The Democratic Party is adrift in a second Trump era with little idea of where to go from here. That means Democratic governors have been left to come up with their own “resistance” messaging, and the results just keep getting weirder.
Democratic governors are trying to boost their “resistance” bona fides by opposing President Donald Trump’s first major action as commander in chief. Unfortunately for them, that first action is deporting illegal immigrants, which is viewed favorably by 67% of the public, including 43% of Democrats. Governors are walking around with a level of bluster on this matter that doesn’t mesh with how unpopular their position is.
That is how you get the utterly bizarre comments that came from Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ).
“I don’t want to get into too much detail, but there is someone in our broader universe whose immigration status is not yet at the point that they are trying to get it to,” Murphy said. “And we said, you know what? Let’s have her live at our house above our garage. And good luck to the feds coming in to try to get her.”
After apparently realizing that “I have an illegal immigrant in my house and the feds will never find her” sounded too much like a possible episode of Law & Order, Murphy’s office clarified that he was talking about a legal immigrant who never lived at Murphy’s house. The New Jersey governor’s attempt at being the tough guy standing in the way of deportations ended with him being under the threat of investigation by Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan.
Enter Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL), a likely 2028 presidential nominee who will almost surely not win the nomination. He still wants to try, though, so he boasted shortly after Trump’s win that, “I want to remind you that a happy Warrior is a Warrior. You come for my people, you come through me.”
(Again, “my people” here stands for illegal immigrants at a time when Trump and Homan have targeted for deportation illegal immigrants with criminal records and gang ties, lest you forget where Democrats are drawing the line in the sand on this battle).
That happy warrior Pritzker then shamed Republicans for sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to a school in Chicago, lamenting that Republicans were “sowing fear and chaos” by starting deportation raids at elementary schools and, “Targeting children and separating families is cruel and un-American.”
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Pritzker’s big shining moment turned out to be a dud, though, because the agents who visited that Chicago school were not with ICE. They were actually with the Secret Service, investigating a threat. Pritzker and the school administration got their story wrong, broadcasting false information to the rest of the country to prove just how bold they were standing against Trump.
With no clear leader of the Democratic Party, every wannabe tough guy governor now gets to flex their resistance chops with their own messaging, and the results range from pathetically uninformed to downright bizarre. The Democratic governors who are supposed to stand against Trump may not be very good at this after all.