VDH: The Poverty of the Criticism of Trump’s Agenda.
Two strange phenomena now characterize the political landscape.
One, opposition to the Trump administration’s initiatives has reached a near-unprecedented fever pitch.
The frenzy is manifested in strange ways. At the bottom end, there is an epidemic of street terrorism, including the keying of Teslas, bullying their owners, firebombing dealerships, or vandalizing charging stations.
All that is mostly the logical but dirty reification of those in the media and the Democrats who brand Elon Musk as a foreign-born counterfeit citizen and a disloyal un-American foreigner, thus deserving to be “taken down,” in the words of Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Or is he to be ostracized as an “ass-h*le” in the invective of Sen. Mark Kelly and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz? The latter cheered a downturn in Tesla stock prices, contrary to the interests of his own state’s public portfolio.
Sometimes, the impotent Democrat Congress issues kickboxing/ninja videos of its feistier female representatives. At other moments, senators race to the bottom, echoing each other’s pottymouth expressions of “sh*t.”
Rep. Al Green could neither disrupt nor end Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress by shaking his cane and screaming epithets. Nor, as he damned Trump on the floor of the Senate for 25 hours in a filibuster to nowhere, could Sen. Cory Booker offer a single word that might offer his supposedly better way to address crushing debt and deficits.
Two, there is a second common denominator to all this frenzy and fury: there is so far no alternate agenda on trade deficits, budget deficits, and debt.
That is, no one on the left—or, for that matter, the libertarian right or the now inert Republican establishment—can outline an alternate pathway to Trump’s remedies for America’s dire problems. Just as the left used to worship Tesla’s breakthrough EV cars and now tries to destroy them, so too it once lectured the country on the merits of tariff-enforced symmetrical trade—until Donald Trump made that his signature issue.
So in lieu of serious counter-proposals, we get from the left vulgarity, the smash-mouth of Rep. Crockett, and street terror against fellow Americans. All this inanity is the natural bookend to the prior four years of lawfare, the efforts to remove Trump from state ballots, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and two assassination attempts.
Meanwhile, regarding illegal immigration, the left can’t find a coordinated message. In February, Michael Moore apparently believed the illegal aliens Trump was attempting to stop at the border was a starship full of Vulcans: Michael Moore says deported migrants could have cured cancer, stopped ‘asteroid that’s gonna hit us in 2032.’
More recently, Jasmine Crockett, attempting to be the next AOC, is partying like it’s 1859: Jasmine Crockett on Immigration: ‘We Done Picking Cotton.’
“…I had to go around the country and educate people about what immigrants do for this country or the fact that we are a country of immigrants,” Crockett began before saying, “The fact is ain’t none of y’all trying to go and farm right now. Okay, so I’m lying? Raise your hands… You’re not. You’re not. We done picking cotton. We are. You can’t pay us enough to find a plantation.”
In case you do not speak love child of Al Sharpton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC cosplay, what I believe the congresswoman is trying to say is that we need to keep illegal immigrants in this country so that we have someone to participate in their idea of Slavery 2.0.
Well, first of all, I’m pretty sure the people we’re deporting aren’t the ones “picking cotton.” They’re the ones who are raping, murdering, stealing, torturing, trafficking, kidnapping, and participating in organized crime. I don’t know too many gang members whose day jobs involve farm work.
Second of all, Democrats might want to rein this kind of talk in because it’s not a good look. It’s not the first time someone on the left has said the quiet part out loud. As a matter of fact, back in February, I called the New York Times out for doing exactly that when it published a lengthy article about how deporting illegal immigrants was bad for the Hamptons because there’d be no one to mow the lawns or fill up the soap dispensers.
Yesterday in his Commentary newsletter, Abe Greenwald wrote about the weekend’s anti-Trump protests:
More to the point, what were they protesting? The New York Times reports: “They came out in defense of national parks and small businesses, public education and health care for veterans, abortion rights and fair elections. They marched against tariffs and oligarchs, dark money and fascism, the deportation of legal immigrants and the Department of Government Efficiency.” An unfocused hodgepodge.
There are the broadly worded causes such as “public education,” “health care for veterans,” “fair elections,” and opposition to “fascism” that everyone—including Donald Trump—supports. On “abortion rights,” they have most of the country behind them, but Trump and JD Vance already neutralized the issue sufficiently to win the 2024 election and the popular vote.
As for much of the demonstrators’ remaining laundry list, these are issues on which Trump is backed by most Americans—and the protesters are outliers. There will be no mass movement to oppose the deportation of violent or pro-terrorist illegals. Americans find Elon Musk irritating, but they’re in favor of cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. And Musk (the emblematic “oligarch”) will likely be gone from the scene before long.
If a significant number of demonstrators really were protesting the tariffs, it wasn’t clear from the images in the media. Go look at the Times story I’m quoting. It contains multiple photographs of the protesters marching with too many placards to count. You’ll see slogans about trans rights, protecting the forest, school libraries, Musk, disinformation, and all the rest. But I dare you to identify one about tariffs—the only issue that really could gain traction and produce a potent anti-Trump backlash.
My favorite sign, spotted at the New York City march, read “So Awful, Even Introverts Are Here.” It captures the aimless, solipsistic tone of the whole affair. A bunch of self-consumed, self-diagnosed homebodies felt just enough pressure to leave their apartments on a Saturday and protest Trump by advertising their social frailty.
And the sign is indicative of something else. The resistance has lost its oomph in part because the identity politics that fueled it in 2016 is now in retreat. It was a lot easier to get liberals and leftists out on the streets when the point was to signal the importance of their group identity. But that whole paradigm is fading, and progressives don’t yet know what to replace it with. For decades, the left has been railing against free trade, so it won’t be easy for them to take on Trump’s trade wars. I applaud the introverts for making a brave last stand for an overlooked and alienated identity group.
With the left lacking a unifying message, it’s not surprising that the core base has gone feral: Or as John Hinderaker of Power Line summarizes: Let’s Kill the Republicans. But then, that’s the been the Democrats’ message since 1865.
UPDATE: Great moments in cosplay:
