that Democrats haven’t presented a positive agenda of their own that might define them as a better alternative to Trump and the Republicans. Most of the protests by Democrats, including their eviction from the speech last night, signified the lack of a core vision, values, and agenda for America.
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In fact, the situation for Democrats is even worse than that. Not so long ago they said climate catastrophe was inevitable if they didn’t get hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to subsidize green energy. Now, Democrats are quiet about the large cuts to green energy subsidies and the abandonment of ESG policies by the world’s largest energy companies. Every Senate Democrat voted to allow boys and men to compete in girls’ and women’s sports, and yet no member of Congress last night held up signs saying “Transwomen Are Women”; many others had long since removed their pronouns from the X bios. And where during Trump’s first term in office, progressive leaders, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, histrionically accused the president of grave human rights violations for his immigration policy, Democrats did not denounce the decline in border crossings last month to their lowest level in 25 years, thanks to Trump’s crackdown.
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The obvious answer to all of these questions is that the Democrats’ positions on transgenderism, climate change, and DEI are wildly unpopular and only becoming more so as new evidence emerges. Nearly 80% of respondents to a New York Times poll last month said they supported a ban on males in female sports. The Department of Justice is investigating the misuse of a $27 billion climate program managed by the Environmental Protection Agency. “It appears the billions didn’t revitalize anything,” noted the Free Press, “except the coffers of a range of environmental nonprofits associated with former Obama and Biden administration officials.” And in the weeks since Trump signed executive orders against DEI, journalists have reported that the Department of Education, Department of Justice, and Department of Defense had allocated hundreds of millions for divisive, racially segregationist DEI trainings and initiatives.
But that raises the question of why Democrats aren’t putting forward an original agenda.
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Democrats lack a coherent vision, agenda, and message partly because they have lost many of their most competent thought leaders through infighting and excommunications. As we wrote shortly before the election, the Democratic Party was significantly weakened by members’ tendency to turn on and cancel their own allies. The coalition became unstable because it eventually labeled too many of its members as “oppressors” and cast them into the out-group. Unable to tolerate disagreement, the party was continually hijacked by its most histrionic members who demanded adherence to a radical agenda and punished dissent.
This extremism fueled fear and conformity, but it also generated apostates. From Covid school closures to addiction to “gender-affirming care,” millions of Democrats’ own constituents suffered the physical and psychological consequences of their party’s favored policies, which could not be challenged internally. As a critical mass of apostates formed, others, seeing where the winds were blowing, also renounced the party. Democrats thus lost a significant portion of competent and ethical individuals who could have been assets to the party.
It is no coincidence that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Trump himself, and others in the administration are former liberals or Democrats. The writing was on the wall for years that the party was bleeding key factions and losing moral high ground on topics like free speech, foreign wars, education, and civil liberties. Yet Democrats could not course correct.
We’re seeing a totally depleted, unhinged, and hollowed out Democratic Party post-2024. They hurled everything at Trump and still couldn’t beat him in 2024. They gambled the farm and lost it. For Republicans, only they can hurt themselves with intraparty fights and other distractions that could derail this budget reconciliation proposal that’s going through the motions on the Hill which, if passed, will provide, among other things, funding to secure the border, finish the wall, and make the Trump tax cuts permanent, which is a top domestic agenda item.
Democrats seem to be waiting for Trump and the GOP to trip-up. For now, it doesn’t look that way. If anything, the circus remains on their side of the tracks. When Napoleon defeated the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz, a masterpiece in warfare, the British knew they would have to wait until the emperor made an error, which came when French troops got entangled in a counterinsurgency in Spain.
The only issue here is that should the GOP overreach, the Democrats, again, need to have an agenda and a message that’s more appealing than President Trump’s neo-populism, and they don’t have it. No doubt not having a plan is frustrating some Democrats, but I also can see why the political cupboard is bare: they got everyone and everything, even the Justice Department, to launch a coordinated attack on Donald Trump, and he defeated them at every turn. There’s nothing left other than admitting defeat, recognizing that some of their policy positions are atrocious, and start genuine outreach to win back male voters, especially non-white working class men. None of that will happen since the Left is allergic to debate and scrutiny of their ideas.
So, yeah, GOP hiccups are coming, but the Democrats don’t have the political intelligence, messaging, or plan to outflank us. That’s not to say we should shrug off or take lightly any unforced legislative errors or impasses that might come our way.
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