I have found an enormous proportion of the opinion pieces whether editorials, columns, or blog posts remarkably uninteresting. Republicans support Trump. Democrats oppose Trump. Those who are independents or disaffected from both political parties don’t really know what the heck is going on or, indeed, why the political parties are behaving so erratically. Let’s recap.
Back in 2016 Donald Trump obliterated the Republican establishment by prevailing over eleven major Republican aspirants and who knows how many minor ones representing every faction in the party to become the Republican presidential candidate for president in the general election. There is no longer a “Republican establishment” and won’t be as long as Donald Trump is the leader of the party. He isn’t a libertarian, a paleoconservative, or a “Reagan conservative”. His beliefs are whatever he says they are on the day that he’s asked. We know he’s in favor of cutting taxes, opposes illegal immigration, and thinks the U. S. has been taken advantage of by allies and adversaries alike. He likes tariffs but may not understand them. After that it gets fuzzy.
After having devoted considerable energy to impeaching Trump twice and prosecuting him in court who knows how many times only to lose the presidency, House, and Senate to him and the Republicans the Democratic Party is rightly described as “leaderless”, “rudderless”, and “flailing”. What does the party stand for? No one is entirely sure.
My own complaint about the Democratic Party is that it is not presenting workable alternatives to the policies Trump and the Republicans are espousing. IMO opposing Trump and the Republicans is not enough. They are hampered in presenting workable alternatives by their devotion to public employees’ unions. I recognize you’ve got to “dance with the one that brung ya” but uncritical loyalty to public employees’ unions is driving the most Democratic states and cities into insolvency.
So far, Trump’s second term is like a movie sequel, everything is bigger with more special effects, but the general plotlines are the same. Unless something changes, Democrats are on course to win back the House in 2026, impeach Trump multiple times but fail to convict, and possibly win in 2028 (a replay of 2017-2020).
Why should Democrats do anything differently than what they did in 2017/2018? It certainly worked well enough.
In all fairness, the Dems are truly powerless right now to a degree I dont think we have seen before. True is just ignoring Congress and assuming all of the powers normally controlled by Congress. He is ignoring SCOTUS when convenient. As nearly always with Trump it isn’t that he is doing something that hasn’t been done before, other presidents have used executive orders, he is just doing it at a scale never seen before. The only thing Dems can really do is complain, at the national level.
Again, at the national level, there is some disarray which comes from Biden deciding to run again. If he had done the right thing and stepped down ahead of time the Dems could have had real primaries and not been forced to run an unpopular Harris. I am guessing they still lose due to the inflation hangover but who knows.
At state and local levels while you obsess over Chicago there are changes elsewhere. As always it’s a pendulum and after finally realizing the radical progressives are a minority and not especially popular among the majority many Dems at the state and local level are moving more towards the center.
Steve
Running Joe Biden as president in 2020 was a symptom of how deep the disarray was. His running for re-election in 2024 should have been a non-issue—he should have been removed under the 25th Amendment before that became an issue. That he was not is itself a scandal.