Politico: Well, Dems Really Blew That Week, Huh?

Well … fortnight, really. Their bad week started on March 4th and continued through last night. And there’s always the promise of the week to come!

After staging an embarrassing display of impotence during Donald Trump’s speech to Congress, one might have thought that Democrats would have learned a lesson. Instead, as Politico laments, they were just warming up:

President Donald Trump’s week was poised to be bruising.

Instead, the president is ending it on a political high after he and congressional Republicans closed ranks and, with an assist from the looming specter of DOGE, cornered Democrats into voting to avert a government shutdown on their terms. Now, it’s Democrats who are fighting each other, distracting Washington, at least temporarily, from Trump’s trade war that has wreaked havoc on the stock market.

It’s a sign of just how different this Trump is from the one who left office four years ago. Not only is Trump firmly the leader of a GOP he has remade in his image — borne out Tuesday when many hardline members of the House Freedom Caucus voted for their first ever stopgap spending bill. But his mercurial governing style drove a wedge between Democrats, some of whom feared they would play into the president’s hands if they voted to shut the government down.

“I don’t know who the leader of the Democratic Party is, but I know who runs it. It’s Donald Trump,” said Scott Jennings, a GOP strategist and vocal Trump defender who was at one time considered for the White House press secretary post.

Democrats have become the victim of their own campaign propaganda. Having painted Trump as a Nazifasciststinkybottom, they have left themselves no room to maneuver. They have become the political equivalent of Monty Python’s Argument Clinic sketch — unable to articulate any principle or coherent policy position other than the “automatic gainsay” of whatever Trump says or does:

To the extent that Democrats have any position at all, it’s a defense of the status quo — which puts them in the weird and amusing position of being conservatives, in a real sense. They are standing athwart the reform impulses of MAGA and DOGE and yelling “STOP!”, in defense of a status quo despised by nearly everyone else. 

And then this week, they even opposed the status quo! When presented with a CR that kept spending authorizations at almost exactly the Biden-era status quo, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries refused to go along. Why? Because Trump wanted it. And that’s about it. 

Democrats insisted that they wanted to craft a spending plan that would block Trump from exercising the same executive authority that Joe Biden and Barack Obama had all along, as though Republicans had not won the election and had not taken control of both chambers of Congress. And their Grand Strategy was to threaten a shutdown of the federal government that Trump and Elon Musk are largely attempting to accomplish anyway. 

Rarely has any display of political impotence been so profound and so prolonged. For that matter, one can also toss in the profound display of political incompetence by Schumer for setting up a fight he couldn’t win, raising expectations unrealistically and then caving under their weight. 

I’ve never seen anything like it in politics. It’s an orgy of hatred and political insanity that began a decade ago and intensified over the last two years. Democrats have become utterly deranged by Trump, completely unmoored from reality and disconnected from voters in their unreality. (And it’s not stopping yet either, which I’ll address in another post later today.)

Democrats didn’t have a bad week. They’re not having a bad month. They are having a disastrous decade, and that includes the four years they held the White House by covering up Joe Biden’s senility and lying through their teeth to hold onto power through his aphasiac puppet act. Their leadership has become intellectually and morally bankrupt, and their activists absurdly out of touch. 

Four more years of this and we may need to call in butterfly nets and straitjackets. Even the Protection Racket Media has been forced to cover the insanity — at least for now.