First, remember how they acted the past four years — to say nothing of the past eight years — and how they ran their campaigns, for that sets the stage.
On policies, Democrats went all in on wokeism and identity politics. They demonized majorities of Americans, but particularly straight, white males (wrong thinkers any) and anyone who has been financially successful in life.
They blew open the southern border as if we were not even a country. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports that officially about 7.2 million people have entered the country illegally since Joe Biden took office — multiple times higher than during Trump’s presidency. However, that does not include those known as “gotaways”, which are estimated at nearly two million, according to the London Telegraph. And that doesn’t include the “legal” entry of hundreds of thousands through unilaterally changed rules, making the total close to 10 million.
They pursued a green energy policy that caused grocery prices to soar, and created fantastically unattainable electric vehicle mandates in coming years. Nobody outside the far left wanted these destructive policies.
They went all in on denying biological women, claiming anyone who thinks they are a woman, really is a woman — then called Republicans anti-science without a hint of irony. They let boys and men compete in women’s sports, causing some horrific injuries and robbing actual women of records and scholarships, while letting entirely biological men use women’s bathrooms and showers.
These policies, catering to a powerful fringe, showed how captive the Democratic Party became to its extreme, radical and sort of insane left wing.
Further, Democrats from the Attorney General's office to the FBI to district attorneys in New York and Atlanta, used taxpayer money to launch complete political prosecutions of President Trump and many of Trump’s associates. It was open lawfare against political opponents.
Harris represented the captivity by extremists on the far left when she refused to endorse California’s Proposition 36, tough-on-crime amendment that passed with more than 70 percent of the vote . . . in California. Every county — in California — passed the measure. Then she tried to appease the Hamas wing of her party by talking sternly about Israel killing too many civilians and not choosing the far superior Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for Vice President. The Democratic Party has a rapidly growing and poisonous anti-semitism problem.
The party of diversity, equity and inclusion became radically exclusionist. The Biden administration did not invite the world’s most successful innovator and maker of electric vehicles, Elon Musk, to a summit on EVs. They defamed and then tossed aside war veteran and moderate Tulsi Gabbard. They blocked Robert Kennedy Jr. and others from launching any real primary challenge against a bumbling Joe Biden — basically erasing the democratic process from their primary. Then they further tossed aside democracy to push Biden aside and install Harris as the nominee without a vote cast.
As the communications arm of the Democratic Party, the media just blew up its remaining, shredded credibility by lying and gaslighting America on the zombie-like state of Joe Biden and his corrupt family. Sharp as a tack! And they spent four years and an entire campaign devoted to fear-mongering that Trump was an existential threat to democracy. Yet in the most delicious exit polling, more people who believed democracy was being threatened voted for Donald Trump than Kamala Harris.
If the Democrats were serious and trying to figure out what went so wrong, they could start at a worse place than their communications arm. The media wholly given over to the Democrats’ causes is a two-edged sword. While it helps Democrats get their spin out in lock-step on every issue, it also enables very weak, mollycoddled candidates who have not been grilled in tough interviews and gone through tough elections to represent the party. That showed in both Harris and Walz in comparison to Trump and J.D Vance. The media, as an extension of the Democratic Party also has some serious issues to reflect on. And again, the signs are not promising.
Rather than introspection, the media launched into doubling down on every divisive, terrible policy by not blaming Democrats or Harris’ campaign, but blaming voters instead. Those who voted for Trump are misogynists, racists, fascists and so on, the media told us, in the continuing fictional narrative of America. Hurling the worst sorts of insults at people whose vote will be needed in the future looks like a harbinger to come. Just take a few prominent examples.
USA Today columnist Michael Stern refused to even read an article attempting to determine what went wrong with the Harris campaign: “Nope, I won’t read it. Harris ran a great campaign. The story should be titled ‘where the American people went wrong.’ ”
“I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign,” said MSNBC’s Joy Reid. “Queen Latifah never endorses anyone. She came out and endorsed her. You know, I mean, she had every prominent celebrity voice. She had Taylor Swift — she had the Swifties, she had the Beyhive. You could not have run a better campaign in that short period of time.”
Reid went on: “One side stands for freedom while the other meets the textbook definition of fascism: namely, a far-right dictatorial regime like Hitler’s Germany or Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy. But also, white-ruled South Africa before Mandela and the black majority took control.”
Washington Post Associate Editor Jonathan Capehart said: “I can’t help but wonder if the American people have given up on democracy.” Again, no irony whatsoever.
“Can’t believe I actually had faith in other white women to choose our collective reproductive rights over their own whiteness. Naive and dumb,” said Emma Vigeland, a host of the large and influential progressive radio show Majority Report. That sort of suicidal identity politics was a driving force in Democrats defeat. And it’s going nowhere.
And finally, Joe Scarborough and Al Sharpton on MSNBC really went all in on American voters being horrible people.
“Democrats need to be mature and they need to be honest,” Scarborough said. “And they need to say, yes, there is misogyny. But it’s not just misogyny from white men; it’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men — things we’ve all been talking about — who do not want a woman leading them. Might be race issues with Hispanics. They don’t want a black woman as president.”
Al Sharpton vigorously chimed in his agreement: “You’re absolutely right, it’s not simplistic, and we’ve got to have real honest conversations about each other.”
Our biggest, most influential mass scientific publications are just drowning in wokeism.
Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, wrote on X: “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.” She deleted but her hand was tipped.
Nature ran a long article explaining that scientists are terrified by the election results, including Nobel laureate Fraser Stoddart, who moved from the United States to become chairman of chemistry at the University of Hong Kong — run by the Communist Party of China. He said without irony: “In my long life of 82 years . . . there has hardly been a day when I felt more sad. I’ve witnessed something that I feel is extremely bad, not just for the United States, but for all of us in the world.”
There have been recriminations against social media, particularly X, and calls for government regulation of the platforms. Of course, there are still good guys running some social media companies. When left-leaning British journalist Piers Morgan congratulated Trump on his victory, Instagram promptly took down his post as — get this — hate speech. But Trump and his supporters are the fascists.
And there has been a wave of interest among American Democratic women in the once-fringe South Korean movement, called 4B, where women cut all ties with men. Searches for it have quadrupled since Trump’s victory.
One would think that rationally, Democrats should really do a post-mortem on what went wrong when they had the entirety of legacy media and spent three times as much money running against a “felon” and still lost handily. One would be oh so wrong. In part because just how rational is a party that can’t say what a woman is?
It was not just the Democrats’ comms arm. Leading political voices also doubled down.
Gov. Gavin Newsome announced an emergency session of the California Assembly to approve funding for the Department of Justice and other state agencies to “immediately file affirmative litigation.” The idea is to narrowly focus as much as $100 million in the California Attorney General’s office just for fighting the Trump administration.
Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, a Santa Rosa Democrat, said in a statement. “California has come too far and accomplished too much to simply surrender and accept his dystopian vision for America.”
Democrat Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker held a press conference immediately following the election and warned President-elect Trump in tough-guy terms: “You come for my people, you come through me. We will continue to advance a positive, productive and inclusive agenda of our own.” “Inclusive” is the key takeaway, as it is code for woke.
Not to be outdone by California and Illinois, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and state Attorney General Letitia James made clear that President-elect Donald Trump is the enemy in an angry and divisive press conference after the election.
Hochul announced she was creating the “Empire State Freedom Initiative” to fight “policy and regulatory threats” from Trump. “You try to harm New Yorkers or roll back their rights, I will fight you every step of the way,” Hochul echoed both Pritzker and Newsome in the totally fictional narrative that fascist Trump will take away everyone’s rights.
James added: “We will work each and every day to defend Americans, no matter what this new administration throws at us. We are ready to fight back again.”
And remember, in her concession speech the day after the election, Kamala Harris said: “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign . . . hear me when I say … the light of America's promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”
Again, that entire campaign was demonizing Trump and his supporters, which is on point with the rest of the left. But while their claim that Trump is the existential threat is intellectually vacuous and morally reprehensible, a lot of people believe it.
This will be hard to watch and ugly to withstand in the coming years, but a little Democratic Party suicide would be a good thing, because what appears to be the base of the party has gone off the rails of reality.
Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children and seven grandchildren and a rapacious hunger to fight for America for them. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at [email protected].
