Is There a Democrat Blueprint to Regain Power?

By Victor Davis Hanson

What is the long-term Democratic Party’s strategy to return to power?

Americans may ask that only because so far, the Democrat agenda seems to entail polarizing and alienating as many voters as possible.

They gleefully double down on their 2024 defeat. And they seem almost to grow ecstatic at ensuring that Donald Trump and his record poll at unprecedented highs.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) rants on national TV that Trump is a d—k and promises to go to “war” against him.

Democratic representatives chant “f—k Trump” on national television.

Senator “Spartacus” Booker (D-NJ) almost daily shouts to high heaven and barks out promises of massive resistance, proving he is far crazier than his allegedly crazy Trump.

During the recent cabinet confirmations, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Tim Kaine lost their minds in impotent rage at the nominees and played the fools—furious at a few timid Democrat suggestions to tone it down.

Democrats bark that Elon Musk is even more Satanic than Trump.

They swarm and try to break into the Department of Education. They shut down the LA freeways. And in the case of illegal aliens, they wave the flag of the nation they fled from, while burning the flag of the nation in which they demand to remain.

Do they think being pro-Hamas on campuses, inviting in ostentatious transgendered to scream at elected officials, or threatening to bring “weapons” as they go “to war” cements their supposed reputation as the party of “peace” or wins over the lost middle class?

Democrat activists tip off illegal alien criminals, endangering the safety of American law enforcement officers. Blue-city mayors and Democrat elected officials go full neo-Confederate in screaming they will resist federal laws.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the self-described future of the party, sends out pointers to illegal aliens on how to break federal law. Is the point how to best commit a felony?

When fraud, scandal, and waste are exposed at USAID, the Democrats ignore the billions of dollars misspent and instead shriek that children will die if the budget of 2025 returns to the size of its 2019 counterpart, adjusted for inflation and population growth.

And yet so far, the hysterical style is not working. Instead, it is achieving the very opposite of its intention.

Trump’s popularity in the most recent Rasmussen poll soared to 55 percent approval. For the first time in twenty years, the poll found Americans, now after just three weeks of Trump in office, felt that the U.S. is finally for the first time in 20 years moving in the right direction.

Most of Trump’s signature hot-button issues—banning biological males in women’s sports, deporting violent illegal aliens, finishing the border wall, or cutting government waste—poll between 65-80 percent approval. In response, Democrats scream that after a mere 21 days in office, Trump is responsible for not ending the four-year inflation of Joe Biden, which until November 5, they claimed was insignificant and transitory.

After losing the electoral and popular votes in November 2024, the Democrats have no official legislative or executive power.

Ultimately the Supreme Court will quash their efforts to cherry-pick left-wing lower court judges to obstruct Trump’s executive orders.

They have not stopped one Trump nominee who went up for a Senate vote.

Any who broke the law during the last four years, and many did, will not issue subpoenas but fear receiving them.

Their bastions of left-wing resistance—the media, the administrative state, and the universities—are hemorrhaging, losing power, and gaining ever more unpopularity.

The more that viewers are turned off by racial chauvinism, foul language, and screaming, the more left-wing cable networks showcase maddened DEI guests—issuing threats, employing profanity, and shouting as they lose their minds.

Are new Democrat demands for racial reparations wise for some to receive borrowed billions of dollars who were never slaves from many who never owned them when we are all $37 trillion in debt?

There is no Democratic youthful generation, other than the hysterical Squad.

The leaders of the youth party are instead ossified, septuagenarian and octogenarian relics of the last decades—Joe Biden, James Clyburn, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Elisabeth Warren.

The more the elite of the various left-wing black caucuses scream that Trump is a racist, traitor, dictator, and fascist, the more black males trend toward Trump. The more out-of-touch left-wing Hispanic leaders in Congress scream that Trump is a hater and xenophobic, the closer Trump comes to capturing a majority of Hispanic voters by promising to close the border and secure their communities.

The latest poll on Democrat favorability—conducted by liberal Quinnipiac—reveals historic dislike of Democrats, with only 31 percent of voters expressing a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party.

Are Democrats then pivoting or self-correcting?

Do they support legal-only immigration? Do they wish to join in finding fraud in the federal government?

Do they perhaps at least wish to reform the Pentagon, or lower the price of energy?

Nope.

So, what then is their agenda?

It is a retread of 2017, mixed in with the anti-Trump hysteria of 2021-4. By now we all recognize the weary symptoms of their five-point blueprint:

1. Scream nonstop about Trump the monster (and now Elon Musk too) and his right-wing Nazi coup—without supplying any concrete details or analysis to support such ridiculous invective.
2. Cherry-pick left-wing lower echelon judges to delay, block and confound Trump’s executive orders and legislative agendas.
3. Raise huge amounts of money to galvanize street theater, massive sit-ins, and soon violent street demonstrations.
4. Use such fury to win back the House and then impeach Trump in 2026.
5. Investigate and subpoena Trump with lawfare to render him inert until 2028.

All that admittedly worked somewhat in Trump’s first term.

Remember, the left went from the Steele dossier’s “Russian collusion” lie during the 2016 campaign, to Robert Mueller’s 20-month derailing of the Trump agenda through his special counsel witch-hunt that ultimately found no “collusion.”

As designed, that legal circus side-tracked nearly two years of Trump’s governance.

When Robert Mueller shut down his “dream team” and “all- stars” in March 2019, the Democrats went right into full removal mode and so impeached Trump in the fall over one phone call.

In between, they sought to disrupt and distract by claiming Trump was crazy, and subject to 25th Amendment removal, while attacking his wife and children

Critical to the left’s strategy between 2017-21 was to outraise him with billionaire tech and Wall Street cash, enlist administrative leakers and Never Trumpers to disrupt from the inside Trump governance, organize government “experts” and retired generals to write that Trump was an existential danger, a fascist, a Nazi, a liar and a cheat, riot in the streets, burn, and loot during the summer of 2020, and change the ballot laws to ensure only 30 percent showed up on election day.

And all that worked in getting the waxen-effigy Joe Biden elected.

But will the repeat succeed again?

Probably not.

Trump is far wiser, and his team far more polished, loyal, and zealous.

He enters office not after the hopey-and changey therapeutic Barack Obama, but the disastrous term of an enfeebled Joe Biden.

Indeed, four years of anti-Trump lawfare and more—raiding his home, 91 indictments, five criminal and civil courtroom indictments and suits, 20 some states seeking to de-ballot him, and two assassination attempts not only failed to harm Trump but likely ensured his reelection.

This time all his cabinet and agency heads are determined to accelerate, not subvert his agenda. He is not reactive as sometimes in the past in the face of the left’s maelstrom of suits and character assassination that often overwhelmed his inexperienced team.

Now sadder, but wiser, Trump is proactive, preemptive, and on the offensive. It is the left, not Trump, that is overwhelmed, confused, and weakened by a tsunami of executive orders, defamation lawsuits, billionaire defections, and minority apostates.

Minority and youthful voters are trending, not bleeding, Trump. He may well outraise the midterm Democrats, both because of his popular wildfire changes and the once left-wing billionaires who defected from the unstable and unreliable Democrats.

There will likely be no more insider “anonymous” op-eds promising to subvert the administration. Retired generals are more worried about overdue enforcement of Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice than finding more creative smears of Trump. The Republican House and Senate hold small margins, but they are more MAGA-oriented than the past Trump Congresses.

In sum, rejecting light for heat, the Democrats return to the same scowls and furor of the past as if we are forever in 2018, when in fact the world is a far different place in 2025.

The voters’ problem with the new Democratic Party is not just that they are old and unhinged, but that they are so wearily and predictably boring.

 

First published in American Greatness