While politics ain’t beanbag as they say, if you are going to go so hardcore that you demand blood and insist people get shot for the cause, you better be sure it’s going to work.
Earlier this week, I opined that the Democrat’s political strategy was to foment violence and it was the only leverage they seek over our affairs. With precious few exceptions, progressives are not interested in anything resembling compromise even on issues they purport to care about and whether you would go as far as I did in claiming that the violence was the point, they have embraced resistance as their sole rallying cry during President Donald Trump’s second term by their own admission. Whatever purpose or meaning you ascribe to it, the trend has become so extreme that progressive organizations are actively training people to interfere with immigration enforcement, that is to taunt and harass people armed with guns, people they claim are trigger-happy, blood thirsty killers by definition. Whether they truly believe his about some segments of the law enforcement community is irrelevant to the fact that they are readily risking some of their own supporters’ lives while they hide behind their computer screens or security details, a risk that became all too real last week when a woman was shot in Minneapolis. Beyond the insanity of openly stating that at a significant segment of your base wants to use violence for political purposes as Axios, not exactly a right-leaning organization, reported last July, and then actually implementing it or at least appearing to do so, one also has to wonder why anyone believes the strategy will be effective in the first place. While politics ain’t beanbag as they say, if you are going to go so hardcore that you demand blood and insist people get shot for the cause, you better be sure it’s going to work. Otherwise, you are merely screaming at the sky and bleeding in the dirt. In this case, what evidence is there that fomenting outrage which periodically bursts into violence will have any impact at all on President Donald Trump’s agenda, his supporters, or the broader electorate? Or perhaps I should say, have any impact except producing the opposite effect?
To me at least, two things should have been immediately apparent from the start of the second Trump Administration. First, a significant percentage of the country has completely ignored the hysterical pronouncements of progressives and their enablers in the mainstream media for at least the past eighteen months, if not much longer. Long before he retook the Oval Office last January 20, the President was regularly referred to as the second coming of Hitler, a fascist, and an authoritarian lunatic suffering from dementia who might keel over any minute. They have spent the better part of a year screaming over and over again that almost everything he does, large and small, from toppling the leader of Venezuela to building a ballroom, was illegal, unconstitutional, unconscionable, and yet it’s had little, if any effect. Conceivably, there has been some minor impact on his approval ratings, but his numbers still remain slightly higher than either of his predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, at this point in their second terms and are within the expected range for a deeply polarized country coming out of a period of massive inflation. There has, of course, been plenty of speculation that these ratings are about to plummet along with claims that the President is ridiculously unpopular or “horrendously unpopular” as a USA Today headline from last month described him. At times, these claims are accompanied by the idea that the President’s support is crumbling even among his base, that his base is splitting over the Epstein Files, international adventurism, the economy, or whatever. In fact, the USA Today article opened with the insistence, “All good cons eventually crumble, and we’re starting to see the earliest signs that the MAGA movement – one of the greatest and most destructive cons in American history – may be poised to fall. It’s coming, I tell you. And it’s going to be spectacular. The movement’s creator, President Donald Trump, is a horrendously unpopular and swiftly deteriorating lame duck focused more on building a glitzy ballroom or possibly invading Venezuela than on making life better for Americans.” Since then, his approval has increased more than a point in the Real Clear Politics average – and he has presided over one of the most daring raids in United States history, capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro without an American life lost and without the country falling to pieces in the aftermath.
Beyond attacks on President Trump personally, there has been no shortage of outrage over his policies. Progressives were declaring ICE the modern Gestapo long before the tragic incident last week. There have been similar explosions and eruptions over cuts to the government, both staff and departments, tariffs, his actions in Iran, Ukraine, Russia, Venezuela mentioned earlier, basically anything and everything. There have been lawsuits, more than I can account, that were supposed to stop him and his policies in their tracks. There have even been dramatic rulings that were supposed to curtail his power, but which in reality, were quickly overturned in most cases, allowing his policies to proceed essentially unfettered if slightly delayed. Simultaneously, there have been those who were supposed to stop him from implementing his policies politically if not remove him from office, either through endless outrage or some other hard to define action including a bizarre non-filibuster, filibuster that was said to be a historic moment. In addition to the courts themselves, we’ve had everyone from Senator Corey “Spartacus” Booker, who mounted that weird filibuster and achieved nothing, to Bruce Springsteen, who attacked him at concerts in Europe using the same tired tropes as everyone else, Governor JB Pritzker, who did succeed in getting the National Guard blocked for the time being, assuming the President doesn’t just move in under another authority, to Jimmy Kimmel, whose ratings crumbed almost immediately after he was supposedly censored, from Governor Gavin “Cobra Kai” Newsom, who oddly thinks he can hire interns on social media to create poor shadows of the President’s tweets, to newly minted Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who railed against the President only to be hosted at the Oval Office for a cordial meeting, with Senator Mark Kelly, who urged the military to defy unspecified illegal orders, refused to specify them, and then was lowered in rank with his retirement benefits reduced in between. There have been groups as well – No Kings, the Former JAG Working Group, a new collection of former Federal Reserve Chairs and other officials, one after the other. Almost without fail, a new leader of the resistance, individually or as a collective, was crowned on a weekly basis for some purpose, anointed as the person or thing that would finally take the President down or at least halt on of his actions – until they didn’t and the cycle moved on to the next as though time itself magically restarted and we were all supposed to pretend we hadn’t seen this movie before.
Second, and perhaps most importantly given the chattering classes are paid to chatter and plenty of people, myself included, enjoy bantering on the internet, why would President Trump, who remains the most powerful figure in the known universe, choose to listen to any of them personally and why would any of his supporters give them a moment’s attention or worry? Why should he and we care what the opposition has to say, especially when they’ve said it all before, over and over again, and we’re basically enduring the ChatGPT version a decade removed at this point? In some alternative reality, perhaps better than our own, there was the opportunity for some sort of national reconciliation in the aftermath of his 2024 triumph. At that point, Democrats could’ve had a sort of mild awakening upon realizing that the political figure they loathed the most in recent memory won again, emerging more powerful than ever before despite two impeachments, almost a hundred criminal indictments, multiple civil cases, and an assination attempt that grazed his ear. While we couldn’t expect them to abandon their hatred, much less magically become supporters, we might have hoped for some sort of acknowledgement that many of his policies are far more popular than advertised and – within reason – some effort to work together to implement the expressed will of the voters. Instead, Senate Democrats have voted for Trump-supported legislation only twice in an entire year, essentially refusing to participate in anything resembling the usual political process. Thus, the party that proclaimed itself defenders of democracy and the rule of law has preferred to pursue blanket opposition against the preferences of the public as decided by a national election, complete with claims that thousands upon thousands will die as a result. Similarly, his supporters have both watched all this unfold and in at least some cases, experienced a little of it themselves, risking retribution from their employers, social media, and even the government itself, consistently being labelled members of some bloodthirsty braindead cult even for supporting policies fairly popular according to opinion polls.
Last week, we saw both of these traits on display in the wake of the tragic shooting of an anti-ICE activist in Minnesota. Though Democrats and their progressive supporters immediately seized upon the incident, claiming the specific ICE officer involved in the shooting was a cold blooded killer and demanding ICE overall cease operations in the city immediately, complete with Mayor Jacob Frey using profane language, the Trump Administration and its supporters acknowledged neither. Indeed, they did the exact opposite of what Democrats demanded. The very same day as the shooting, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirsti Noem labelled the incident “domestic terrorism” and defended the actions of the ICE officer. As she characterized it, “ICE agents repeatedly ordered her to get out of the car and to stop obstructing law enforcement, but she refused to obey their commands. She then proceeded to weaponize her vehicle and she attempted to run a law enforcement officer over. This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism. The ICE officer fearing for his life and the other officers around him and the safety of the public fired defensive shots. He used his training to save his own life and that of his colleagues.” The next day, Vice President JD Vance insisted the woman who was killed, Renee Nicole Good, was a “deranged leftist.” Though he acknowledged that the “Department of Homeland Security is already investigating this,” he continued to note, “the simple fact is, what you see is what you get. In this case, you have a woman who was trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nobody debates that. You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that. I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe against our law enforcement officers.” The President’s supporters said much the same, and ultimately, Minneapolis and Minnesota will end up with more ICE officers on the ground, not less, “hundreds more” according to Secretary Noem, “in order to allow our ICE and our Border Patrol individuals that are working in Minneapolis to do so safely.” The city and state are now attempting to sue to block the deployment, but regardless of the end result, the combination of hysterical outrage, accusations of murder, and demands to cease operating was met with a forceful counter argument and a surge of officers.
In other words, they pursued a strategy of blanket opposition and outrage, one they themselves acknowledged might lead to violence, and it has only produced the opposite effect. The only question: Why is anyone surprised? If the average person was listening to either Democrats, progressives, or even the mainstream media, President Trump never would’ve prevailed in 2024 and he certainly wouldn’t have an approval rating a little higher than a man many progressives have practically sainted or at least the secular equivalent, President Obama. He clearly knows this, as do his supporters, and whether you love him or hate him, it’s beyond dispute that he has repeatedly defied the odds and the expectations while thriving on this sort of conflict. They are feeding the beast, rather than starving it. While history might prove him wrong at some point, neither he nor any of his supporters have any reason whatsoever to listen to the haters and detractors now. Why would they when they haven’t given anyone the slightest reason to?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 