Dems Keep Putting Themselves On The Wrong Side Of Popular Issues In Trump Era⎪Mary Katharine Ham

This week, President Trump sat in the East Room surrounded by a gaggle of young girls in soccer uniforms, cheer duds, and basketball jerseys. He invited them to gather nearby as he signed an executive order. He joked to the audience of lawmakers, press, and the girls’ beaming moms, "I think I'll be okay. Secret Service is worried about them? If we have to worry about them, we have big problems."

The order was called "Keeping Men Out Of Women’s Sports," an overdue corrective in the decade-long siege on women’s athletics by trans athletes at all levels. To the dedicated Left, this was a bullying assault on a relatively small percentage of athletes. To disaffected liberals, this was a welcome but surprising turn in the feminist movement that brought disappointment in their former fellow travelers. 

Tennis star Martina Navratilova lamented, "I hate that the democrats totally failed women and girls on this very clear issue of women’s sports being for females only."

To the non-ideological, this was common sense. In 2022, the wider public saw the 6’1" physique of University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas stand atop the podium at the NCAA championship in 2022, flanked by women half his size. As he was celebrated for his domination, what had been quiet confusion became quiet objections, then became a desire to see sanity prevail. It was among the issues that made a difference in 2024 for the kind of suburban-mom voters who filled the White House with their daughters.

After the ceremony, which as Trump himself noted, yielded a "great picture," perhaps even an iconic one, CNN’s Harry Enten highlighted for viewers the popular truth under the very online trans narrative.

The Vast Majority Of The Country Is Against Men In Women's Sports

The idea of keeping girls’ sports for girls, protecting them from male competitors in their events and their locker rooms, is an 80 percent issue in America. 

"You rarely get 79 percent of the country to agree on anything," Enten said, terming it a "ginormous majority," which includes almost 70 percent of Democratic voters. 

A hubristic left, culturally dominant for decades and backed by Hollywood, academia, and the media, thought it could take an 80-percent issue and force it into a cultural and political win. It was wrong about that. Convincing people to shut up is not the same as convincing them. 

The wisdom of former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s shorthand for political success remains applicable: Find an 80-percent issue and stand next to it.

How a movement convinced itself to flip this admonition on its head and jump on the 20-percent side is one for the history and political science books. Yet, here we are, another Republican president— this one regarded by institutional feminists as nothing short of an abomination—signing a landmark protection for women in sports. Nixon famously signed Title XI in the White House in 1972.

This is a serious issue, but liberals are willing to do it on smaller issues, too.

US President Donald Trump speaks before signing the "No Men in Women's Sports" executive order in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025. Trump will sign an executive action that bans transgender female athletes from participating in women's sports, setting up a legal and political battle over an issue that became a flash point in the 2024 presidential election. Photographer: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg

Friday, Trump announced that he is signing another executive order getting the federal government out of the business of pushing paper straws. The Biden administration had made it a mission via Executive Order to force the country into a future of disintegrating utensils by 2032. But the thing is, they don’t work and they annoy people. Our friends on the left will now spend time crowing about the indispensable nature of mandated, subsidized paper straws, whose banning was built on dubious data from a 9-year-old’s school project, as a pillar of American democracy. Regular voters will enjoy plastic straws that work. If Trump fixes the gas cans next, he may be president forever.

In ways both big and small, the progressive hubris of the last decade has made life uncomfortable for many Americans, and Democrats have gotten very out of practice taking their concerns seriously.

Led by an activist class, exemplified by the newly elected DNC Chair David Hogg, the party seems intent on finding an 80-percent issue and standing on the wrong side of it. 

In Los Angeles this week, demonstrators protested ICE and immigration policy under the Trump administration by carrying the flags of foreign countries, while burning the American flag. These demonstrators, many of them in the country illegally, went on to block highways paid for by American citizens while local police were told to stand down, according to the local police representatives. A recent Siena Poll showed New Yorkers are on board with deporting illegal immigrants with criminal offenses at a rate of almost 80 percent. Even in blue states and liberal cities, liberals are on the wrong side of these popular issues, spending hundreds of millions to be there. 

Not to be outdone, liberals in Washington found yet another symbol of a shallow well of good will among normal American voters to rally in support of— giant federal bureaucracy.

Dems Are Making More Outlandish Claims With Trump In Office

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said Trump is "terrorizing" federal workers, as his administration offers them an 8-month severance package, to which I say, "Please, someone terrorize me like a federal worker. I have never been terrorized in such a manner in all my life." Elected Democrats, uncertain where to turn for leadership and ignoring the one guy in their caucus who has it figured out, gathered an all-star cast in defense of a bloated, opaque, foreign-aid agency, USAID, to call for the arrest of a presidential appointee to protect foreign-aid programs from the prying eyes of American taxpayers. Foreign aid is among the least popular spending in the federal budget.

There is certainly political risk in moving fast and breaking things, as Trump’s Elon-Musk-led assault on bureaucracy will inevitably do. But Donald Trump has always been fortunate in his opposition. In 2016 and now, he has functioned as an avatar of backlash to the progressive project that got way out over its political skis. But he is now more prepared to wield power than he was in 2016 and the progressive project has ticked off even more normies, hence Trump's highest-ever approval ratings. 

Damon Linker noted this week, a way to understand the unconventional Trump coalition, which is testing the GOP with nominations like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is as a "trans-ideological party of anyone who hates ‘the system.’" Democrats, on the other hand, have made it clear they will passionately defend the system, standing in the cold in solidarity with federal buildings, defending federal agencies, the status quo, and non-citizens against American taxpayers.

It’s a choice. But when it comes to 80-20 issues, "against the system" is a lot safer place to stand.