Let House Theatrics Commence

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

 

Immediately following the November 2016 presidential election, thousands of left-wing protesters took to Blue America’s streets to declare that “Trump is not our president!” (True — then. Donald Trump was elected in November, but wasn’t inaugurated until January 2017.)

NY Times: “Thousands of people across the country marched, shut down highways, burned effigies and shouted angry slogans…to protest the election of Donald J. Trump as president.”

Mayhem ensued, including violent assaults, blocked traffic, pepper spray, arson, shattered storefronts and looting. Injuries were common. Law enforcement described some protests as “riots.

A Facebook page entitled “Not My President” called for protesters to invade Washington to disrupt Inauguration Day. Anti-Trump demonstrators swore that nationwide protests were “just a taste of things to come.” They were.

The protests continued for days, in some places, for weeks and months. Indeed, post-inauguration protesters pledged to “bring unprecedented disruption to his life as president,” by protesting everywhere Trump traveled. In January 2018, The Washington Post reported that, in the year following Trump’s inauguration, there had been protests somewhere in America every day.

The repetition has become childishly predictable and tiresome, yet it is somewhat understandable.

Before the 2016 election, the mainstream punditry’s confidence of a Hillary Clinton presidency raised Democrats’ expectations sky-high. Poll analyst Nate Silver gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning. A Princeton University analysis put Clinton’s chances at 99 percent.

Slam dunk, right?

It wasn’t. Trump won, and a radical “Resistance,” including Antifa, formed. Democrats launched two years of nonstop campaigning, vituperation, doxing and character assassination. Embittered media exhausted itself re-inflating Democratic expectations for the 2018 midterm election.

The sense of inevitability they projected was enough to intimidate forty squishy House Republicans, including some local representatives, into retiring to avoid drowning under what left-wing media convinced them would be a huge Blue Wave. Rather than risking losses in 2018, two Republican senators facing reelection retired. One died.

Despite forty former Republican-held open seats and a “certain” Democratic House majority, there was no wave. After two full years of non-stop, left-wing histrionics, American voters did not repudiate President Trump.

Presidents Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s first midterm elections were genuine waves. In 1994, Democrats lost 54 House and eight Senate seats and, in 2010, they lost 63 House and six Senate seats. In 2018, though, Republicans increased their Senate majority, otherwise it was a rather normal first midterm result.

But, unreported by national media, 2018’s General Election aftermath differed substantially from 2016’s. Unlike Democrats in 2016, Republican and independent 2018 voters whose preferred candidates lost election/reelection contests showed no incivility and conducted no protests or riots. Hysteria didn’t consume disappointed Republicans. There was no property damage, no noisy, violent demonstrations to declare that “Nancy Pelosi is not our Speaker!”

There are downsides to losing the House, of course, but conservatives are eagerly anticipating the extraordinary entertainment potential of a borderline-psychotic Pelosi/Schiff/Waters/Nadler/Cummings-led Democratic House majority and the nonstop social media distractions of newly-minted “democratic socialist” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It’s gonna be awesome!

https://www.pottsmerc.com/opinion/jerry-shenk-let-the-house-theatrics-commence/article_0260df3c-fcf9-11e8-8a99-ff38e3dee5fa.html