It’s almost Inauguration Day 2025, and liberals are still proving they haven’t learned a single lesson from Donald Trump’s election victory in November.
Democrats are currently rudderless and jostling for power ahead of their Feb. 1 vote to elect a new chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a job that will prove crucial in forming the next resistance to the second Trump administration. The current DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, will step aside early in 2025 as his four-year term comes to an end. Despite the repudiation of race-based identity politics this election, Harrison defended his party’s more woke elements following Kamala Harris’s loss. In replacing Harrison, you would think liberals might propose a Democrat who will turn the page on an era of unpopular left-wing politics that has all but obliterated the party’s brand.
That’s not quite the case.
CNN political analyst Leah Wright Rigueur argued Friday that left-wingers Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and twice failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams should be considered kingmakers in the party’s upcoming DNC election.
“As you hear somebody like [DNC chair candidate] Marianne Williamson, who kind of emerges every four years to say these things, we have to remember that Marianne Williamson’s biggest endorsers have been billionaires,” Wright Rigueur said, touching on Williamson’s recent announcement that she is running for DNC chair. “And that’s not actually very much in touch with where the Democratic base wants to be right now, as they said resoundingly, in this last election cycle. The person, the people actually, that they should be listening to are Bernie Sanders and Stacey Abrams.”
“Those are the two people who have been very consistent and very in touch with the American public that have been related to the Democratic Party,” she continued. “Those are the people that are going to help pick the leadership of the Democratic Party, or at the very least, should be helping to pick the leadership of the Democratic Party as we move forward into this next election cycle.”
Wright Rigueur is but the latest liberal signaling an unwillingness to learn from the loss to Donald Trump. Earlier in December, Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, appeared to be in complete denial about why he and the vice president were shellacked.
“We were pledging to be inclusive, we were pledging to bring people in,” Walz said in his first interview since the defeat. “Donald Trump has said that that isn’t what he wants, and so if that’s what America is leaning towards, I guess for me, it’s to understand and learn more about America, because I thought that they were going to probably move towards a more positive message.”
Even Harris and her allies seem deluded as the failed candidate is reportedly weighing another bid for president in 2028.
“There will be a desire to hear her voice, and there won’t be a vacuum for long,” a person close to Harris told Politico. Another unnamed Harris ally told the outlet, “She proved a lot of skeptics wrong as a political athlete. And her standing with the public is as good as any Democrats with the name I.D. that she has.”
Later in December, other prominent left-wing Democrats showed that race-based identity politics is still simmering within their party following Daniel Penny’s acquittal. Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett said the Penny verdict was “more than a miscarriage of justice,” and rather a “green light for more violence against unarmed Black Americans,” she wrote. Meanwhile, Democratic Pennsylvania Rep. Summer Lee argued that “vigilante violence against Black people often goes unchecked.”
“The acquittal of Daniel Penny in the murder of Jordan Neely is a painful reminder of a long-standing reality: vigilante violence against Black people often goes unchecked. Jordan deserved compassion, not violence. We stand with his loved ones in demanding accountability,” she claimed.
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both went into fully equivocation mode after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in cold blood. Instead of outright denouncing the murder as radical political violence, Warren and Ocasio-Cortez made slippery statements
“Violence is never the answer,” Warren said. “But people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”
“This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them,” Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter.
Democrats are facing one of the biggest tests for their party in years: how do they push back against an historic Trump mandate in Congress, and how do they recover the racially and economically diverse coalition that Trump, the supposed racist and elitist billionaire, broke up to secure his second bid to the White House? The right answers will certainly not come from the likes of Stacey Abrams, Elizabeth Warren, or AOC. So long as the party’s leaders and rank-and-file members continue to flirt or outright embrace hardcore, left-wing politicians and their ideologies, the party will only set itself up for failure — in the first months of Trump’s new administration, and the years beyond.
