What's with the Democrats, Part Eight Trillion

Taking Trump to task is often easy but, particularly after last night, doing it without looking at the alternative is neither honest nor smart. Indeed, it's all but impossible.

I’ve written several entries recently asking: What’s with Trump? There’s been plenty to be concerned about, from politically-shaded criminal justice decisions (e.g., to take a few, the blunderbuss pardoning of virtually everyone charged in the Jan 6 riot, violent or not; the appointment of a convicted drug felon as the “Pardon Czar”; and the forced resignations of well-regarded attorneys from DOJ in the Eric Adams corruption case — a case the administration never questioned on its merits) to his empty ultimatum to Hamas to release all hostages (an ultimatum followed by absolutely nothing)).

I want to take the opportunity presented by Trump’s speech last night to pose the question again, but this time with a broader focus: What’s with the Democrats?

Let me sum it up briefly: Trump did not so much win last night (although in my view he did) as the Democrats lost. Abe Greenwald from Commentary explains why:

Still wondering why there’s no organized “resistance” movement? The Democratic response to Donald Trump’s address before a joint session of Congress last night answered that question conclusively. The apparent trauma of a second Trump presidency has forced his enemies to seek the therapeutic comfort of adolescence.

The Squad and Squad-aligned Democrats who protested Trump in the chamber were like outcasts sitting off by themselves in the high-school cafeteria. A clique of misfits who have only one another to lean on, they dress alike and speak a private language.

I won’t get into Democratic Rep. Al Green, since his antics (which got him tossed out) are so far off the wall even for Democrats that using him as a Dem metric is no more fair than using Tucker Carlson as a Republican metric. Which is to say: It’s not entirely unfair, but the temptation is, for fair-minded people, best avoided.

The Democrats outside the gang of eccentrics were mostly like Goths, sitting somberly through applause lines and declining to stand for the night’s emotional highlights.

Glum, sulking, sour and bratty. Anyone still wondering why the electorate last November declined to give this group a majority? (Apart from the fact, which they did their utmost to hide, that their leader, Joe Biden, wasn’t even a fully functioning adult).

The most telling moment came at the very start. As Trump walked down the aisle to the rostrum, Rep. Melanie Stansbury held a sign behind his head reading “This is not normal.” To the contrary, says Mr. Greenwald:

Donald Trump was the most normal thing about the night—both in his comportment and in the substance of his speech.

Viewing Donald Trump as the embodiment of normalcy is, shall we say, enough to get one’s attention, but Greenwald makes a pretty good case.

What could be more normal than a legitimately elected president, who also won the popular vote, touting the highlights of a “common-sense revolution” against woke abnormality? Trump called for ending tax-funded transgender surgery for minors. He was unapologetic in saying that “there are only two genders: male and female.” He said, “I also signed an executive order to ban men from playing in women’s sports” declining to pay the standard woke language tax of adding “biological” before the word “men.”

Trump also championed his increased border-security measures, railed against outrageous federal waste, called for more drilling to bring down fuel prices, announced a tough new crime bill, and boasted about a rise in military recruitment since he took office.

Trump was too long-winded, too belligerent and too partisan for my tastes. Think how much more effective the speech could have been if Trump had more or less sincerely urged the Democrats to understand that the electorate had voted for change and urged them to make at least an effort to work with him to achieve it. Yet, on the other hand, Trump’s opposition is so set in stone and has embraced so much startling nonsense that even a more restrained speaker would have trouble resisting the temptation.

There is no resistance precisely because Trump is working to reestablish and institutionalize the basic presumptions and concepts that undergirded standard American reality up till a few years ago. There are two sexes, crime must be punished, borders must be secure, the military should be strong, we must access our bountiful natural resources, and God has blessed our country. You might call this “the adult world.”

Which explains why the Democrats are now cast in the role of adolescents…They rebel against the adult world by acting out in antisocial fits, withdrawing, embracing exotic identities, neglecting their responsibilities, and so on. In other words, while adolescents rarely get their way, they usually end up harming themselves. They sure did last night.

The NYT, of all things, has an article today that on the whole reinforces that conclusion. The subtitle of the piece is, “For many reluctant Trump voters, there was a mixture of confidence, anxiety, hope and frustration — along with some anger directed at congressional Democrats.”

“Reluctant Trump voters” are, of course, the ones who made the difference last November and the ones the Democrats need to win back lest they remain the out party. Those voters’ assessment of last night cannot come as good news to the DNC.

“In my opinion, as a Democrat, that was a Republican Party win,” said Darlene Alfieri, a longtime registered Democrat who had taken a chance on Mr. Trump in 2024.

She did not come to this conclusion primarily because of the president’s speech. It might have been a bit more professional than some of his past speeches, she felt, but it was still light on the specifics she craved.

“He’s still talking that we’re going to be great, that things are going to get better, but I’m not seeing them get better in my day-to-day life,” she said. “Talk is cheap.”

No, she believed it was a good night for Mr. Trump primarily because she thought it was a terrible night for the Democrats, some of whom heckled the president at the beginning and then mostly refused to stand and clap throughout, even for Devarjaye Daniel, the boy with cancer that the president recognized in the crowd.

“I’m ashamed of the Democratic Party,” she said. “Deliberately being argumentative and refusing to acknowledge good when it’s good is ridiculous.”

I’m of two minds on the now-familiar tactic of inviting selected individuals to sit in the gallery and be pointed out to personify one item or another in the President’s agenda. On the one hand, it sentimentalizes the policy debate, which always, when discussed honestly, presents difficult choices among alternatives, each with its own costs and benefits. That unavoidable (if we’re to be honest) nuance and balance tends to get drowned out. On the other hand, it puts a human face on what we’re dealing with, and hence uniquely illustrates the stakes in real life.

One way or the other, it’s now a standard part of speeches like last night’s, and has been since Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were so masterful at using it. Last night, so was Donald Trump. The Democrats’ uniformly sullen and nasty response — this from the relentlessly self-advertised “party of compassion” — was, in my view, the biggest take-away from the speech, and one that will hang around the Democrats’ necks for quite a while.