Key Trump administration officials have been confronted at restaurants. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) called on protesters to harass Trump officials at restaurants, gas stations and department stores.
Progressive pundits and liberal media come up with novel ways to characterize President Trump as a Nazi, fascist, tyrant, or buffoon almost daily. Celebrities openly fantasize about hurting Trump.
What is behind this unprecedented confusion?
Just as Barack Obama was not a centrist, Trump is not one either. Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States. Trump promised to do the same and more—but in the exact opposite direction.
Trump’s agenda enrages the left in the same way that Obamacare, Obama’s tax hikes, Obama’s liberal Supreme Court picks, and the Iran nuclear deal enraged the right.
But the current progressive breakdown is about more than political differences. The outrage is primarily about power — or rather, its total and unexpected loss.
In 2009, Obama seemed to start a progressive revolution that would last a generation.
Democrats controlled the House. They had a supermajority in the Senate. Obama had a chance to secure a liberal majority on the Supreme Court for years.
Democrats gained ground on Republicans at the state and local levels. The media, universities, professional sports, Hollywood, and popular culture were all solidly left-wing.
A Republican had not won 51 percent of the popular vote in a presidential election since George H. W. Bush’s defeat by Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. Before 2016, Republicans had lost the popular vote in five of the previous six presidential elections.
And then the visions of a generation of progressive greatness suddenly disappeared.
Obama left behind a polarized nation. Democrats lost both the House and the Senate. During Obama’s term, Democrats lost more than 1,000 state seats.
Presumptive winner Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election.
Foolishly, Clinton tried to secure a landslide victory by wasting valuable campaign time in unwinnable red states like Arizona and Georgia. Meanwhile, she too often neglected winnable purple states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which Obama won in 2008 and 2012. Clinton apparently forgot that the Electoral College, not the popular vote, elects the president.
After his election, President Trump did not falter as predicted. Following Obama’s precedent of relying on executive orders, Trump began to recalibrate everything from immigration enforcement to energy development.
Abroad, Trump has done what no other Republican president has dared to do: bomb ISIS, scrapped the Iran deal, sought the denuclearization of North Korea, withdrew from the Paris climate accord and moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The US economy took off with novel tax cuts and deregulation. Dramatic improvements in unemployment, economic growth, and oil and gas production created novel confidence among consumers and businesses.
Despite his regular vulgarity, Trump is approaching 50 percent approval ratings in several polls. That has only made the impotent opposition even angrier — both at the other half of the country for supporting Trump and at Trump himself, who is full of passion and ridiculing progressives in a way no previous president has.
Worse still, progressives largely lost power, at least partly through no fault of their own.
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unwisely lowered the number of votes required to overcome a filibuster for leadership nominations and most judicial nominations in 2013. That mistake gave Republicans a chance to reshape the Supreme Court when they took over the Senate in 2014.
Obama chose not to try to win over the opposition but to discourage it by turning sharply left in his second term. Hillary Clinton foolishly entangled herself in a series of personal scandals that embarrassed her party and contributed to its defeat.
In response to their sudden loss of political power, Democrats would be wise to focus on the center, as Bill Clinton did, which effectively ended the Reagan Republican era.
They could abandon their obsession with identity politics and instead try to win over working-class voters on more inclusive grounds of class rather than race.
Instead, Democrats endlessly rehashed the 2016 election. Groundhog Day-style, Hillary Clinton repeatedly offered dull excuses for her defeat.
For progressives, Trump has become not an adversary to be defeated with a better plan, but an evil to be destroyed. Moderate Democrats have been written off as boring; leftist fringe elements have been praised as clever.
Voters in 2016 were outraged by redistribution, open borders, bigger government, and higher taxes, but now progressives are promising those voters even more of what they didn’t want in the first place.
Furious at their sudden and unexpected loss of power, furious progressives have done almost anything to lose even more power.
And this paradox only leads to more uproar.
