From the moment it became clear that Donald Trump had secured a decisive electoral victory, the left has been flailing about, desperately seeking a counter-narrative to explain away and diminish the evident allure of his far-reaching, revolutionary agenda.
Early on, unable to challenge the reality of an unambiguous mandate from the American people, the hard left had little choice but to blame the voters. Of course, that has never proven to be a wise strategy, as Hillary Clinton discovered when she wrote off half the electorate as a basket of deplorables. But some lessons are never learned. Right after the 2024 election, in the most egregious of the many instances of leftists condemning the electorate, famed race hustler Al Sharpton blamed Kamala Harris’ loss on misogyny among black and Hispanic voters.
Fast forward a month, and over the weekend, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of The Squad let loose by expressing a sentiment about Trumpists that her fellow travelers likely share. Displaying an admirable level of honesty, she said the quiet part out loud: “These people are just idiots — I really am at the point where it has become really hard to have an intellectual debate with any of these [Trump supporters] because the level of stupidity that they are displaying every single day is frankly, embarrassing … the dumbing of the United States has arrived, because how else do we get a Trump presidency again?”
Lest you believe the left might have finally come to grips with their catastrophic decline, consider the string of talking points they have adopted and then dropped in trying to convince the American people of the horrible mistake they made last November. Hours after Trump assumed office, they started with the term “oligarch,” believing that because tech titans came alongside Trump at his inauguration, we would now be governed like the Russian oligarchy. Remarkably, we suddenly started hearing the same exact talking point from the media and talking heads.
When that narrative failed, the leftist crowd moved on to “shadow government,” hoping people would shake in their boots at the thought of Elon Musk secretly controlling the government from some secret bunker. Then they fine-tuned the talking point to “President Musk,” trying in vain to claim that Trump, of all people, had handed power over to the billionaire while simultaneously wailing that Trump has executed a coup d’etat after winning a democratic election – hard to reconcile those two concepts. With Trump’s public approval stubbornly remaining higher than ever, they flailed away by complaining that Musk is “unelected.” Note to the left: The entire executive branch, other than the president, is unelected.
Since all those strategies proved fruitless, leftists have now adopted an entirely new narrative animated by wishful thinking: Trump is failing. Indeed, a story in the left-wing American Prospect entitled “The Coup Has Failed” – there’s that word again – declared, “Trump’s falling approval ratings reveal an out-of-touch presidency, and have given space for allies to turn against him.” Nice try, but Trump’s approval in the latest Harvard-Harris poll is 52%, higher than at any time in his first administration. In that story and others from the left, a new narrative centers around a handful of districts that Trump won easily, where hundreds of angry voters showed up at town halls to express outrage to their elected representatives. Note to the left: Considering the shouts of “Tax the wealthy,” “Tax the rich,” and “Tax the billionaires,” for example, at one of those town halls in eastern Oregon, these are almost certainly people who voted against Trump. In another wishful, tone-deaf story from a far-left publication, entitled “The DOGE Project Will Backfire,” The Atlantic declared, “Trump’s war on public employees is bad for all of us … let’s dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not.”
An additional storyline leftists are attempting to peddle is that Trump has done nothing to lower food prices, as if he could fix a problem years in the making in his first month, or could force private companies to lower prices by executive fiat. Similarly, they complain that he has failed to tame inflation, a result of massive overspending in the Biden administration. Yet polling reveals that public confidence in the economy has sharply risen since Trump became president again; in fact, it is higher than at any time since he left office in 2021.
Then there’s the narrative that Trump and Musk are out to violate your privacy via DOGE and take away your Social Security, a particularly inflammatory accusation designed to alarm senior citizens on fixed incomes. But there is not a shred of evidence that the administration has any such intent. And then there are all the stories about Musk and DOGE deliberately cutting off funding for the poor, sick, and disabled, again with no evidence to support the claims other than Musk, by his own admission, taking a chainsaw to the deep state legacy of waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption – with broad public approval. As Liberty Nation News has pointed out, 69% of the public in a New York Times/Siena poll before the election favored either major change in the federal government or tearing the system down entirely.
Finally, the left writ large has employed the phrase “potentially illegal” to define some of Trump’s extraordinary string of executive actions, merely throwing that against the wall – without evidence, as the left loves to say – and hoping it might stick, unlike their many other anti-Trump narratives. The 47th president has been breaking eggs to make what he might call a big, beautiful omelet, so it is not terribly difficult to whip people into a frenzy. But the left has so far failed to do so with one flailing accusation after another, confirming the very message delivered by the voters in November.