Flashback to late October of 2024: The Democrats’ Insanity Defense.
In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must have dismissed it out of hand. “She did things that nobody would ever think of,” Trump said, while rattling off a list of some of the vice president’s most radical past positions. “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”
The idea that the vice president “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” seemed so patently absurd that The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser cited it in a column posted the next morning as an example of Trump’s lunacy: “What the hell was he talking about?” Glasser wrote of the trans operation lines. “No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’ point.”
That reaction was understandable—the idea of the operations was, as Trump himself said, a “thing nobody would ever think of.” The problem was that it is true.
The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. “When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,” he said. “They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”
Another Republican operative made a related point on the failure of the party’s attempt to message on trans issues in 2022, which was that the reality of the procedures was so gruesome that voters simply preferred not to think about it. “Phrases like ‘genital mutilation’ are disgusting and viscerally off-putting, even to voters who may be sympathetic to the Republicans’ position but will just write you off as a freak for talking about it that way.”
A similar dynamic plays out in foreign policy. On the one hand the Democrats conjured out of thin air the claim that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, which was, we now know, a conspiracy theory concocted by ex-spies and Clinton campaign operatives and seeded in the intelligence agencies and media by the outgoing Obama administration to cripple the new administration. That is to say that it is not a matter of partisan political opinion; it is simply false. Yet as of 2022, nearly half of U.S. voters, and a majority of Democrats, still believed that Trump was elected in 2016 due to Russian interference, and the hoax remains a mainstay of Democratic rhetoric. It even played a major role in the 2020 election, providing the predicate for the Biden campaign to collude with tech companies and retired spooks to censor reporting about Hunter Biden’s foreign influence-peddling schemes, which turned out to be entirely real.
THERE'S MUCH MORE.
