Earlier this week, Julian Epstein, an old-school Democrat, delivered a spectacular rebuke of his party’s infighting and its cartoonish anti-Trumpism.
Epstein began by noting some of the things that are sucking up all the oxygen in the Democrats’ room these days: “Political veteran James Carville was punching down to the ingénue David Hogg, scolding him for ham-handedly seeking to primary party elders. AOC and Bernie Sanders want to declare war against oligarchs who, ironically, mostly support Democrats and their causes. The portly [Illinois Governor J.B.] Pritzker is now competing in a speech to New Hampshire Democrats to be the party’s angriest man in the room (of course, when his family is not running Harvard University into the ground with the anti-Western pedagogical trash and open tolerance of campus bigotry).”
The Carville-Hogg feud is an interesting one, and it’s tearing the party apart, pitting the old against the new.
“But,” Epstein laments, “there is a certain self-defeating, almost Elmer Fudd quality, overlying these Democratic party contretemps.”
Here, we might suggest to Epstein that part of the party’s problem is that its elitists tend to trot out 25-cent words like “ingénue,” “oligarchs,” “pedagogical,” and “contretemps,” when humble dimers like “youngster,” “fat cats,” “educational,” and “arguments” will work perfectly well. But c’est la vie.
Beyond that, I think the better analogy is to Daffy Duck rather than the hapless Fudd, but more on that in a minute.
“Fudd,” continues Epstein, “could never catch Bugs Bunny and often wound up shooting himself in the face. Keep this image in mind as you consider what’s happened in the last week or so.”
Bugs, of course, is President Donald Trump, who, while the Democrats are consumed with petty potshots, is shutting our southern border, reconfiguring global trade, remaking the Middle East, and bringing trillions in international investment to the United States.
Now, then, to the Daffy Duck analogy: While Elmer Fudd is hapless, bumbling, and mostly harmless, the Democrats are nothing of the sort. They’re nasty, vindictive, and always scheming, just like Daffy Duck.
Moreover, just like Daffy, they’re suffering from a literal case of pronoun trouble. In the Democrats’ case, it’s an inability to let go of lost causes, the embodiment of which is the notion that it’s okay to let boys and men compete against girls and women in sports.
Hah! That’s it! Hold it right there! Pronoun trouble.
Thus, while the Democrats are busy shooting each other in the face, Trump is giving the American people one reason after another to run away from the party of Daffy Duck. As Epstein rightly warns:
But look around the corner. If the White House can stick the landing on the 17 imminent bilateral trade deals with major global partners, depressurize the squeeze with second-order countries, and narrow the tariff aperture to focus on China’s mendacity, then a major trade reformation could be within sight.
Together with the “big beautiful” tax relief and deregulation bill slated to pass soon, mid-summer could see a major economic boon. If so, the Elmer Fudd Democrats will have nothing — as is often the case with maximal rejectionists — and will be seen again as the boys and girls that cried wolf, as they were in Russiagate and the Nazi slurs directed against Trump.
Epstein’s voice, though, isn’t alone in the wilderness. The increasingly sensible Bill Maher was at it again recently, slamming the Democrats for their failures as parents: “Liberals need to push back on the dumb ideas that come from their children. The Democrats’ problem is the energy of the party’s with the young, and the young are with the terrorists. That’s not good.”
No, it’s not good at all — unless you’re the president of the United States, and your goal is to Make America Great Again. In that case, you’re best off not interfering while your political opponents keep fighting over pronouns and shooting themselves in the face.
