Time was when Republican presidents were supposedly either stupid or evil. Ike and Reagan and W were stupid. Nixon and Trump were evil.
Those were the days — the days when Democrats restricted their petty and pathetic name-calling to either of two convenient categories. Donald Trump, though, has flummoxed the Democrats by defying that easy categorization.
Trump is worse than evil, their focus-group thinking went, and so are his supporters. So we need a new smear. It doesn’t need to be accurate or historically defensible. It just needs to roll off the tongue and conjure up the worst of all possible images. “Nazi” is good, but Trump hasn’t yet invaded Europe and rounded up all the Jews, so that might strain credulity even among our dim-witted minions. So it needs to be like “Nazi,” but not quite so Nazi-like. It needs to be … think, think, think … fascist! We’ll call them fascists!
The Trump-era Democrats had found their smear. Mind you, they haven’t found any good ideas to run on, nor have they managed to pull their historically awful polling numbers out of trial-lawyer territory, but they’ve got their smear, by golly.
Indeed, the Democrats have fallen for “fascist” like a late-‘70s teenager falling for that Farrah Fawcett pin-up. While at their keyboards during the day, they play around with the word in various font treatments. When they have trouble sleeping at night, they count fascist sheep.
But this fascist fetish is deadly serious stuff. Not even the political assassination of Charlie Kirk by one of their own — “Hey, fascist! Catch!” was written on one of the assassin’s shell casings — has knocked some decency into them.
Well, except for Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman. “Unchecked extreme rhetoric, like labels as Hitler or fascist, will foment more extreme outcomes,” he warned.
As for the rest of them, they’ve doubled down. Take, for example, a press conference last week at which the Democrats railed against the Trump administration’s assault on free speech in the wake of unfunny and unwatchable late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. (Never mind the fact that ABC, not Trump, suspended Kimmel. Democrats never let facts get in the way of a good narrative.)
“Fascism is not on the way. It is here,” said Democrat Congressman Maxwell Frost, the shame of the Free State of Florida. “The First Amendment is how generations of Americans, from civil rights activists to labor organizers, American workers, LGBTQ+ activists, have fought for progress, and it is our power.”
Not to be outdone, pasty-faced Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy lashed out at the same presser when a reporter had the nerve to ask him whether his party’s vile and incendiary rhetoric had anything to do with the political violence all around us. “Donald Trump is trying to” — wait for it! — “destroy our democracy,” said Murphy. “He is trying to silence free speech. He is acting in a way that is scarily similar to many would-be despots all across history. We have no obligation to sugarcoat the gravity of this moment. The only way we save this nation is if the people of this country rise up in peaceful protest, if they mobilize all across America.”
But the Democrats’ theatrics weren’t confined to hackneyed media events. There on Capitol Hill at a House Oversight Committee hearing was the Jew-hating Pride of Dearborn herself, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. “We need to stand up against this fascist takeover,” she said. “That’s not a bad word, it’s a fact.”
On the contrary, “fascist” is a very bad word when it’s improperly applied to an American president and his supporters. Why? Because Trump-deranged Democrats and their fellow leftists are too dull to know it’s a lie. Instead, they actually believe these demagogic Democrats, and they act on it — often with deadly consequences.
Democrats have so thoroughly succumbed to laziness brought by a lack of challenges from an honest media that they no longer even bother to defend their positions. All they can do is smear their political opponents and reflexively stake out the farthest of far-left territory. On the Democrat left, name-calling has replaced lawmaking.
Which is why today’s Democrat Party is about as popular as shingles.
