The Democrats’ Insanity Defense
Republican activists say they have to water down the reality of their opponents’ agenda in focus groups. ‘They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.‘
by
Park MacDougald
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. As CNN had reported that week, Harris, when running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, had written in an ACLU questionnaire that she supported publicly funded “gender-affirming care,” including transition surgeries, for federal prison inmates and detained illegal immigrants. Follow-up reporting from The Washington Free Beacon revealed that while serving as California attorney general, Harris had in fact implemented a statewide policy of taxpayer funding for prisoners’ sex changes, born out of a settlement in which she agreed to pay for the transition of a man convicted of kidnapping a father of three and then murdering him as he begged for his life. Harris later bragged, on camera, about this policy as evidence of her commitment to the progressive “movement”—in a clip that has since become a staple of Trump campaign ads.
Many Americans still have trouble accepting these facts, because the underlying predicate—that Barack Obama purposefully sought to ally the United States with a terror-sponsoring, America-hating theocracy—seemed too insane to credit.
The sequence of events neatly encapsulated a pattern that has played out countless times since Trump entered American political life. Trump says something seemingly insane, to many people’s outrage and disbelief, only to have his supposed “lie” revealed to be wholly or at least significantly true. Often the specific truth revealed—that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite another example—is in fact “crazier” than Trump’s exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was.
The reason that this strategy has worked is because Democrats rely on all nonexplicitly right-wing media to adopt their framing of issues and cite the party’s preferred experts, which they do. The party’s influence over the country’s communications apparatus has, for the past decade, emerged into something like a political superpower, allowing it to act outside the normal bounds of American politics without suffering from political blowback.
“All of it,” said a Republican congressional staffer, “is insulated by their absolute confidence that they can just use their control over communications institutions to just say words, including change of language, right? Flip a switch and it’s now gender affirming care. Flip a switch and it’s now undocumented migrants, or undocumented Americans. Flip a switch and now you can change people’s pronouns.”
The result, for anyone skeptical of the Democratic Party yet bound to operate within the consensus reality of its discourse, is akin to living in a wilderness of mirrors. How to explain, for instance, that elected Democrats from the Biden White House on down support not only taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens, but policies that allow schools to “socially transition” children without informing their parents? How to explain, without sounding like a lunatic, that the newspapers and expert bodies that recommend life-altering surgeries for children, and defend them as “life-saving” or “medically necessary” care opposed only by cranks and Bible thumpers, either don’t know what they’re talking about or are lying to you for political reasons? That the claim that such surgeries were rarely if ever performed on children was also a lie? That when President Biden, the kindly old moderate, directed his Department of Health and Human Services to address the “barriers and exclusionary policies” keeping children from accessing “gender medicine,” what he was describing was a policy that would see members of his own administration pressuring medical agencies to allow procedures such as breast and penis removal be performed on young children, despite the lack of any proof that these measures contribute to greater mental or physical health?
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.
Outside the pages of a handful of news sites, however, you will look in vain for coverage of the Biden-Harris administration’s disturbingly close relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, an authoritarian and explicitly anti-American regime currently waging a multifront war against Israel. Like the Obama administration, of which it is a continuation, the Biden-Harris administration has attempted to realign the United States away from Israel and other traditional allies and toward a revisionist-Islamist bloc led by Iran but also including Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, and various Palestinian radical groups. This orientation is reflected at the level of policy—including nonenforcement of Iranian oil sanctions, flooding Hamas and Hezbollah with cash through cutouts, and, since Oct. 7, the relentless undermining of Israel’s war against Iran and its proxies—as well as at the level of personnel. The Biden administration’s envoy to Iran, who was suspended last spring for mishandling classified information later published in Iranian state media, also hired a confirmed Iranian influence agent into the U.S. State Department. And the White House’s coordinator for intelligence and defense policy on the National Security Council—i.e., the man who would normally be responsible for investigating the recent leak of Israeli military plans to Iran—is a former affiliate of not one but two fronts for the Iranian proxy Hamas: Students for Justice in Palestine and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. The Iranian regime has repaid the Biden-Harris administration for its generosity, hacking the emails of Trump campaign employees and handing them off to a Democratic PAC, which published them last week.
These are all demonstrable matters of fact. Yet many Americans still have trouble accepting them, because the underlying predicate—that our country is purposefully allying with a terror-sponsoring, America-hating theocracy in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which it has already promised to use to wipe America’s most powerful regional client, Israel, off the map—seemed too insane to credit. Why would Barack Obama have put that into motion, and why would everyone else let it happen? There are plenty of conceivable answers to these question, of course. But you can’t get at any of them if the underlying reality itself is too insane to accept.
Americans do not, as a rule, pay much attention to foreign policy, but the White House’s orientation abroad is inseparable from its politics at home. Within the United States, the Democratic power vertical has cultivated allies and sympathizers of the Iranian “axis of resistance” as donors, fundraisers, “organizers,” clients, and street muscle. It has protected them from law enforcement scrutiny, invited them into the policymaking process, and directed both federal money and funds from party-aligned megadonors such as George Soros and the Tides Nexus into their nonprofits, as I reported for Tablet in May. These nonprofits have in turn played a major role in organizing the pro-terror protests and encampments that erupted across blue America in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, which have drawn on activist networks previously mobilized to organize anti-Trump protest movements (e.g., the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter) during his first term and anti-Supreme Court protests in the wake of the Dobbs decision in 2022.
The idea that the radicals and thugs shutting down a bridge in your city are part of the Democratic machine is not a particularly difficult idea to wrap one’s head around, particularly following years in which we were constantly warned about the threat of supposed Trumpist “militias” like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The problem is that the Democrats’ alignment with these thugs strikes most Americans as too bizarre and obviously destructive to be true—a thing that “nobody would ever think of.” “You cannot get people to pay attention to the idea that the Biden-Harris machine is plugged into the Democratic machine, which is plugged into campus antisemitism,” a staffer told me. “It’s not because it’s too complicated. Voters understand that the same people fund the same things. It’s just that Americans find antisemites weird. We’re not in Europe, right?”
It does appear that this insanity defense may finally be breaking down. Polls and early voting returns suggest that Trump may be poised to recapture the White House and potentially even win the popular vote, despite a near daily stream of invective from Democrats and their press allies casting him and his supporters as some version or another of Hitler. Some of this is a product of objective factors hurting the incumbent administration, such as a middling economy and popular anger of its deliberate opening of the southern border, a crisis that eventually became too glaring for the White House to spin away. And some of it, no doubt, is the legacy of nearly a decade of hysteria and overheated propaganda on every topic under the sun, from Trump to the pandemic to race and the relations between the sexes. At some point, voters outside the bubble simply tune out.
Joe Biden, whatever his faults and infirmities, played an important role as a symbolic figurehead for what functioned in practice as a radical bureaucratic regime. Even as his administration pursued policies far outside the Overton window of American politics, it was difficult for anyone, let alone moderately engaged voters, to believe that “Scranton Joe,” the avuncular centrist and Irish bullshitter, believed in any of the things that his party was said to be doing. Noting the sudden success of the campaign’s transgender ads, one Trump campaign staffer told me, “We were making this attack on Biden, but it was through some sort of convoluted process because of, like, some sort of Department of Education regulation. But everyone perceived Biden as what he was—an establishment moderate. Maybe he’s had to take up some radical positions for political reasons, but no one thinks Joe Biden sincerely cares about trans rights.”
That seems to have changed when Biden was overthrown in favor of Kamala, whose 2020 primary campaign—pitched at party activists and powerbrokers—led her to make the mistake that both Biden and Obama for the most part managed to avoid: openly pandering to the party’s activist base, often on camera. Defund the police. Decriminalize illegal border crossings. Ban fracking. Confiscate guns. Transgender surgeries for illegals.
Harris has since tried to walk many of these positions back, which only creates the new problem of appearing inauthentic and weak—a bad combination when the opponent is Donald Trump, especially when he’s also trouncing you on every issue of substance. It is of course too early to say whether Trump really will return for a second term, though his campaign couldn’t have hoped for better odds back at the DNC in August, when it looked as if Obama and the rest of the party’s messaging machine might successfully reinvent Kamala as a patriotic moderate and champion of the middle class. That machine is slick and sophisticated, to be sure, but eventually, the laws of political gravity do reassert themselves. You can piss on the shoes of the American people for one term or maybe two, but eventually, they’re going to figure out it isn’t raining.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/democrats-insanity-defense
