by Sean Hannity
During the first Democratic presidential primary debate on June 26, 2019, Beto O’Rourke lamely scrambled to explain away Trump’s successes. “This economy has got to work for everyone and right now we know that it isn’t and it’s going to take all of us coming together to make sure that it does,” O’Rourke said. “Right now, we have a system that favors those that can pay for access and outcomes, that is how you explain an economy that is rigged to corporations and to the wealthiest.”3 How can this message resonate when it glaringly contradicted reality? Unemployment rates were at record lows and wages were rising for people at all income levels, not just the wealthy. So O’Rourke was relegated to complaining that some people have more than others.
We heard some version of this class warfare appeal from nearly all the Democratic presidential candidates. During one presidential debate, Senator Warren at least five times accused American businesses of wanting to “suck” profits from consumers and boasted about her plans to eliminate private health insurance providers because they too have “sucked billions of dollars out of our health-care system.”4 In Warren’s grim world, our economy comprises countless greedy, immoral companies whose primary activity is exploiting the American people, who in turn can be saved only by the government—with Warren at the helm.
Similarly, Bernie Sanders accused the fossil fuel industry of intentionally wrecking the environment to line their pockets. “What do you do with an industry that knowingly, for billions of dollars in short-term profits, is destroying this planet?” asked Sanders. “I say that is criminal activity that cannot be allowed to continue.”5 Earth to Bernie: oil is the lifeblood of the world’s economy, and it creates the highest potential for high-paying career jobs for Americans. Without fossil fuels, the entire American economy would grind to a halt, and the nation would largely deindustrialize—not to mention that alternative energy sources can’t power a modern economy. Yet according to Bernie, the entire industry is a criminal enterprise. “So legally drilling for oil and gas, employing millions of people, and providing cheaper energy for hundreds of millions is now criminal?” asked the Wall Street Journal editors. “And they say Donald Trump is demagogic.”6
The Democrats’ gloom and despair were so at odds with our economic reality that occasionally they’d wander off script and argue the opposite of what they were supposed to be saying. For example, on February 17, 2020, former president Obama tweeted, “Eleven years ago today, near the bottom of the worst recession in generations, I signed the Recovery Act, paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history.”7 Oops—instead of harping on the rank injustices that permeate our economy, Obama jumped off the sidelines to claim credit for Trump’s economic achievements. The Democrats’ doom-mongering also contradicted the rekindled patriotism stoked by President Trump’s “America First” agenda.8 They were so confounded by Trump’s “winning” and so bankrupt of positive ideas, they had no believable answer for Trump’s brilliant economic record. The pandemic, politically speaking, fell into their laps as they seek to directly blame Trump for the damage done by a pernicious virus originating in China.
Prior to the outbreak, my friend Bill O’Reilly predicted on my radio show that President Trump would win reelection handily if he uses the stature of his office to communicate his message to voters. Why? Well, because he’s got a strong record and the “Democrats don’t have anybody.” Bill was right, but he didn’t go far enough. It’s not just that they don’t have anybody—unless you count Sleepy Joe Biden, which I don’t; the problem is they don’t have anything. They have no credible policy agenda. What they have is rage, extremism, and the bogus claim that Trump botched the response to the virus, which I detail later.
The indignant Democrats have become the joyless party, characterized more by anger than a loving spirit, which is also ironic, since they hold themselves out as loving and compassionate. They never get off their moralistic high horses, always pointing their fingers of judgment while basking in their false sense of superior compassion and humanity. Everyone is evil but them. No one cares about their fellow man but them.
The leftist-controlled Democratic Party isn’t interested in improving people’s lives. It wants to control them, through the instrument of government. Democrats believe they know better than the people do what’s in the people’s best interests. They want to pick the winners and losers among businesses and entire industries. For them, it’s a class struggle, which is what socialism and communism have always been. They must demonize and punish the rich. As we’ll see in the next chapter, they are willfully blind to the failed record of socialism.
The discontent and rage of the sixties radicals now dominate the Democratic Party and the millions of people indoctrinated by leftist propaganda since that turbulent decade. You saw their anger in the presidential debates. You see it in their late-night “comedians.” You see it in their radical foot soldiers, from Occupy Wall Street to Antifa. You see it in their demand for intellectual conformity—their refusal to permit dissenting opinions in their ranks. And you see it course through their entire agenda, which is more geared toward singling out and punishing scapegoats than it is helping anyone achieve a better life for themselves.
TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME
Democrats and Never Trump Republicans sometimes argue that even if you believe Trump’s policies have improved people’s lives, it’s not worth sullying the presidential office with such a vile man. But we’re not going to let them get away with that, either. No president in the modern era has had to take these unprecedented sustained attacks by both liberal Democratic socialists and the media mob in an attempt to destroy him and tear him down. As I’ve outlined on my programs, and as we’ll see in the myriad examples below, they are primarily responsible for the partisan rancor and for coarsening our political debate with their never-ending stream of personal attacks against the president. Democrats and the media have so ruthlessly derided Trump that people seem to overlook the astoundingly unpresidential behavior of the Democrats who campaigned to replace him. They denounce him for his alleged rudeness and vulgarity, hoping we’ll overlook the enormous planks in their own eyes. Their outrage rings hollow when they constantly attack Trump, his family, and even his everyday supporters in the most crude and vicious ways.
Trump Derangement Syndrome permeated the entire Democratic presidential field. They could say anything they want about him without the liberal media batting an eye. At the CNN Democratic debate on July 30, 2019, the candidates seemed to be competing with each other to hurl the most over-the-top invectives at Trump. Senator Warren declared, “We live in a country now where the President is advancing environmental racism, economic racism, criminal-justice racism, health-care racism.”9 She claimed Trump “is a part of a corrupt, rigged system that has helped the wealthy and the well-documented and kicked dirt in the faces of everyone else.” Bernie Sanders jumped in the fray, calling Trump “a pathological liar” and declaring, “We have got to take on Trump’s racism, his sexism, [and] xenophobia.”10
The second-tier candidates chimed in as well. Senator Michael Bennett called Trump a “bully” who “doesn’t give a damn about your kids or mine.” Representative Tulsi Gabbard said that “Donald Trump is not behaving like a patriot,” “is continuing to betray us,” and “is supporting al-Qaida.” Washington governor Jay Inslee called Trump a “white nationalist.” Julian Castro called him “a racist.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said, “The first thing that I’m going to do when I’m president is I’m going to Clorox the Oval Office. Donald Trump has really torn apart the moral fabric of this country, dividing us on every racial line, every religious line, every socioeconomic line he can find.”11
Hypocritical senator Kamala Harris said Trump “has a predatory nature and predatory instincts…. And predators are cowards.”12 Nonsense. Harris herself, however, has engaged in predatory behavior. She calls herself a “progressive prosecutor.” But as law professor L
ara Bazelon noted, she “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”13
The overwrought accusations continued to flow unabated. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio accused Trump of committing “crimes worthy of impeachment,” adding that Trump is “the real socialist. The problem is, it’s socialism for the rich.”14 Former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper said that Trump “is malpractice personified.” Beto O’Rourke claimed that Trump “uses fear to try to drive us further apart.” Mayor Pete Buttigieg said, “When [former Ku Klux Klan leader] David Duke ran for Congress, ran for governor, the Republican Party 20 years ago ran away from him. Today, they are supporting naked racism in the White House or are, at best, silent about it.” And Marianne Williamson added her trademark cosmic take on Trump, declaring, “The racism, the bigotry and the entire conversation that we’re having here tonight, if you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.”15
Former Maryland congressman John Delaney made a particularly noteworthy remark: “Donald Trump is the symptom of a disease and the disease is divisiveness.”16 Delaney’s jab says it all, does it not? After participating in a debate that involved more personal attacks against Trump in a few hours than he could level against his opponents in a month, Delaney blamed Trump for divisiveness. Are these Democrats, even the allegedly mild-mannered and less radical among them, incapable of recognizing they’ve become consumed with hatred? Trump is no wallflower, but he usually doesn’t start these skirmishes. Legions of Democratic opponents, haters, and detractors have blasted him without provocation since the moment he announced for the presidency. Neither they nor their media co-conspirators have any standing to accuse him of polarizing behavior.
We also saw an unvarnished display of TDS at the 2020 State of the Union address, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dramatically ripped up her copy of Trump’s speech. But what was supposed to appear as a spontaneous act of righteous indignation was quickly revealed as an orchestrated stunt—film clips circulated of Pelosi, earlier in the address, hiding her copy of the speech under a table and slightly pre-ripping the pages to ensure they tore properly when her dramatic moment arrived.17 House Republicans sought to reprimand her ridiculous conduct, but failed by a vote of 224 to 193.18
An unrepentant Pelosi excoriated Trump again at her weekly news conference, attacking his State of the Union address, his record on health care, his economic policies, and his impeachment defense efforts. Pelosi also took a cheap shot at my friend Rush Limbaugh, who has been the leading conservative voice in the country for a generation now, having paved the way for me and many others to follow, a patriot who’s done more to advance freedom in this country than Pelosi and all her colleagues combined. Trump awarded Rush with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the SOTU speech a few days after Rush announced he has advanced lung cancer. At her news conference, Pelosi flippantly said that when Trump mentioned a cancer diagnosis, she thought he was getting ready to honor Congressman John Lewis, who suffers from pancreatic cancer and has already received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Pelosi and her friends have been demonizing Rush for years with false accusations of racism and other horrendous slanders, but her disparagement of Rush, his award, and his illness was a new low.
Pelosi also doubled down on tearing up Trump’s speech. “It’s appalling the things that he says. And then you say to me, ‘Tearing up his falsehoods, isn’t that the wrong message?’ No, it isn’t. I feel very liberated. I felt that I’ve extended every possible courtesy. I’ve shown every level of respect.” This sounds delusional, since Pelosi has shown Trump nothing but scorn. She treated him contemptuously during negotiations on the border wall and helped impeach him on a transparent hoax, reneging on her vow that impeachment could not advance on purely partisan lines because it would be too divisive.19 In fact, at her press conference Pelosi displayed malicious glee over impeaching Trump, bragging, “He’s impeached forever, no matter what he says. You’re never getting rid of that scar.”20 Considering Trump was acquitted in the Senate, this is like declaring that a person indicted on a phony charge and then found not guilty is “indicted forever.”
THE DEMOCRATS’ NIGHTMARE VISION FOR AMERICA
We can’t let Democrats get away with changing the subject when we compare our respective agendas. But when they’re forced to discuss the issues, they try to dupe Americans into thinking they’re not as extreme as they sound. Every American must understand that if Trump is defeated by any Democrat, even one mistakenly thought of as a “moderate,” America will never be the same again.
Don’t be fooled if presumptive nominee Joe Biden pretends to distance himself from some of his party’s more radical proposals. The party has embraced a radical agenda, and that will be America’s agenda if they regain control. Biden, as we’ve seen, has already shown his willingness to bend to the radicals’ will, and he would be putty in their hands. When Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden, they both announced that they were working together to form six working groups to focus on education, criminal justice, climate change, immigration, the economy, and health care policy during the 2020 campaign. More ominously, Biden told the socialist Sanders, “I think people are going to be surprised that we are apart on some issues, but we’re awfully close on a whole bunch of others.”21
Anyone who thinks a vote for Biden is a vote for the Obama administration platform is mistaken. How do I know? Because Obama himself said so. In his speech endorsing Biden, Obama declared, “If I were running today, I wouldn’t run the same race or have the same platform as I did in 2008,” adding, “Joe already has what is the most progressive platform of any major party nominee in history.”22 As radical as Obama policies really were, Obama is already indicating that more progressivism is in order.
So let’s now turn to the specific policy proposals of today’s Democratic members of Congress, senators, and former presidential hopefuls, which are nightmarish on their face and which, if properly understood by the American people, would spell electoral disaster for Democrats. None of these proposals was treated as radical by the Democratic establishment, and if Biden is elected, he will be pursuing most of them. If empowered, Democrats have promised to take or consider taking the following actions:
Enact the Green New Deal
Ban fracking, thereby reversing our newfound energy independence
Subordinate some of our sovereign authority to international bodies like the UN
Pack the Supreme Court with additional justices
Appoint leftist activist judges throughout the judicial branch
Gut the Second Amendment and confiscate our firearms
Suppress our First Amendment speech and religious freedoms
Expand the federal administrative bureaucracy and erode states’ rights
Abolish or nullify the Electoral College
Downsize the military
Promote federally funded abortion on demand including, in some instances, infanticide
Abolish private health insurance and wholly socialize medicine through Medicare for All
Impose a wealth tax
Increase the death tax
Raise taxes on individuals and businesses by reversing the Trump tax cuts
Increase the top marginal income tax rate to 70 percent
Abolish student debt and tuition
Enact a universal basic income (also called a citizen’s income, guaranteed minimum income, or basic income)—the idea that the federal government should pay a federal cash subsidy to certain groups of Americans or all Americans regardless of their work status
Greatly increase the minimum wage
Abolish the border and grant mass amnesty
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bolish ICE
Make it easier for immigrants with criminal records to enter our country, including criminal illegal immigrants who were already deported
Expand welfare benefits and provide free education and health care to illegal immigrants
Recalibrate our foreign alliances away from Israel and toward Iran
Make transgenderism the “civil rights issue of our time,”23 including mandating gender-neutral restrooms, allowing biological males to compete in female sports, and making gender identity a protected class under federal civil rights laws
End all new drilling and mining on federal lands
Provide slavery reparations
Legalize voting for convicted felons
Enact “race-conscious laws”
Empower the government to micromanage what we can eat and drink
It’s an impressive list of bizarre and destructive proposals, but let’s begin by looking at the granddaddy of them all—the Green New Deal.
SOCIALISM DISGUISED AS ENVIRONMENTALISM: THE GREEN NEW DEAL
While AOC claims she is concerned about the environment, it’s hard to distinguish her concern for the earth from her passion to impose socialism on America. There’s no denying that many environmentalists truly believe much of the apocalyptic lunacy they preach, but it’s also clear that they use fearmongering to advance their statist agenda. AOC’s former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, admitted as much in connection with his boss’s climate agenda. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”24