By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | February 05, 2025
When the president addresses Congress, we expect some partisanship. When Democrats talk about how they want to force people to do their bidding, Republicans don’t applaud. When Republicans talk about cutting people’s taxes, Democrats sit on their hands.
But there have always been times in the past when the entire chamber applauds, sometimes members of the opposing party even stand. That’s because the person addressing them is president of the United States, not leader of a faction.
Until now.
We have never seen a spectacle like we saw last night. Democratic women wearing pink (pink?) as a sign of protest. Various members holding up little placards as though they were at an auction bidding on who would come away the biggest loser. Others carried canes to, what, signify that the party is old and decrepit? The Democrats’ showrunner for the night deserves to be DOGED by his or her own party.
But truly the weirdest and most cult-like spectacle of the night was that not one Democrat – not one – had the cajones to acknowledge anything Donald Trump said. They sat there as though part of the Borg Collective from Star Trek, the cybernetic beings that assimilate entire races into a single collective consciousness with the catch phrase “Resistance is futile.”
As our ace contributor Bob Maistros points out, Trump knew this was going to happen and cleverly included in his speech a prediction that they’d refuse to applaud for anything. And for the next hour-plus, Democrats proved him right.
They didn’t clap for anything. Well, that’s not entirely true. Democrats did applaud when Trump said that we’d dumped $350 billion into the Ukraine war an ocean away while Europe offered relative peanuts to the conflict on their doorstep.
Earlier in the day, dozens of Democratic lawmakers took to social media to read from the exact same script, using all the exact same video clips, to attack Trump. All they needed was some Borg makeup to complete the scene.
What is this idea here? To show a unified party? Or to underscore to a public that already holds Democrats in low esteem that they literally have no ideas of their own, other than act like out-of-touch, angry, humorless, centrally programmed robots? Don’t Democrats know that the Borg were defeated? That resistance to their “equity” plan is not futile?
If the grim spectacle that we saw last night is evidence of what Democrats learned from their drubbing last November, then Trump is right, the Golden Age is here – for conservatives.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
Original article link
