This May Be the Best Summation of the Complete Failure of the Anti-Trump 'Resistance'

The anti-Trump Democratic powers still seem to be scrambling and trying to understand how President-elect Donald Trump won on Nov. 5.

Being locked in their bubble and never seeing what most other Americans are thinking was always part of the problem -- it's why they were anti-Trump to begin with. Every effort they leveled against Trump just made him stronger. They made it all about "Trump is Hitler" and didn't get what the American people cared about. We saw that with Joe Biden, for example. Among his regrets, he thinks that Americans just didn't understand all they had done, and it was just a messaging problem.

But journalist/writer Ross Barkan, who is on the left side of things, may just have summed up their failure after all the demonization of Trump in one of the best statements I've seen so far.

I’ve been struggling a bit since the election. Not emotionally, but intellectually. I was never the biggest "resistance" guy, but I was on its side against Trump. Ross Barkan nicely captured why I've felt adrift since Nov 5. We have a lot of work to do. (Link in next tweet.) pic.twitter.com/Zq27yOyoUM
— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) December 29, 2024

Now, for the Democrats, it is all wide open. There will be no one anointed in 2028. Instead, there will be a long, bloody fight for the nomination, and that is democracy. The liberal-left resistance, meanwhile, will have to stagger into a future they failed, over and over again, to head off. No movement, perhaps, has accomplished less. No movement has done so little to reach what was supposed to be an existential goal. Trump, eight years into the resistance, is at his apogee. The editorial boards and NGO bosses and magazine writers and braying congressmen and MSNBC panelists must contend with this bare, inarguable fact. The electoral map ran blood-red. How? Why?

Barkan truly skewered the excuses and notes that it wasn't just that Trump was selected, but that Democrats and their tactics were rejected soundly.

It was the racism of an Arab majority city voting for Trump, the white supremacy of the Bronx, New York’s poorest borough, deciding Trump needed more of its vote than ever before. Pundits prattle about misinformation, as if all the voters were toddlers who needed to be bolted down and told why Brat Summer was so vital for the future of the republic. There are calls now for a feminist Joe Rogan, as if the actual Rogan did not already endorse a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. The liberal-left reaps what it sows. It was not merely Trump that was chosen. It was the not-Democrat, the option that wasn’t in power. A vote is a middle finger aimed to the sky. In the heat of all this, the liberal-left will have to recalibrate or dissolve. Radical chic is fading. The Hitler analogies are played out. So are the speech wars. They will have to, somehow, consider material conditions. This is never easy if you’ve never lived anything close to a precarious life. Harder, still, if you’ve allowed condescension and indignation to become the pillars of a worldview. The smug never inherit the Earth. If only the Bible printed this, or someone took it to cable television in time. Much grief could have been saved.

If you could reduce it down to one sentence, that one is the best: "The smug never inherit the Earth."

If there ever was a description of the anti-Trump resistance, that's it. And that's the thing that is presently impeding them from truly learning the message Barkan brings here.