President Donald Trump has a new burst of political momentum — just in time for early voting and the last few weeks of the 2024 campaign. If he prevails on November 5 — and in the interminable counting that will continue for days, if not weeks, thereafter — he will have achieved the greatest comeback in American political history.
Democrats may try to delegitimize the result, but in the end they will only have themselves to blame for their loss, for five basic reasons.
The first is the poor quality of their chosen candidate, Kamala Harris. She was a terrible candidate for president in 2019 (she never made it to 2020), and she demonstrated why in 2024: Harris lacks a basic level of political ability. She is adept at climbing the ladder among Democratic Party elites, but lacks a feeling for retail politics and cannot improvise. Her instincts are left-wing, but fundamentally she has no convictions, beyond her personal ambitions.
Yet the Democrats had set themselves on a path to defeat long before President Joe Biden was elbowed out and Kamala took over.
The events of January 6, 2021, ought to have caused Trump enough political damage as to keep him from being a contender ever again. But Democrats were not content with holding him politically accountable. They pursued a partisan strategy of “lawfare” against him, against his supporters, and even against his legal advisers.
“Lawfare” was embraced by the highbrow gentry of the Democratic Party, but in truth it is the lowest tactic of Third World dictatorships. It united the Republican Party around Trump as nothing else could have done.
If that was the Democrats’ plan — elevating Trump to the GOP nomination to make Republicans easier to beat in the general election — it backfired. Americans from a variety of political backgrounds sensed the dangers of Democrats’ abuses of power.
Democrats also chose to reverse Trump’s successful border policies. It is not clear whether they failed to anticipate the consequences — a rush of millions of migrants from all over the world — or whether that was part of their plan.
Regardless, the choice to kill the border wall, and to end the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers awaiting court dates, led to disaster. Democrats convinced no one when they claimed immigration reform was the answer.
Inflation was another inevitable consequence of clear, and unnecessary, policy choices by Democrats. When Biden took office in 2021, there were already trillions of dollars of coronavirus relief still waiting to be spent. The so-called “America Rescue Plan” was an expensive reprise of the big spending of the early Obama era, geared to Democratic states and constituencies. But with the economy already recovering, the cash ignited inflation not seen in decades.
Biden’s weak leadership on the world stage was also entirely foreseeable. After campaigning for years on the idea that Trump was too close to Russian president Vladimir Putin, Biden tried appeasing Russia. After the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, Putin sensed Biden’s vulnerability, and invaded Ukraine. Meanwhile, Biden tried reviving a failed Iran nuclear deal and pumped cash into the regime that later funded terror against Israel and triggered a major war.
Democrats point to the upsides of the Biden era, such as a return to the low jobless rates of the pre-pandemic Trump years. But few Americans believe the country is on the right track.
And Democrats have no answers. They cling to unpopular ideas like transgenderism, and promise higher taxes and increased censorship. They recycle old hoaxes about Trump, and stoke fears about abortion rights.
They are a party that has lost its mandate. They deserve to lose.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
