When listening to Democrat thought leaders, it is best to know the pattern:
Trump (or his administration) does something. Democrats explain that action in a way that makes it look stupid, petty, corrupt or some combination of the three. Meanwhile, they ignore the far more plausible explanation that’s staring them in the face – an explanation that supports the public good.
The most recent example arose in response to the U.S. operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Operation Absolute Resolve.
On Saturday, Trump told reporters he has no plans to parachute in Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado to run the country.
“It’d be very tough for her to be the leader,” Trump said. “She doesn’t have the support within — or the respect within — the country.”
For now, the Chavista regime remains in place and Delcy Rodríguez — Maduro’s VP — has stepped in as interim president.
The liberal media saw their chance to strike in the most idiotic way imaginable.
The Washington Post reported Monday that “[t]wo people close to the White House” told the paper Trump’s “lack of interest in boosting Machado … stemmed from her decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, an award the president had openly covered.”
“If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be president of Venezuela today,” one of these anonymous and dubious sources reportedly told the Post.
It’s the perfect red-meat story for progressives: Trump comes off as an unprincipled narcissist who doesn’t mind destabilizing an entire country to avenge a perceived slight.
The average MSNOW-viewing WaPo reader experiences a thrill of “fear for Our Democracy™” and the warm feeling of superiority that always accompanies it. All his priors have been validated. God is in His Heaven; Orange Man is bad; and, all’s right with their twisted world.
Never mind that this explanation falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. For one thing, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.
The day after WaPo published its story, The Wall Street Journal reported that, prior to the raid on Caracas, Trump was briefed on a CIA analysis, which found that keeping Maduro’s regime in place was the best way to maintain stability after removing him.
The Venezuelan military has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and rapidly overturning it could plunge the country into chaos. Installing Machado as president now would be a blunder on par with the Bush administration’s disastrous “de-Baathification” of Iraq.
The New York Times confirmed the Journal’s reporting (with the added detail that Trump envoy Richard Grenell spoke with Machado and concluded that she had no clear plan for putting a post-Maduro regime into power).
We also have no idea who WaPo’s unnamed sources are. “Two people close to the White House” could mean almost anything. We all remember the first Trump administration, when formerly respectable publications granted anonymity to any clown who offered them a scrap of anti-Trump gossip, no matter how absurd it was or how remote the “source” was.
Unfortunately, Democrats have proven time after time that they’re more than willing to accept any explanation — no matter how far-fetched — that affirms their Trump derangement.
They did it last summer when the Justice Department overrode antitrust officials by allowing a telecom merger to move forward.
Prominent senators like Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) immediately screamed corruption. They tried their hardest to conjure up a full-scale production: televised hearings, salacious allegations about backroom deals and a new “principled Republican whistleblower” as star witness.
Their attempt fizzled because the real story — the settlement not presenting antitrust concerns — was far simpler. The intelligence community advised DOJ to greenlight the deal because it would help counter the global dominance of Huawei, a Chinese telecom company that threatens U.S. national security.
That’s it. No corruption and no “All the President’s Men” drama. Just policymakers weighing tradeoffs and making a prudential judgment. It’s fine for Democrats (or Republicans) to disagree with that judgment but they should do so without descending into pure fabulism.
Democrats pulled the same trick a few months earlier when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs. They followed a simple formula and were intended to provide a basis for future negotiations: a 10 percent global tariff with each country’s rate adjusted upward based on its trade surplus with the United States.
But one particular list entry stuck out: the 10 percent tariff on the Heard and McDonald Islands — Australian territories populated solely by wildlife. Liberal outlets rejoiced. “The penguins and seals who live there — they will never menace the American economy again by flooding us with their cheap exports,” declared Rachel Maddow.
“Idiot Drumpf tariffed the penguins” is an irresistible narrative for any Maddow fan. Why do the hard work of seriously defending decades of failed neoliberal trade policy when you can just laugh the whole thing off as one big farce? But once again, there was a far more logical explanation.
For one thing, the U.S. did actually import $1.4 million worth of goods from the islands in 2022, according to the World Bank. Leaving those islands as the sole exception to a global tariff regime would encourage dishonest actors to exploit that loophole.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed this explanation almost immediately. “If you leave anything off the list, the countries that try to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us,” he told CBS.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that “the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.” And on issues ranging from Venezuela to antitrust policy to tariffs, Democrats have established an impressive record of success. Substantive policy debates are good, but if we want to start having them again, Democrats will need to get over their TDS. It’s rotting their brains and wasting our time.
Michael Flanagan is a former captain in the United States Army, a practicing attorney, and a former Member of Congress from Illinois. He served on the House Judiciary Committee