Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency in a historic and unprecedented Election Day upset over rival Hillary Clinton, many on the left took to the streets in protest. The situation escalated when protesting turned to rioting in a number of cities, injuring police officers and damaging property.
A week later, Green Party candidate Jill Stein announced she was launching a recount, but only in the typically blue states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which Trump had won. Clinton’s campaign team joined in on the effort, which resulted in finding more votes for Trump in Wisconsin.
{mosads}Despite the recount findings resulting in a bolstering of Trump’s legitimacy, leftist agitators urged Electoral College electors to abstain from finalizing the president’s place in the White House on the basis he lost the irrelevant (California) popular vote. They failed and ended up with more electors defecting from Clinton than they did for Trump.
Then came the accusations of Russian interference and although not a single vote was changed, Democrats ran with the narrative anyway to further delegitimize the process and Trump’s duly elected status as president.
Fast-forward to the inauguration on Jan. 20 and 67 Democrats, a third of all Democrats in the House, refused to show up. Democratic Rep. John Lewis (Ga.) told NBC’s Meet the Press he didn’t believe Trump was a legitimate president, despite the constitutional process validating him as president of the United States.
Now, Democrats are holding Trump’s Cabinet nominees hostage, some of whom are vital to national security such as the secretary of State and attorney general. At this point in President Obama’s first term, he had nearly all of his Cabinet and agency nominees confirmed thanks to Republican cooperation. Now, because of Democrat obstruction, Trump doesn’t even have half. Adding insult to injury, Democrats led by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) vowed to filibuster Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, despite not knowing who the nominee was or anything about their judicial record.
Schumer, along with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), took to the steps of the Supreme Court Monday night to oppose the president and rally protesters, ignoring the basis of Trump’s executive order on refugees came from Obama administration guidance on countries harboring terrorists.
Former President Obama, who left the White House for the final time just 11 days ago, couldn’t help but opine on Trump’s actions for the sake of “our values” and muddied the waters about what the executive order actually means.
“Citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake,” Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis told Politico. “With regard to comparisons to President Obama’s foreign policy decisions, as we’ve heard before, the president fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion.”
His commentary breaks with longstanding tradition of former presidents staying out of the current president’s business. Not to mention, the executive order doesn’t discriminate against individuals based on religion, and in fact indiscriminately bars people of all faiths, including Christians and Yazidis under ISIS genocide, from temporarily entering the United States. It does discriminate based on geographical location.
All of this is to say Americans will quickly tire of Democrat temper tantrums, especially when they are based on false accusations of racism, bigotry and bogus narratives. After all, that’s why Trump won in the first place.
After losing more than a 1,000 seats in statehouses, governors’ mansions and Congress throughout the past eight years, Democrats should be focused on rebuilding their party, not protesting or making surface-level arguments because they didn’t get their way in the 2016 presidential election.
Republicans are running the table after years of leftist hyperbole and fearmongering. They will continue to do so if this is the path Democrats are going to take moving forward.
Pavlich is editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.
The views of contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.