There’s a certain way Democrat leaders are speaking in recent days, and they’re all expressing some variation of what the party’s national committee chair said this week: Democrats “cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore.”

Everyone should interpret that to mean Democrats are out for blood, literally.

That’s in no way an overstatement, not least because Democrats spent a significant portion of the last election season openly fantasizing about legally murdering Donald Trump (and then ultimately shrugging when he was actually shot). There’s simply no other way to explain it.

To be sure, here’s what Democratic National Committee head Ken Martin said in full: “I’m sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight. We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore. We’ve got to stand up and fight. We’re not going to have a hand tied behind our back anymore. Let’s grow a damn spine and get in this fight, Democrats.”

First, it’s preposterous to claim that Democrats are in an electoral rut because they’re so nitpicky about rules or because Republicans have dominated them by cheating. To the contrary, Republicans are the ones who were still campaigning like it was 1998 after Democrats figured out how to harvest ballots from even the most apathetic, low-info voters with their mail-in and drop-box schemes. And when the party wasn’t sure that would work in 2024, Democrat election administrators attempted to keep the leading Republican presidential candidate’s name off voter ballots.

To the extent that Democrats are too trifling when it comes to rules and process, it’s that they’re constantly trying to change them.

Second, is there some recent political episode I missed wherein Democrat opposition to Republicans was so lacking in effort that you had to wonder if they were even awake? Because I’m old enough to remember when a Democrat U.S. senator literally flew to Central America in an attempt to retrieve a foreign national who had been deported by the Trump administration and was credibly accused of being both a violent Latin gang affiliate as well as a woman abuser.

I can also recall Democrats refusing to cooperate with federal authorities on removing violent criminal aliens from the interior; Democrats suing the administration for firing useless bureaucrats; and Democrats threatening to block government funding because the president was actually doing the things he was elected to do.

So, when party leaders assert that it’s time to up the ante, there’s no logical conclusion to draw from it other than that they’re eager and ready to cross the point of no return. There’s nothing left but that. They’re that desperate and they’re openly admitting it.

Again, it’s not like it wasn’t just last year that the current president was nearly assassinated twice. Democrats have done their best to black out those memories, and for obvious reasons. Those events didn’t reflect too well on them.

They keep using the “knife fight” metaphor. It’s safe to assume they no longer mean it as one.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of "Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone."