Democrats: “This is a Constitutional Crisis”

This is exciting news to me.

ABC News:

“A fiery group of about a dozen congressional Democrats blasted Elon Musk and President Donald Trump on Monday afternoon outside of USAID’s headquarters amid their attempts to shut down the overseas funding agency, claiming the rapidly unfolding events are causing chaos and harming national security.

The Democrats called the actions against USAID “illegal” and a “constitutional crisis” while vowing to take their defense of the agency to the courts. …”

As I have repeatedly explained, I am closely monitoring how Democrats react to Trump 2.0.

In one plausible scenario, nothing much may have changed in 2024. Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders. Many of these will get temporarily blocked in federal district courts. Some will go down while others will be upheld in the appeals courts and at the Supreme Court. In a few months, Trump’s poll numbers could collapse like Joe Biden’s and the Democratic opposition could be reinvigorated, which is what happened to Biden by the summer of 2021. Republicans would then go on to lose the 2026 midterms. This is basically the sort of political environment we have been stuck in for twenty years. It is why lots of Democrats are doing nothing and counting on “thermostatic politics” to kick in.

The historian in me is confident that this cycle will not continue indefinitely. Polarization can only go on for so long before one side or the other breaks. Soon, we will have a clear majority party and a minority party again, and the majority party will have a new governing ideology, the confidence and the political mandate to aggressively impose its vision on the country. The thermostat will break and American politics will depolarize. Watching Democrats impotently whine at this press conference and on television about how we are in a “constitutional crisis” is reminiscent of the Lincoln and FDR presidencies.

In those days, Democrats and Republicans respectively were lost. The Republicans eventually came to accept New Deal liberalism and internationalism. Liberalism became the American mainstream. The culture settled into a long period of consensus between the two parties. Thus, it is encouraging to watch Democrats begin to settle into their new role and act like the great losers of the past bleating on about a “constitutional crisis” in a time of enormous pent up demand for sweeping, systemic change.

Trump’s effort to destroy the mainstream media is reminiscent of Lincoln and FDR. Roosevelt also used radio to bypass the press and take his message directly to the people.