OPINION:
Over the past three weeks, President Trump has unleashed a blitzkrieg of executive orders designed to reduce government and bring back sanity.
Surrounded by grateful female athletes in the Oval Office, he signed a directive to keep males out of girls’ and women’s sports teams and locker rooms, undoing his predecessor’s madness.
Many Democrats are taking this political sea change badly.
“I was in denial for several days, my stomach in turmoil,” Sally Quinn, former religion page editor for The Washington Post and widow of Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, wrote about her morning after the election. “Then, I realized what I was really experiencing: grief. I looked up Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I moved on from denial to anger to bargaining. What could I have done to prevent this from happening?”
Meanwhile, at the Democratic National Committee meeting on Feb. 1, strategists analyzed the pieces and devised the formula that had led them to lose the White House and both houses of Congress: Wokeness, economic madness and the illusion that they lacked clear messaging. We need more of this, not less, they concluded.
To which I say, mug them again. One woman was dragged out by security after screaming, “I am terrified!” Others yelled, “Climate emergency!” and “Fossil fuel money!”
“The Democratic brand is in the toilet,” Molly Ball wrote in The Wall Street Journal, noting that a Journal poll found that “60 percent of Americans view the party unfavorably while only 36 percent see it favorably. Democrats lost ground with nearly every demographic.”
Former congressional candidate Adam Frisch chimed in: “Twenty big cities, Aspen and Martha’s Vineyard — that’s what’s left of the Democratic Party.”
Well, not really. Nearly half of the country went for Kamala Harris, and voters gave Republicans only a small advantage in the Senate and a razor-thin majority in the House.
Republicans had better not get complacent. What goes around comes around.
Democrats have set their sights on taking back one or both houses of Congress in 2026 and are mounting a fierce resistance, especially in their legacy media.
Dire warnings about the Republicans, and especially Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dominate the coverage. The Washington Post, chastised by owner Jeff Bezos for being out of touch with many Americans, was supposed to curb its worst excesses. Not happening.
“Trump’s cruel ban of trans athletes aims to demonize, not protect,” thundered the headline for a column Thursday by Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins. She called the administration’s ban on males in girls’ and women’s sports a “cavernous cruelty, and the distinct smell of autocratic sauerbraten.”
That’s code for comparing Mr. Trump to Adolf Hitler. Other leftist pundits gave Mr. Musk the same treatment for his outstretched arm in a photo, although that nasty little slander has been eclipsed by pictures on social media of several Democrats in the same pose.
During the 1980s, comedian Mort Sahl spoofed liberal media bias with a fake headline: “World Ends Tomorrow: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.”
Not to be outdone, The Washington Post raged Wednesday on its front page over the president’s executive order halting spending by the United States Agency for International Development: “Fear, pain, hunger for millions as aid dries up.”
According to the White House’s Feb. 3 order, USAID has spent billions of dollars on weird stuff overseas, including $2 million on Guatemala for sex changes and LGBTQ activism; $4.67 million on EcoHealth Alliance, which funded bat virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China; and $10 million on meals for the Nusra Front, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group.
The agency’s leftist staff also has interfered in foreign countries against U.S. policies. There’s a name for that.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was appointed acting director of USAID, says the agency will be analyzed and that anything worth funding, such as real humanitarian aid, will continue. However, it might be under the State Department so they can keep an eye on things. Meanwhile, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter Feb. 3 to the acting directors of the Justice Department and the FBI, calling the ouster of some ideologues an “alarming threat to national security.”
No, it isn’t. It’s a threat only to a politicized, partisan operation that needs a thorough detox.
Any Democrats who can’t handle all this change might want to read Ms. Quinn’s aforementioned tale of reaching peace through methods taught by a Harvard psychiatrist who doubles as a Buddhist guru.
He, too, woke up and felt “rage, fear and disgust” upon learning about the election outcome. But she says he put his Zen meditation into gear and got through it.
As for her, she went from acceptance back to denial upon learning that Kimberly Guilfoyle had been appointed “ambassador to my beloved Greece, where I spent the happiest years of my childhood. I had a total relapse.”
Maybe it’s a good time to try something else: “No Jesus, no peace; know Jesus, know peace.”
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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