America, brace yourselves for the Left’s coming rage. Just as in 2017, expect it again in 2025. Only worse. Because this time, the Left understands that America has turned on them.
The greatest lie of the 2024 election was Kamala Harris’ claim of a campaign of joy. It was because the Left is the most joyless ideology there is. Their entire Marxist belief system is built on a zero-sum equation of exploitation: one group advances only at the expense of the other. Accordingly, everywhere they see and seek this conflict.
America’s Left is even more miserable still. In their Woke vision, they do not see just Marx’s single bipolar conflict (between capitalists and proletarians), but an ever-expanding multiplicity of them. Accordingly, they will not be happy until everyone is as miserable as they are. And they are plenty miserable, which is why they are always angry, always shouting. There’s a reason why polling consistently shows liberals are less happy than conservatives.
America can expect the leftist condition to become even more strident with Trump’s inauguration. After all, it did after his first one.
In 2016, the Left was dismissive of Trump. After he won, they were dismissive of his victory. To them, Hillary Clinton had lost more than he had triumphed; she was unlikeable and not far enough left anyway. Now, she was gone and the Democrat establishment discredited with her. The path was open for Sanders to finish what he had started in 2016’s primaries.
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And so, beginning in 2017, the Left rampaged that way for eight years. While Trump was in office, they railed against him. When Biden replaced him, the Left forced their agenda through his administration.
After Trump’s first victory, the Left had an assurance, a certainty: Trump and his victory could be dismissed. To the Left’s mind, 2020 proved them correct. Up until November 5th of 2024, the Left could still feel that way.
Then, the Left lost. What’s more, they lost not just the election; they lost the American people. Incredibly, Trump won the popular vote—something no Republican presidential candidate had done in 20 years. He won every one of the swing states—something neither he nor Biden had done in either of the previous two elections.
And the Left had lost with one of their own. Kamala Harris’ defeat did not offer the Left the buffer that Biden’s would have. To the Left, Trump beating Biden would have been a reprisal of Clinton’s 2016 defeat: they could have blamed it on the Democrat Party’s establishment. They could have blamed it on Biden’s attributes—too old, too white, too male.
But Harris’ defeat meant the whole blow fell directly on them. Harris was one of them, and one with them. Hers was their agenda—illegal immigration, radical environmentalism, abortion extremism. The Left knew that Harris had always fronted for them. Her failure was therefore their failure.
Even if the Left will not explicitly admit these things, they know them. They know too that things could get worse. Trump is already proving more popular in transition than he did in campaigning. In office, Trump could prove more popular still. Once Trump is gone, his conservative populism could not just live on but prove even more attractive to the American people, if embraced by someone without Trump’s personal baggage.
After 2016 and over the next four years, the Left were outraged—at Trump, at Hillary Clinton, at the Democrat establishment. Following 2024, they are outraged at the American people.
In 2025, the Left’s outrage will be distilled down to rage. They will act out their anger, something they excel at. Already we are seeing it as Democrat officeholders vow resistance to the incoming Trump administration.
They are vowing it on the Left’s issues—transgender surgery, illegal immigration, environmental extremism—the same issues that lost them the election. Such stances are nonsensical politically. But emotionally, they make perfect sense…to the Left. This is who they are, what they believe, and if the American people do not, then to hell with the American people.
Knowing they have lost the American people, the Left knows they have nothing left to lose. The outrage they once reserved for Trump and his administration, they can—and will—now loose broadly without hesitation.
J.T. Young is the author of the new book, “Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left,” from RealClear Publishing. He has more than three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, and OMB, and representing a Fortune 20 company.
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