Analysis

NYT Admits It — Dems Exhausted And Trump Has All The Momentum

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(Photo by TANNEN MAURY/AFP via Getty Images)

Gage Klipper Commentary & Analysis Writer
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The New York Times coined a telling term on Monday to describe a new phenomenon among America’s most ardent Trump-haters. Aging out of their rebellious streak, #TheResistance is exhausted, and is now struggling to maintain their once unmatchable passion and energy amidst overwhelming feelings of “anti-Trump burnout.”

Those who donned pink pussy hats, organized rallies and marched in the streets during the Trump era were once the powerhouse of Democratic politics. It was suburban moms finally getting off the sidelines believing their human rights at stake, the self-involved young voters who never turned out before, but under Trump learned that the personal is political. Their incessant rallying cries over Trump’s racism, misogyny and even treason echoed the media’s own, creating an illusion of anti-Trump consensus, while their antics proved to low-information moderates that the country was effectively ungovernable under Trump.

All told, it was a good run: #TheResistance flipped the House in 2018, decimated Trump in 2020, and helped Democrats wildly over perform in the 2022 midterms. However, bracing for another election against Donald Trump, they’re losing their resolve. Visceral anxiety over the country’s imminent collapse has been replaced with something new, the “feeling of fatigue.”

“We’re kind of, like, crises-ed out,” one Democrat told the Times, among several Resistance alumni profiled.

“Some folks are burned out on outrage,” said Rebecca Lee Funk, founder of the ironically-named activist group, Outrage. “People are tired. I think last election we were desperate to get Trump out of office, and folks were willing to rally around that singular call to action. And this election feels different.”

“Any sense of urgency that we had with the 2020 election” another Democrat said, is “still there in the sense that no one wants Trump to be president, at least for Democrats, but it’s exhausting.”

This is by no means an isolated phenomenon. Nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed in a Pew poll from September said they “always or often feel exhausted” by politics. For Democrats, this was part of the plan. They extrapolated their own exasperated hatred for Trump to the rest of the country, banking on Trump-exhaustion to serve as a poison pill for moderates against a milquetoast Biden in the general election. But they overestimated their man, as Biden’s own catastrophic failures, gaffes, and often outright malevolence, leave many yearning for a real adult in the room. Even Democrats chose “exhaustion” and “dread” as their top two sentiments toward the 2024 election in a Yahoo poll from the fall.

And The Times gets so close to uncovering the root of the problem.

Mostly, this is a classic case of the boy who cried wolf. As Max Dower, owner of political-theme clothing line told The Times, “We’ve dealt with so many emergencies these past few years: national emergencies, perceived emergencies, real emergencies — it’s just kind of like, that is not really a strong motivator for me anymore.” For this, the Democrats only have themselves to blame. (RELATED: New York Times Accidentally Admits Democrats Are Extremists)

The rise of fascism, COVID, the racism epidemic, war on women’s rights, the climate crisis, book banning and so-called trans genocide — all either non-existent or disingenuously contorted issues that Democrats weaponized to whip up a sense of crisis among their most hysterical supporters. The emergence of a fresh new crisis carries with it an inherent shock value, but comes with diminishing returns. According to Democrats today, every quotidian issue we face is a national crisis, yet the world keeps turning —so it’s no wonder the sense of urgency has dissipated.

In 2020, Trump was the figurehead of these myriad crises — a “singular call to action” as Funk put it — and outrage was useful for its own sake. Get angry and vote against Trump — the only requirement, which alone felt like a victory over crisis regardless of what came next.  It almost hearkens back to the War on Terror; if only we could topple Saddam, then whatever comes next will be a cakewalk. Yet whether in Iraq or back home, focus splits and resolve breaks when the discrete tasks of social engineering begin.

This touches on another issue brought up by The Times, the sense of “powerlessness” that the left feels about resisting the forces arrayed against “our rights.” Of course, this is self-flattering nonsense. Despite imagining themselves as the underdog, the left holds the majority of raw political power. Their true powerlessness lies in their ineffective crisis messaging; they sense anyone open to convincing has already been convinced, and at this point they are just screaming at the wall. In fact, momentum is pushing back the other way as Trump gains steam and more people are waking up to the scam. (RELATED: New NYT Piece Could Signal Tide Is Turning Against Child Mutilation)

One other possible explanation lies in a simple fact of life: #TheResistance is growing up. When these passionate young people first took to the streets, many were college students or just starting out in real, “adult” life. Now, nearly a decade later, they are well into their 30s and have more important things to do than get extremely angry all the time. The new generation was raised on, and desensitized to the outrage, and have yet to pick up the slack.

All of these likely intersect to explain the burnout, but The Times can’t quite get there; to do so would be to implicate themselves. Perhaps no media outlet in the world carries more responsibility for whipping up anti-Trump hysteria which has now led to the burnout. To recommend taking a step back, to pick and choose crises more discerningly, would admit that The Times has long since abandoned its journalistic credibility in the name of short-sighted political victories.

Meanwhile, Trump is just going to keep on winning.