Democrat overkill made Trump stronger

An idiotic panty raid and unprecedented indictments turned his win into a landslide

John Harris is founding editor and global editor-in-chief of Politico, a news outlet that tells Washington what it wants to hear. This week, he told DC something it needed to hear: Trump really is your president this time.

Courts won’t save you.

A resistance within the federal government won’t save you.

Bird flu and another pandemic panic won’t save you.

This ain’t 2017 with a rookie elected official from north of Hoboken. This time Trump knows the drill. They say sergeant majors don’t walk on water, they just know where the rocks are. Trump is now the sergeant major of presidents.

Harris wrote:

He is not a fluke, who got elected initially in 2016 almost entirely because of the infirmities of his opponent. He is not someone the American public somehow misunderstands—as though Democrats and the news media have not spent 10 years forcefully highlighting the risks of his record and character.

He is someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match. In other words: He is a force of history.

This is something his most ardent supporters—still shy of a national majority—have never doubted but something others, myself included, have been slow to reckon with. The inaugural address and a raft of hundreds of executive orders Trump has promised for his opening days in office make it impossible to avoid.

The guy has a toe or two in denial (“still shy of a national majority”) but he senses that huffing and puffing will never blow his house down because it’s, as the Commodores once sang, a Brick House.

A Democrat Party that once blew away Nixon’s 49-state demolition of McGovern in two years has been after Trump for more than a decade. As shopworn as the Road Runner analogy is, it still applies. Meep, meep.

Democrats and the rest of Washington defeated Trump in the dead of night in 2020 by stuffing the ballot boxes with mail-in votes. They thought they got away with something and maybe they did.

But then they had to rub it in by inciting an insurrection at the Capitol and impeaching him again. RINOs went out of their way to turn the midterm red wave into a puddle of pink.

Thus began three years of Operation Humiliation or whatever they really called this unprecedented abuse of the law. The Soros crowd launched a coordinated attack of civil lawsuits and fake crimes.

Some Ivy Leaguer with a master’s in communication or some other fakery convinced Obama to raid Mar-a-Lago and slap Trump with phony national security law violations. The FBI confiscated 100,000 documents from Trump and rifled through Melania’s underwear drawer.

They put boxes of these documents in his bathroom and took pictures like a group of terrorists showing off hostages they kidnapped. Democrats brought in Jack R. Smith, an unhinged and discredited prosecutor whose work was overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court, to prosecute the case.

No one in their right mind wanted this.

Democrats showed they are completely out of touch with the electorate. Their coveted mugshot became a campaign fundraiser for Trump, not them. At that point, intelligent beings who look at the voters instead of the mirror would have put their selfie sticks down and walked away from lawfare.

But Democrats plunged right ahead, making Trump the sympathetic hero and revealing themselves as the evil, vile villains they are.

They were bumbling as well as evil and vile. Their plan was to replace Biden with Harris at the last minute and avoid a primary battle. Democrats set up a presidential debate in June, an odd time for such an historic event. Trump played along with them. Biden lost pretty badly.

Democrats followed the debate up with a terrible interview with George Stephanopoulos which cleared the way for Harris replacing FJB.

But Kamala-la-dee-dah was almost as bad at campaigning as she was at picking a running mate. The fear was picking Josh Shapiro would have cost her Michigan but Tim Walz cost her Michigan AND Pennsylvania.

Sometimes, you just have to take the L. Had Democrats done so in 2020, Trump would have left the White House by the back door after the usual poor second term for presidents. Even the New York Times opinion people see that now.

Instead of saying goodbye to Trump, liberals say hello to an invigorated, experienced president who really was ready on Day One.

AP reported, “President Donald Trump moved quickly to remake the Department of Homeland Security Tuesday, firing the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and Coast Guard before their terms are up and eliminated all the members of a key aviation security advisory group.”

Forbes reported, “President Donald Trump’s administration is in the process of purging more than 1,000 Biden appointees from their government roles, and has already announced several high-profile firings, placed all DEI employees on paid leave and reportedly reassigned more than a dozen veteran Justice Department officials.”

NBC reported, “The Trump administration fired four top officials at the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, which oversees U.S. immigration courts, late Monday.”

The firings I like. They send a message to other abusers of their positions of power. The executive orders are many and very satisfying.

What surprises me are the deals that Trump is cutting with businesses as well as Washington leaders and foreign heads of state.

Fox reported, “President Donald Trump unveiled a massive artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure project from the private sector on the first full day of his second term in office on Tuesday.

“During a speech at the White House, Trump announced that Softbank, OpenAI and Oracle have joined forces for a project called Stargate, to build data centers in the U.S. for powering AI.

“The CEOs of all three tech firms—OpenAI's Sam Altman, Oracle's Larry Ellison, and Softbank’s Masayoshi Son—joined Trump from the Roosevelt Room at the White House for the announcement.

“The initial investment for the project will be $100 billion, with plans to expand to $500 billion over the next four years. The first data center built under the initiative will be in Texas, and it will eventually expand to other states.”

I hope that Softbank does not let us down like Taiwan’s Foxxcomm did 8 years ago.

I know Trump won’t let us down this time because he didn’t let us down last time. There were setbacks. He’s learned his lessons.

But so has the electorate. In 2016, the wall was a joke to many people. Four years of FJB changed minds on the wall because we saw what happened without one.

The public also saw how vicious and cruel Democrats are. They went after Trump too hard and too often. When they saw that didn’t work, they should have cut and run. Only after the election did they realize their folly.

Trump realized their folly all along. He came into office ready to exploit the landslide—excluding California, he won by 5 million votes—from the get-go.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the weathervane of American politics, is OK with tariffs now: “People argue is it inflationary and not inflationary. I would put it in perspective, if it's a little inflationary, but it's good for national security, so be it. I mean, get over it.”

You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them. Democrats proved their ignorance of the latter in 2020 and again in 2024. We shall see how they handle JD Vance in 2028 because they sure bungled on Trump.