Donald Trump was able to emerge victorious last November despite concerted “lawfare” efforts by his Democrat political enemies, with the help of politically motivated prosecutors and judges, to block his candidacy and label him as a convicted felon in four different state and local jurisdictions. But since taking office, Trump has been subjected to a series of lawfare attacks by carefully selected pro-Democrat federal district court judges across the country. In response to lawsuits by liberal attorneys, these judges have been issuing emergency injunctions seeking to block the implementation of more than a dozen of Trump’s lawful executive orders issued under his clear constitutional authority as the president of the United States.
As the New York Times put it, these liberal lawsuits are the Democrats’ “last bulwark against Trump.” They have been filed as part of a liberal strategy “to stop the White House in its tracks” by canceling the practical consequences of Trump’s clear victory in the November election.
As Politico has noted approvingly, “the courts have provided the only real opposition to Trump 2.0 so far,” and more such injunctions against Trump’s policies are on the way.
According to Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, federal district judges across the country have issued more than 14 nationwide injunctions against Trump’s actions in February alone, with 160 more such lawsuits already working their way through the federal judiciary system.
For example, Judge Theodore Chuang of the federal district court in Maryland, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, tried to force the State Department to waste $2 billion of taxpayer money by funding politically “woke” and DEI-motivated USAID projects in several foreign countries.
Judge Ana Reyes, another member of the liberal Washington, D.C., district court who was appointed by President Joe Biden, sought to block a Trump executive order, issued as this country’s commander in chief, mandating conventional gender identification admission standards for members of the U.S. armed forces. The list goes on.
But the most controversial injunction was issued by James Boasberg, the chief judge of the Washington, D.C., District Court, another Obama appointee. Boasberg’s order was to prevent Trump’s border officials from deporting 251 violent members of the notorious Venezuela gang known as Tren de Aragua, who entered this country illegally, to a notorious jail in El Salvador.
JUDGES ENCROACHING ON TRUMP’S PRESIDENTIAL AUTHORITY
In arguing against the order, Attorney General Bondi declared that “one unelected federal judge [is] trying to control [U.S.] foreign policy,” which under the Constitution is supposed to be controlled by the president. Bondi also declared that “there are 251 reasons why Americans are safer now because those people are out of this country.”
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller asked facetiously during an interview on CNN, how Judge Boasberg knew, when he ordered the planes carrying the gang members which had already taken off to take them to El Salvador, that they had enough fuel left in their tanks to turn around in flight and return to the United States.
Miller also said that “these same [liberal] district court judges didn’t do a thing to stop Joe Biden from flooding this nation with millions of illegal aliens. [They] didn’t issue any injunctions to save the lives of Jocelyn Nungaray or Laken Riley [who were murdered by illegal aliens]… How are you going to expel [the other] illegal alien invaders from our country who are. . . murdering little girls, if every deportation has to be adjudicated by a district court judge?”
When White House lawyers later explained to Judge Boasberg that his verbal order to turn the planes around wasn’t legally enforceable because they were no longer in American airspace, the judge was not satisfied. He ordered further hearings on the matter, implying that he might call for punitive measures against the Trump White House for disobeying his instructions.
At a White House press conference last week, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, noted that “67% of all of the injunctions in this century [against a sitting president] have come against … President Donald Trump … and 92% of those have been from Democrat-appointed judges.
“This is a clear concerted effort by leftists who don’t like this president,” Leavitt observed, “and who are trying to oppose or slow down his agenda.”
Leavitt then read off a list of three other dangerous criminal aliens captured in recent days by U.S. Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents around the country, who should be next on Trump’s deportation list, but only if the activist judges stop issuing injunctions designed to keep these illegal alien killers preying on U.S. citizens in this country.
SUPREME COURT EXPECTED TO UPHOLD TRUMP’S ORDERS IN THE END
According to many respected legal commentators, eventually, most of the injunctions issued by liberal judges against Trump’s actions are expected to be overturned either during the appeal process or at the Supreme Court level. But that outcome is not certain, in light of the 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court three weeks ago, including unexpected support from Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It upheld a lower court order for the government to pay out $2 billion to previously approved USAID projects that Trump had ordered to be canceled on Elon Musk’s recommendation.
Scott McKay, who is a senior editor for the American Spectator, joined with the Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson in complaining bitterly about Chief Justice Roberts’ criticism of President Trump for publicly calling for the congressional impeachment of Judge Boasberg. They also criticized Justice Barrett for joining with Roberts in the earlier case by upholding the funding for the USAID projects that Trump had ordered to be canceled.
The harsh dialogue between Trump and Chief Justice Roberts began with a Truth Social post by President Trump calling Judge Boasberg an unelected member of the federal judiciary who deserved impeachment for trying to usurp the president’s power and obligation to combat illegal immigration and then by trying to halt the deportation of the 251 violent Venezuelan criminals after it was already well in progress.
Trump’s post also alluded to “crooked” judges who have colluded in unprecedented lawfare attacks with the blue states, left-wing NGOs, and powerful members of the administrative deep state that have filed more than 100 lawsuits aimed at paralyzing Trump’s presidential policies.
Roberts wrote in response that, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
But the problem with that argument is that judicial impeachment by the House and Senate is a well-established remedy for rogue judicial behavior which is explicitly authorized by Article III of the constitution which states that federal judges shall sit only “during good Behaviour,” and the use of judicial impeachment goes back to the presidency of Thomas Jefferson in the early 1800s.
According to McKay, in the USAID case, “the correct [Supreme Court] ruling would have been a sharp rebuke of the district court on jurisdictional grounds and an unmistakable signal that these restraining orders are all null and void, and it’s time for the courts to stop granting them. It was an act of cowardice and dereliction by the constitutional court not to provide a clear statement of constitutional law when given an opportunity.”
JUDGE CALLS FOR THE RETURN OF DEPORTED VENEZUELAN GANG MEMBERS
While several other judicial orders thwarting Trump’s executive orders have been issued since then, the worst, in McKay’s opinion, is Judge Boasberg’s order blocking the deportation of the violent Venezuelan gang members who have “wrought terror all over America since its members were allowed to infiltrate the country, run guns and drugs, and inflict general mayhem in our cities,” McKay also noted that Tren de Aragua (TDA) “has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization. As such, removing members of that gang illegally in the United States is a matter of presidential prerogative.”
While McKay repeats unproven allegations that some of Chief Justice Roberts’ prior rulings may have somehow been compromised, he says that he prefers to take an “optimistic view. . . that when Roberts says the appellate process is the best vehicle to deal with abuses like Boasberg’s and the other usurpations of presidential power by district judges with a partisan axe to grind, he means that the Supreme Court will shortly dispose of this phenomenon by clarifying that a federal district judge has no power to stop the president of the United States from the lawful exercise of his core Article II powers and that none of these orders are binding against Trump.”
While McKay says that he still expects the Supreme Court to uphold President Trump’s orders against a ruling by “a pipsqueak political activist judge at the district court level,” he still believes that Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Barrett could have avoided “the coming showdown” in the Supreme Court by having issued the proper ruling three weeks ago in the USAID case, thereby clarifying the limits set by the Constitution on judicial challenges to a president’s executive authority.
However, Josh Blackman, an associate professor of constitutional law at the South Texas College of Law, questions why Chief Justice Roberts failed to speak out during the Biden presidency when prominent Democrats called for the impeachment of conservative Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas allegedly based upon unproven accusations of ethical lapses, but much more likely due to their conservative legal opinions and their votes on politically controversial cases before the high court. As a result, Blackman concludes, Chief Justice Roberts has started “hitting the panic button [over calls for impeaching federal judges] “a bit too late.”
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS FAILED HIS OWN DEFINITION OF A JUDGE’S JOB
Conservative columnist Josh Hammer, writing on the RealClearPolitics website, cites a statement by Chief Justice Roberts during his 2005 Senate confirmation hearing in which he defined the proper role of a Supreme Court justice. “Judges are like umpires [at a ball game]. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. [But] nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.”
But unfortunately, Hammer observes, Chief Justice Roberts has failed to live up to that definition on several occasions during his Supreme Court tenure by going far beyond the baseball umpire’s limited role of “calling balls and strikes.” He has gone to great lengths to distort the clear meaning of a law or the Constitution in order to engineer a much more politically desirable outcome.
The prime example was Roberts’ notoriously illogical deciding opinion in the landmark 2012 case in which he rescued the Obamacare law from being declared unconstitutional by redefining a fine that Obamacare imposed on those who refused to buy a health insurance policy as a “tax,” thereby making the Obamacare law constitutionally acceptable, to the great consternation of Obamacare’s Republican opponents.
Roberts’ primary motivation is his desire to shield the reputation of the Supreme Court from attacks based upon accusations that its decisions are influenced by partisan political favoritism. Back in 2012, he feared that any Supreme Court ruling overturning Obamacare, regardless of its legal justification, would ignite a liberal political firestorm that would destroy the court’s public image and its reputation for integrity and political independence.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS’ FAILED EFFORT TO SAVE THE ROE V. WADE DECISION
Ten years later, after conservative Supreme Court justices achieved a stable 6-3 majority when Amy Coney Barrett took over Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat, Justice Roberts tried to do it again by urging his fellow conservatives on the bench to accept a benign compromise in the case known as Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which gave the conservatives an opportunity to challenge the highly controversial 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But the other conservative justices stood their ground, and did overturn the Roe decision, with all but Roberts joining the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito.
Although there has been a lot of complaining since then from Democrats about that decision, the reputation of the Supreme Court has survived the controversy and it has largely retained its authority, despite repeated efforts by liberal groups to unfairly demonize some of the conservative justices.
But with the lower court judicial injunctions against Trump’s policies now working their way through the appeal process to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts will have an opportunity to redeem his record by deciding the TDA terrorist deportation case, in particular, in Trump’s favor. The Constitution clearly orders the Supreme Court to accord the president, as head of the executive branch, “substantial deference” on immigration policies, particularly those that “implicate matters of national security.” Roberts must expedite the Supreme Court’s review of the injunction issued by district court Judge Boasberg and overturn his ruling, which was clearly based less upon the law and more upon the effect of Trump Derangement Syndrome on a liberal insurrection-minded judge.
As explained by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the liberal district court judges issuing these universal injunctions and orders managing federal government operations have unilaterally taken upon themselves “the mantle of Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security and Commander-in-Chief,” while dictating “the foreign policy, economic, staffing and national security policies of the [Trump] Administration.”
From that point of view, it is the overreach of liberal members of the federal judiciary who are responsible for threatening to plunge this country into a constitutional crisis, rather than the lawful actions of the Trump administration. Because these judges have been issuing universal injunctions at an unprecedented speed, scale, and potency, it is Trump who has been forced to save American democracy by reasserting his control as president over the executive branch of the federal government, as explicitly specified by the Constitution. The Trump administration has now called upon the Supreme Court to “declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”
TRUMP IS THE TARGET OF AN ATTEMPTED JUDICIAL COUP D’ETAT
On one level, according to conservative columnist Roger Kimball, this amounted to a judicial coup d’état, an attempted takeover of the constitutional powers and duties of the Executive Branch by the unelected Judicial Branch of the federal government.
But on another, deeper level, we are watching an attempt by the federal judiciary to prevent a duly elected American president from reclaiming control of the Executive Branch from the “deep state” permanent federal bureaucracy. According to John Daniel Davidson, writing in the Federalist, the deep state has “functioned as an unelected, unaccountable and increasingly powerful fourth branch” of the federal government since the 1930s, when it was created by FDR’s New Deal in response to the Great Depression. It “has always been controlled by Democrats and leftist ideologues” who have increasingly controlled the functions of the federal government, far more effectively than the elected executive and legislative branches.”
As a result, Davidson adds, “President Trump, with a strong mandate from the American electorate, has resolved to wrest control of the government from the deep state. The deep state, in turn, has been forced to fall back on its last line of defense: the courts.”
These historical and political facts also reveal that “the idea of a neutral, nonpartisan class of experts and bureaucrats [to run the federal government] was always a fiction, a thinly veiled scheme for implementing the Democrats’ agenda and neutralizing the effect of elections on actual governance. The voters could elect whomever they liked, but it would not much change what the [controlling deep state] bureaucracy did.” According to Davidson, “this scheme has been the greatest scandal of modern American government, and the crisis unfolding now is a direct result of Trump’s efforts to dismantle it,” in an effort to reclaim his rightful powers over the Executive Branch as president.
REVEALING THE HIDDEN REALITY OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE DEEP STATE
“It wasn’t until Trump came along and attempted to reassert political governance that the reality of administrative rule became so obvious. . . The good news is that by attacking the deep state, Trump has forced it to fight back and expose its true nature. . . Trump has also exposed the collusion and corruption of the judiciary in upholding the authority of the deep state. . . [by] resorting to increasingly outlandish injunctions and restraining orders to maintain the deep state’s hold on power.”
Davidson concludes that “the plain reality is that this fight [between Trump and the radical partisan judges of the] federal courts is really a fight against the entire progressive scheme of administrative rule. . . that Trump has to win” to restore American democracy.
In the end, it now appears only Chief Justice Roberts has the moral authority to end the current Trump hatred-driven liberal judicial insurrection by declaring that unelected lower federal court judges do not have the authority to impose their legal will upon the entire country and the president by issuing universal injunctions. But if Roberts refuses to act, Congress will be forced to step in to bring order to the lower federal court system they created through their legislation, by using the impeachment remedy that Trump has suggested to discipline Judge Boasberg for his attempted judicial power grab.
DESPONDENT DEMOCRATS TURN TO SANDERS AND AOC FOR INSPIRATION
Meanwhile, despondent Democrats across the country, depressed by the initial success of President Trump in asserting his control over the federal government and imposing his “America First-MAGA policies and goals” upon it are turning in large numbers to its most extreme liberal leaders, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) for a shot of inspiration and hope for a more “woke” and progressive American future. Their spontaneous rallies in blue cities across the country last week attracted huge crowds, including 15,000 supporters in Tempe, Arizona, and a record 34,000 people in Denver, Colorado, eager to express their anger at the policies being promoted by Trump and Elon Musk. They are showing pent-up frustrations with the incompetence and the out-of-touch policies being promoted by their mainstream Democrat party leaders.
As Democrats on Capitol Hill in Washington struggle to find a strategy to combat Trump’s fast-moving agenda, Sanders is stepping into the void and pitching his familiar socialist policy prescriptions for how their party can start winning again. At the rally in a hockey arena in Tempe, Sanders teamed up with his progressive protégé, AOC. Sanders replayed the winning vintage pitches from his political playbook, such as surveying the crowd for examples of people living paycheck to paycheck and calling for free college and universal healthcare. Sanders and AOC also attacked a new political target in addition to Trump in the person of Elon Musk and his controversial, radical cost-cutting DOGE activities.
In an angry tone of voice, Sanders pleased the crowd by telling the absent Trump, “I’m not going to allow you and your friend Mr. Musk and the other billionaires to wreak havoc on the working families of this country!”
In her remarks to the same audience in Tempe, AOC said Republicans are stealing Americans’ healthcare, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and “bailouts for their crypto friends.” But she also told his audience not to give in to despair and to give up, which prompted one member of the audience to shout: “We won’t do that.” And another one to yell: “We’re here.”
But while Sanders and AOC had no trouble galvanizing their liberal audiences with their progressive agenda, they are also aware that their liberal policies are being blamed by many Democrats for their loss of last November’s election.
ANGER AT SCHUMER FOR SUPPORTING A REPUBLICAN SPENDING MEASURE
The success of the Sanders-AOC “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” in turning out large numbers of concerned Democrat supporters contrasted sharply with the withering criticism that infuriated Democrats have been hurling at their Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and several of his Democrat colleagues in the Senate they hold responsible for the latest Democrat embarrassment, the passage of a continuing resolution preventing a government shutdown that Democrats had hoped to blame on the Trump administration.
But when Sanders was asked during a CNN interview whether he would support his partner, AOC, in challenging Schumer for his Senate seat in 2028, Sanders quickly ended the interview without answering the question.
In town halls and other political events across the country last week, both centrist and progressive Democrats alike have been focusing on how the mass firings of federal workers by Musk and his DOGE associates, combined with the rest of Trump’s tax and regulation cutting agenda, could make the lives of ordinary Americans’ worse by curtailing vital government services — from Medicaid and Social Security to the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Education Department, while using the GOP spending cuts to pay for tax relief for wealthy people who don’t need it.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sanders admitted that the Democrat Party had lost its way. It is strong on women’s rights, and civil rights, Sanders said. “But in terms of fighting for the working class of this country, Democrats have been virtually nonexistent. They haven’t been there.”
While Sanders has always been able to draw large crowds of voters unhappy with the political status quo, his bids for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020 were frustrated by party leaders who felt that his openly socialist economic policy agenda was too radical to win a general election. But in the wake of last November’s embarrassing loss, widely blamed on the “woke” Democrat social agenda, Sanders’ focus on economic issues has won greater popularity with the now struggling party leadership.
SANDERS AND AOC FIGHTING TO MAINTAIN DEMOCRAT PARTY LEADERSHIP
It has also prompted New York Post columnist David Marcus to write in an analysis on the Fox News website that what Sanders and AOC are really fighting against is not Donald Trump or Elon Musk, but rather to maintain ideological control of a Democratic Party which has become one of the most unpopular major political parties in American history. They want to fight back against more moderate Democrats, such as Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and Congressman Ritchie Torres who represents a congressional district near AOC’s in New York City, who are urging the party to adopt a much more centrist political image to win back the support of its lost working class voter base.
According to Marcus, they now have gained the upper hand inside the party in the wake of November’s bitter electoral defeat, and they know it, which is why they are biding their time, building their campaign war chests, and plotting a new direction for the future of their party.
“I’m noticing,” a smiling Sanders said to a Wall Street Journal reporter, about other Democrats who are now adopting his socialist economic message. “My colleagues are not dumb people. They are, by and large, very, very smart. And you’ve got to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to analyze the solution [to the Democrats’ problems],” he said.
SCHUMER DEFIANTLY REFUSING TO ADMIT HIS VOTE WAS WRONG
Meanwhile, Senator Schumer has reacted with defiance to calls from many of his fellow Democrats to step down from his leadership position and defended his decision to support the continuing resolution crafted and passed by the House Republican majority even though he knew, he told NBC interviewer Kristen Welker, that there “would be a lot of controversy” when he cast his vote to prevent a government shutdown. While he admitted knowing that the GOP funding bill was “certainly bad,” a government shutdown “would be 15 or 20 times worse, [because] under a shutdown, the executive branch has sole power to determine what is ‘essential.’ And they can determine it without any court supervision. The courts have ruled it’s solely up to the executive what to shut down.”
Schumer said that Trump and Musk could shutter any agency or service they want during a government shutdown, simply by declaring it to be “non-essential.” That includes food stamps, mass transit, Medicaid, Social Security, and the Veteran’s Administration.
Because of that, Schumer remains convinced that he made the right choice by keeping the federal government funded, despite the heavy criticism he is now receiving for it from the party’s voter base. “Sometimes when you’re a leader, you have to do things to avoid a real danger that might come down the curve. And I did it out of pure conviction as to what a leader should do and what the right thing for America and my party was. [But other] people disagree,” Schumer conceded.
One of those people who disagreed with Schumer was former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who complained that Schumer broke the Democrat filibuster without getting anything from the Republicans in return. But Schumer responded by insisting that, “What we got, at the end of the day, is avoiding the horror of a shutdown,” he said.
Whether Schumer’s vocal critics in the party will ultimately come around and forgive him for it now seems to be unlikely, but it still remains to be seen.
DEMOCRATS WARNED TO DISBELIEVE POLLS SHOWING TRUMP SUPPORT FADING
Meanwhile, veteran Democrat demographer Ruy Teixeira called recent polls showing President Trump’s approval rating turning negative, largely over fears that he is mishandling the all-important issue of the economy due to his insistence on imposing tariffs, which will raise prices on imported goods, to be misleading. They “raise the hope in Democratic hearts that . . . a combination of stout-hearted opposition and waiting around for the sky to fall on Trump will suffice; [will relieve them of the] need to do anything drastic like actually changing toxic party positions and doing serious [work to repair] the party brand.”
Teixeira believes instead that the political “hole the Democrats are in is [too] deep [and the party’s] problems are just too severe” to justify such optimism. Instead, he cites the recent CNN poll showing that only 29% of Democrats view their party favorably, a 10-point loss since the November election and the lowest rating since the poll’s inception in 1992. In addition, the same poll showed that among the key demographic of working-class non-college-educated voters who were primarily responsible for Trump’s decisive victory, his favorability rating is still 20 points higher than that of the Democrats.
An NBC poll came to roughly the same conclusion as CNN’s, and among independent voters, the Democrats’ favorability rating was underwater by an astounding 45 points (11% positive vs. 56% negative). Thus, Teixeira concludes that even though “these voters may not love Donald Trump [as much anymore], they really don’t like the Democrats.”
Democrats who take an optimistic view of current polling have ignored the NBC News poll showing Trump with the highest job approval ratings of his political career. There is also the fact that more voters now believe that the U.S. is heading in the right direction than at any time during the past 20 years, and that most of them approve of the general idea behind Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and his initial success in identifying unnecessary government jobs, wasteful spending and inefficiency.
This is despite some mistakes that Musk made and quickly corrected, and the predictable Democrat uproar on behalf of the deep state bureaucrats and pet programs that have been exposed and eliminated by Trump’s executive orders. Ignoring the criticism in the mainstream media centering on Musk and the ridiculous rulings by low-level liberal federal judges trying to usurp Trump’s presidential authority, as clearly spelled out in the Constitution, almost all Republicans and conservatives remain unified and jubilant over the initial performance of Trump and his administration in rapidly fulfilling his campaign promises, and they remain in lockstep supporting the expansive agenda that he and congressional Republicans are pursuing in Washington.
NOBODY KNOWS WHAT DEMOCRATS STAND FOR ANYMORE
Even more discouraging for Democrats, a Blueprint Research poll found that two-thirds of all voters agreed with the following statement: “No one has any idea what the Democratic Party stands for anymore, other than opposing Donald Trump. Democrats have no message, no plan of their own, and no one knows what they would do if they got back into power. If Democrats ever want to win elections again, people need a clear message from them about what they stand for and what they’ll do.”
Similarly, while a Navigator Research poll of voters in the most competitive Congressional districts across the country did think that Democrat candidates do “fight for what they believe,” they also thought that Democrats “don’t respect work, don’t share my values, don’t look out for working people, don’t value work, don’t care about people like me, don’t have the right priorities” and, by a massive 47 points, “are unable to get things done.” In other words, according to Teixeira, even though more voters seem to be having doubts about Trump, they do not see the Democrats as offering “an attractive alternative.”
That conclusion is also confirmed by current voter registration trends. In the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina more voters are registering as Republicans than as Democrats. Across the entire country, Democrats are out-registering Republicans in only four states, California, Colorado, Delaware, and New York, while Republicans are gaining voters in a total of 22 states nationwide.
In addition, dissatisfied residents in deep blue states like New York and California are “voting with their feet” by moving primarily to popular red states like Florida and Texas. According to Teixeira, the trend is very clear: “[Voters] don’t want to live where Democrats are in charge.”
VOTERS LEAVING DEMOCRAT-RULED BLUE STATES
According to Teixeira’s columnist colleague at the Liberal Patriot, Nate Moore, “between 2020 and 2024, California, New York, and Illinois each lost more than 100,000 thousand residents. Florida and Texas, meanwhile, both gained around 2 million residents.” As a result, in the next congressional reapportionment following the 2030 census, the red states are expected to gain more seats in Congress at the expense of the blue states, and the existing GOP advantage in the Electoral College will increase by a similar amount.
More specifically, according to the American Redistricting Project, California will lose 3 seats in Congress, New York will lose 2, and the Democrat-voting states of Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Illinois are each likely to lose one of their congressional seats, while the red states of Texas and Florida will each gain 4 seats and Idaho and Utah will also pick up another member of Congress. This expected transfer of 10 congressional seats from red states to blue is double the size of the GOP’s current very thin majority in the House.
In addition, in terms of political representation, Democrat voters are poorly distributed. They are found in huge concentrations in a handful of blue states such as New York, California, Illinois, and Massachusetts. But no matter how large the Democrat majorities in those states become, they will still result in the same number of seats in the House and Senate, and votes in the Electoral College, which determine which party will control Congress and the White House, while ceding most of the states in the rest of the country to much smaller Republican majorities.
In light of these statistics, it is clear that the real problem facing Democrats today is that they are widely disliked by most voters across most of the country, and that will not be easily corrected by such simple measures as deposing Chuck Schumer as the Democrat leader in the Senate.
DEMOCRATS LOSING WORKING CLASS, HISPANIC, AND YOUNGER VOTERS
In addition, the closer you look at the voting patterns in key demographic groups, the worse it appears for Democrats. The most extreme example of this trend is the mass defection of former Democrat voters in the Hispanic community, which is now the largest racial minority group in the country. In the 2024 election, the Democrat majority among Hispanic voters fell by 24 percentage points compared to the 2020 election, and 46 points compared to 2016.
While Kamala Harris made gains nationwide among college-educated voters compared to Biden’s showing in 2020, they were overshadowed by Trump’s gains among voters under the age of 30, regardless of race or gender. The Democrats were also at a major disadvantage to the Republicans concerning the most popular issues in the 2024 election. The economy and inflation, border security, and concerns about law and order were far more important to most voters than the issues of climate change, health care, and support for the Roe v. Wade decision, where Democrats had the advantage.
Teixeira and several other prominent Democrat political strategists suggest that what Democrats need to become politically competitive again on a nationwide scale is a total make-over of their public image, often referred to as their political “brand,” to convince American voters that they are “normal” once again, and that they have abandoned the extreme and impractical “woke” social and cultural goals which dominated Biden administration’s policies across the board.
DEMOCRATS NEED ANOTHER BILL CLINTON AND AN ISSUE MAKEOVER
In other words, Democrats today need the same kind of transformation that Bill Clinton and his moderate Democrat Leadership Council achieved by rejecting the party’s liberal left positions, which voters of that era had been rejecting, to the mainstream political center, enabling Clinton to win the 1992 presidential election.
Similarly, Teixeira argues that to become acceptable once again to most voters, Democrats need to revise their current positions on the issues of illegal immigration, gender identity, affirmative action, criminal justice, racial preferences, and climate change which, taken together, led to their rejection by the voters in the November election. But before they can do that, Teixeira says Democrats must first abandon the false pretense that “the deep hole they’re in is just a shallow indentation and vanquishing Trump is right around the corner.”
Mark Penn, who was the chief strategist and pollster for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign for the Democrat presidential nomination before he became a defender of Donald Trump, makes a similar argument, noting that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory “pushed Democrats further to the left on cultural and economic issues [and made] the chief goal of the party to lay down resistance to Trump and everything he stood for.”
David Catron, the political editor of the American Spectator, concurs, writing, “for all intents and purposes, the Democratic Party exists [today] for no other reason than to oppose President Trump, the GOP, and the 77.4 million Americans who voted for them last November.”
BIDEN’S FATAL GRAND BARGAIN WITH THE DEMOCRAT LEFT
Penn also notes that after Joe Biden struck his “grand bargain with the [Democrat] left so he could go into the [2020] election with a united Democratic Party. . . he seemed to abandon virtually every position he ever took in his over 50 years as a moderate senator. . .
“By the time he departed the Oval Office, the left and a set of extreme policies had remade the Democratic Party from a working-class and middle-class party to a coalition of elites and Black voters. Those making over $100,000 a year and college-educated voters backed Vice President Kamala. . . But those making between $30,000 and $100,000 a year now voted for Trump.”
Penn also concluded in a Fox News interview this week that for the last two years of the Obama presidency and all four years of Biden’s presidency, the extreme left was far too influential in setting the policies of the Democrat party.
When 2024 voters looked back, Penn writes, they saw Joe Biden as “a weak leader who let the left run his administration and drive massive spending that resulted in crushing inflation and massive deficits, deliberately left the border open that could easily have been closed, and took the country in uncharted cultural directions.
“The result is a Democratic Party in ruins which will have to wait for the next Bill Clinton to come along and reset it again and return it to its common sense, middle-class roots.”
DEMOCRATS TO HOLD THE FIRST TRULY OPEN PRIMARY IN 20 YEARS
Meanwhile, the shadow primary for the Democrat 2028 presidential nomination is already underway, and for the first time since the 2004 election cycle, there is no apparent leader among more than a dozen governors, senators, members of Congress, and celebrities being mentioned as possibilities. Furthermore, this will probably be the first truly open Democrat primary whose outcome was not fixed in advance by party insiders since 2008.
According to New York Magazine writer Ross Barkan, the current “short list” of Democrat presidential wannabes includes (in no order of preference): Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, Maryland governor Wes Moore, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, and California governor Gavin Newsom. Senator Christopher Murphy of Connecticut, Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna, billionaire investor Mark Cuban, former Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, former Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel, and last, and probably least, both Kamala Harris and her disappointing running mate, Tim Walz.
It is also interesting to note that in the latest polling of Democrats about their preferred leaders, the top three were AOC, with 10 percent support, followed by former vice president Kamala Harris at 9 percent, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who is now 83 years old, at 8 percent, all of whom are part of the extreme left wing of the party and are committed to the positions on the issues which led to the stinging defeat of the Democrats this past November.
DEMOCRATS STILL LOOKING FOR AN ACCEPTABLE SUBSTITUTE FOR TRUMP
None of the likely Democrat candidates have so far exhibited the kind of genuine leadership and constructive vision for the future of this country needed to inspire the electorate, as Barack Obama did, or to provide a moderate substitute for the party’s extreme liberal positions, as Bill Clinton did. In addition, as long as Democrat candidates remain hysterically obsessed with Trump Derangement Syndrome, they will continue to be viewed by most mainstream voters as unacceptable as an alternative to Trump and Republican rule.
While it is still far too soon to predict the next nominee, at least Democrats are unlikely to repeat their most recent mistakes, such as picking another empty suit, like Joe Biden, who was already visibly well past his prime when he was running for the 2020 nomination, or an incompetent like Kamala Harris who, after the 2024 nomination was handed to her by party leaders, dodged the media and failed to make a coherent case for her candidacy, while setting a new world record for squandering campaign funding.
Perhaps the most serious damage suffered by the Democrat Party during the Biden administration was the destruction of its traditional identity as the chosen political agent of the working class. Instead, since the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it has gradually become the party of affluent professionals, the ultra-rich, and elitist, college-educated liberals and government bureaucrats. At the same time, Democrats have increasingly ignored the priorities and everyday economic struggles of its former base among working class and proud, traditionally minded American voters.
In addition, rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly angry at their party’s elected officials because they seem to be powerless to respond effectively to Trump’s extraordinary accomplishments during the first two months of his presidency. Many lower- and middle-income Democrat voters also feel that they are drowning under the relentlessly rising costs of rent, groceries, and childcare and are frustrated by their inability to afford to buy a house or a new car. They are particularly furious at their Democrat elected leaders, who were in charge of the government while these problems developed over the past four years, and do not have a clear path back to affordability to offer as a credible alternative to Trump’s reduced tax and regulation, supply-side economic approach. Meanwhile, our lives keep getting more expensive as Democrat leaders keep blaming everyone else except themselves for failing to fix the problems their policies created.
DEMOCRATS LOSING THE MESSAGING WAR FOR THE FIRST TIME
Democrats are also angry at their party leaders because they are losing the messaging war to Trump and his fellow Republicans, which used to be the Democrats’ forte. Democrat liberals still dominate the traditional news media, composed of newspapers and TV channels, and the secular cultural world of Hollywood and New York. Trump was also badly outspent by the Harris campaign. But he won the November election anyway, by a decisive margin this time, because his messaging dominated the new world of social media and podcasts, where most younger Americans now get their news and form their opinions.
The Democrats were helpless to respond during the final weeks of the campaign when video clips went viral showing Trump enjoying himself while serving french fries to customers at a McDonald’s restaurant and behind the wheel of a garbage truck, wearing a worker’s yellow vest. By contrast, after a promising beginning, Harris’ presidential campaign fell flat when voters realized that she had nothing new to offer them and that she was incapable of defending her record, first as a California prosecutor, then as a U.S. senator, and finally as Biden’s vice president.
By setting a daily political agenda, the Trump White House has been able to dominate and control each news cycle throughout the first two months of his administration. In sharp contrast to President Biden, Trump has also found ways to make himself available to the media on a daily basis. He is always ready to answer almost every question off the cuff and is constantly taking the opportunity to comment on virtually any topic. This has also frustrated the Democrats because it gives them no time in which to organize a response to his latest policy move or presidential action before it is replaced by Trump’s next move.
TRUMP’S SUCCESSFUL MEDIA STRATEGY
The newsworthy Trump events and photo-ops change from day to day. They range from Trump’s efforts to halt the fighting in Ukraine and free the hostages Hamas is holding in Gaza, to making a flying visit to the hurricane-devastated area of North Carolina, to exposing the scandalous wasteful spending of the USAID, to hosting the football team that won the Superbowl on its visit to the White House, and driving his own presidential limousine on the track of the Daytona 500 auto race. Another powerful pro-Trump political image was the video of two planeloads of violent Venezuela gang members being deported and turned over to prison officials in El Salvador, in defiance of a verbal order by a liberal federal court judge.
Trump’s cabinet picks and advisors are also media savvy. They work closely in support of one another towards their common goal of advancing Trump’s agenda and highlighting his accomplishments. For example, when left-wing critics of Elon Musk’s work with DOGE turned violent by setting fire to Teslas in new car lots with Molotov cocktails (incendiary gasoline bombs) and vandalizing their charging stations in several states across the nation, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, was quick to announce the arrest of three of the “domestic terrorists” on serious criminal charges carrying jail sentences of up to 20 years in prison.
TURNING AROUND THE DEFINITION OF DOMESTIC TERRORISTS
The use of the term “domestic terrorists” to describe the “Tesla arsonists” is politically significant, because during the Biden administration, that was how Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland often referred to Trump dedicated MAGA supporters who were involved in the events of January 6, 2021, characterizing them as threats to American democracy.
Bondi said, “The days of committing crimes without consequence have ended. Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.”
Meanwhile, Reuters has reported that to carry out Trump’s promise to stage a mass deportation of the millions of illegal immigrants who were admitted by Biden’s open border policy, starting with the violent criminals, his administration has reassigned thousands of agents from all of the federal law enforcement agencies to join with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) in hunting down for deportation as many of the targeted immigrants as they possible.
TRUMP IS TRYING TO KEEP A PROMISE FIRST MADE BY RONALD REAGAN
As president, Trump has also tried to keep another promise first made by President Ronald Reagan 45 years ago to abolish the Department of Education that was founded just a few years earlier by Reagan’s predecessor, President Jimmy Carter.
Trump has now eviscerated the Department of Education in the same way he gutted the USAID, and the pet federal agency of the liberal Democrat senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. While Trump cannot totally eliminate the Department of Education without the passage of supporting congressional legislation, he has instructed his Secretary of Education, longtime loyal Trump supporter Linda McMahon, to dismantle the department from within, while maintaining a skeleton crew of surviving employees to continuing the enforcement of education-related civil rights laws and the oversight of student loans and Pell grants, while either cancelling the department’s other functions or transferring them to other appropriate federal departments and agencies, and transferring most of the Education Department’s portion of the federal budget to the states to spend more efficiently on their own education programs.
“Hopefully Linda will be our last secretary of education,” Trump quipped at the White House signing ceremony of the executive order calling for the elimination of the department, and he called on Democrats in Congress to help pass the legislation needed to complete the shutdown of the department.
SEEING A CIVICS LESSON INSTEAD OF A CRISIS FACING TRUMP
Meanwhile, Utah Republican Senator John Curtis, in an NBC News interview, denied that the current conflict between President Trump and federal district court judges over the legality of the injunctions they have issued to halt his more drastic actions to keep his campaign promises to remake the federal government constitutes a constitutional crisis, as many Democrats and media pundits have declared. Instead, Curtis insists, the conflict is actually “a civics lesson” which “is actually what our founders intended, this tension between the three different branches [of the federal government].”
“I hope every high school civics teacher and every high school student is paying attention because we’re having a lesson in civics. . . President Trump has been very clear multiple times, he will obey court orders. So I don’t see the crisis.”
