May 2 - What I like about the world right now—and don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty I don’t like—what’s very nice right now, I think, is that the shrieking hysteria of the unhinged left in politics and media in America isn’t working. It’s just not connecting with the majority of the population.
Trump’s declining job approval numbers surely make the dementors think that their round-the-clock, hair-on-fire cries of Hitler! Fascism! Genocide! are producing results, so they’ll double down on all that. Let them. It’s just noise at this point.
More on the noise in a minute, but first: there’s another possible cause for Trumps declining job approval: maybe Trump’s been doing a lousy job lately.
The first couple of months were terrific: promises made, promises kept.
As the lady sings, “Nope, I don’t regret a thing.”
Trump was focusing on the issues that had big majority support of the American public, forcing the reflexively (and insanely) oppositional left to take highly unpopular positions.
These issues included securing the border, deporting illegal aliens with criminal backgrounds, keeping boys out of girls’ sports, burning away layers of red tape, shrinking the bureaucracy, slashing budgets. Restoring the military’s focus. Full-throated support for Israel.
The Democrats resisted all of these popular initiatives, and paid a price for it: their own approval numbers cratered.
The Greenland stuff was (and remains) weird, but although I myself live in a country that hardly ever thinks about anything else now, Americans don’t really care.
But Trump and his administration screwed up badly on tariffs and on Ukraine-Russia. When I say they screwed up, I don’t necessarily mean they screwed up on policy: I mean their actions and communications have been so muddy, especially in comparison to the clarity and transparency on everything else, that the policy is unclear. And that’s a massive screw-up. I can’t and won’t defend their policy, strategy, or tactics in these areas because I don’t understand them—and that’s on them.
People will forgive some momentary pain if they understand the eventual payoff. But if you inflict pain on them without making that payoff crystal clear, they’ll turn on you in a New York minute. As they should: “I don’t understand why you’re hurting me” is a natural and even necessary reaction.
If Trump can snatch some kind of economic victory out of this tariff stuff, and can establish any kind of peace at all in Ukraine, then Americans will turn around and support him again. If he doesn’t, the midterms are going to blow up in his face.
On the other hand, the midterms are still 15 months away and that’s a geologic age in American politics, where attention spans are better measured in minutes (or seconds?) than in months.
The Democrats have Trump on the ropes for the moment: so what do they do?
The entire machinery of the American left seems to be doubling down on its emotional breakdown, with Congressional Democrats giving the highest profile to their irrational caucus—cranky kooks like AOC, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Jasmine Crockett and serial fabulists like Adam Schiff and Chris Murphy.
It’s stupid and suicidal of them. Trump is the most politically vulnerable he’s been since being elected. A rational party would be attacking him where he’s weakest and offering a clear (and sober) alternative.
The Democrats haven’t been a rational party in decades, however, so their fanatical front is screeching about oligarchy and “Maryland men” and how many devils can get due process on the head of a pin.
This is the problem with hysteria: it’s irrational and self-perpetuating.
Mental illness is not a viable platform.
Somewhere between 72 and 87% of American Democrats tell pollsters that they believe Donald Trump is a fascist or fascist dictator (87%: ABC/Ipsos, October 2024; 72%: Rasmussen, April 2025).
Do they really believe it?
I mean, if Trump were half the maniac they claim to think he is, wouldn’t at least some of these injunction-issuing judges have been taken out and shot by now? Wouldn’t CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all other “opposition” media have been shut down? Wouldn’t we all be wondering what had happened to Chuck Schumer, AOC, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the rest of the usual gang of idiots? Wouldn’t the deportations be replaced with camps or gulags? Wouldn’t Elon Musk have helped expand the size and power and compulsive force of the federal government, instead of putting his reputation (and life) on the line to shrink and enfeeble it?
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Has the rank and file already forgotten how chummy their own prominent Democrat politicians and “journalists” got with Trump around the inauguration? Chuck Schumer’s chuckles at Trump’s barbs during the Al Smith dinner in New York last fall? “Morning Joe” Scarborough’s visit to Mar A Lago?
There only appear to be two possibilities: Democrats (and the American left generally) either genuinely believe Trump is the evil fascist dictator they say he is (in which case they’re stupid), or they don’t believe it but think it’s a winning argument. In which case they’re evil, given that this isn’t a question of policy or ideology, but of framing their opponent as a literal threat to democracy.
I suspect it’s a combo platter: there are evil, cynical Democrats willing to tear the country apart out of sheer partisan malice, and there are also stupid and gullible followers just going with that flow.
A good example of this kind of cynicsm was on display just the other day, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was talking to the press about Trump’s really bad, no good, terrible poll numbers (39% approval). A reporter asked what conclusions could be drawn about his own really bad, no good, terrible poll numbers (17% approval), and Schumer’s response was “Polls come and go.”
We can represent the exchange generically:
SCHUMER: There is a fact, X, about Trump, to which I direct your attention as evidence of his awfulness.
REPORTER: That same fact, X, is also true about you—even more so.
SCHUMER: The fact X is meaningless.
It’s so shameless it’s impressive.
It’s almost as shameless as the way the legacy media have begun informing us (or at least themselves) that, “you know, in retrospect, when we take a real critical look at ourselves—as we always do because we are the oracles of truth—we probably coulda maybe been a little more forthright in our reporting on Joe Biden’s condition, but gosh, you know, his inner circle really duped us pretty good!”
To that point (and from that link):
Alex Thompson of Axios, who won The Aldo Beckman Award (at the White House Correspondents Association dinner) for his coverage of the coverup of Biden’s decline while in office, addressed complaints from some on the right that the press had gone too soft on the Democrat.
“We — myself included — missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it,” Thompson told the room of journalists. “We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”
He has three “somes” in there: some on the right have complained. Some people trust us less. We bear some responsibility.
That motherfucker. Those motherfuckers.
They lied and lied about the biggest presidential story in American history: the leader of the free world was non compos mentis. They smeared anyone who called them on it. And now they’re sitting in their Sunday best, swilling champagne and applauding themselves for their supposed bravery.
The leering and obsequious elites of Capital City in The Hunger Games look downright earthy by comparison.
I have a new theory. It goes like this: there are still two major parties in America, the Democrats and Republicans. Neither party would be recognizable to its partisans of thirty years ago—even though both include plenty of loyalists from that era. For now.
The Republicans under Trump have been broadening their base, pulling in working class and minority voters along with ideological refugees from the increasingly weird Democrats.
The Democrats have for about ten years been narrowing their base.
Ian Faith explains:
As the Democrats double, triple, and quadruple down on their asshattery, they’re going to find themselves with a reliable base of just 23-28% of the electorate. That’s the bonkers base, the hysterical hardcore, the demented deadenders.
I’m not saying they’ll only get 23-28% of the vote in elections, I’m saying that’s going to be the extent of the base they can count on to turn out. The remainder will have to be fought for in a way Democrats haven’t much experience with.
If they start charting a course back to reality now, they could turn things around even before the 2026 midterms.
If they keep leaning into the AOC, Sanders, Crockett, and Booker types—and the 20% side of every 80/20 issue in American politics—then they are going to continue hemorrhaging voters.
Republicans won’t be able to absorb all the alienated former Democrats, however. There are too many Democrats out there who know their party’s gone crazy but would rather drink Drano than vote for a Republican.
So a new third party will emerge—either formally or as a splinter group within the Democratic party—and, for the first time in a long time, it’ll be a viable third party (or splinter group). It’ll take all the Democrat refugees plus win over a lot of Democrats who fled to MAGA but never felt quite at home there. It might even attract some wobbly Republicans.
So the electorate will be 23-28% Democrats, 49% Republicans, and 23-28% in the new middle. The new middle will align with Democrats when they’re not being crazy, and with Republicans when they are. (Or stay at home when they’re ambivalent, which will benefit Republicans.) They’ll therefore be able to swing virtually every election in balanced districts.
Over time, the new middle will become such an extinction-level threat to the Democratic Party that it will have to either start a slow return to normalcy or accept their own eventual irrelevance.
It makes no difference whether the new middle fizzles away with its members mostly going back to the Democrats and a sliver retreating to the GOP, or whether enough Democrats finally cross over to the new middle that the Democratic Party itself simply wastes away.
The only thing that matters is that the left side of American politics will once again be predominantly a party of big government, welfare-state classical liberals and the right side will be predominantly a party of limited government, free-market, privateer classical liberals.
Both sides will have a fringe of nutters, but neither will be driven by its fringe.
That’s my theory. It’s insanely optimistic, I know, and every bit as unlikely as it is optimistic, but offers hope for Americans of every party who are at their wit’s end with the unbridled, hold-my-beer insanity of the Democratic Party as it exists right now.
As for the legacy media?
They’re already dead, they just haven’t realized it yet.
Monday’s Almanac is right here. Emphasis on the Communist Holiday and a whole lot of salad.
Wednesday’s child was The Resistance Must Be Crushed, in which I expressed my exasperation with the left’s continuing calls for an uprising against the government. (And my wondering what it would take for the right to begin calling for an uprising against the insurrectiony left.)
On Thursday I just vented my spleen. What Danes Know About America is just one more log on the bonfire of my exasperation with Danes’ ignorance about how America actually works—and my fury at the deceptive Danish journalists and “America experts” that have made it their life’s work to keep Danes in the dark.
Have a great weekend.
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