“The voters have spoken,” said Arizona Democrat Mo Udall after having been trounced by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential primaries. “The bastards.”

Similarly, the voters spoke last November 5 — but the Democrats just don’t seem to have gotten the message. And the voters have continued to speak — urgently so — through the political urchins known as pollsters. Yet still, the Democrats continue to thrash about and do self-harm — so much so that they’re polling at depths never before plumbed. A recent CNN poll has the Democrats’ favorability at 29%, while an NBC News poll has them at 27%.

At the same time, that NBC News poll has Donald Trump, Le Bête Orange, polling at an all-time high.

Still, there was Chuck Schumer two days ago, making the TV rounds and defending himself against calls to step down as minority leader in the wake of what his party’s wingnuts see as a budgetary surrender to Donald Trump. “It gives me no pleasure to say this to you because we are friends,” said “The View’s” Sunny Hostin, “but I think you caved. I think you and nine other Democrats caved.”

Schumer meekly replied, “We’re going to fight this every day. But I want to win and fight smart.” He was no more convincing when he added, “We’re going to stick it to them and fight smart and win.”

Uh-huh. Lately, the Democrats have been sticking it to Trump and the Republicans by reflexively taking one suicidal policy position after another. This is how Trump has so thoroughly boxed them in: First, he trained them like seals to hate his guts. Then, he’s sought out and embraced the issues that are wildly popular with the American people: closing the border and getting rid of the criminal illegals; canceling foreign aid and rooting out government waste; calling out the outrageousness of men competing against women in sports; and on and on. What have the Trump-deranged Democrats done in response? In every case, they’ve adopted the opposite position merely to spite him.

The American people are disenchanted with the status quo. They don’t like Big Government. And the Democrats are, as always, The Party of Big Government. Consider the self-destructive meltdown that Schumer had on “The View”:

Dem Senate leader Chuck Schumer mocks Americans who want to keep their hard-earned income and praises the government as a “barrier” to them:
“You know what their attitude is, ‘I made my money all by myself. How dare your government take my money from me?’ … They hate… pic.twitter.com/vb4oDxPQ3V

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) March 18, 2025

"You know what their attitude is?” he railed, “‘I made my money all by myself. How dare your government take my money from me. I don’t wanna pay taxes.’ Or, ‘I built my company with my bare hands. How dare your government tell me how I should treat my customers, my, um, the land and water that I own, uh, or my employees.’”

Martha, do you hear yourself? We do like the idea of running our own lives and our own businesses, and we do like the idea of keeping more of our own hard-earned money. The Founders did, too.

Schumer sounds so condescending. Who do these patriotic, hard-working Americans think they are? Why, it’s as if he were channeling his inner Barack Obama: You didn’t build that.

Just who are these Democrats, and what on earth do they stand for? They hate men. They hate straight people. They basically hate anything normal. They have a congressman who dresses like a woman, and yet they rail against Trump about “norms.”

So sorry and deluded are the Democrats that they now resemble Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a politician: “An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the super-structure of organized society is reared.” And here’s the best part: “When he wriggles, he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice.”

The leftist judges aren’t helping the Democrats, either. Indeed, they’re doing their level worst. One of them, DC District Court Judge James Boasberg, ordered a planeload full of illegal immigrant gang members to turn around mid-flight and return that dangerous rabble to the U.S. forthwith. Yet another said that the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismantling of the wasteful and decadent USAID apparatus was unconstitutional. Still another said the administration can’t remove the trannies from our warriors’ midst.

Had the rudderless Democrats a sentient standard-bearer by now, he’d have made like R.P. McMurphy in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: “Hey, you idiot judges, stay off my side.”

“How do we plot the catastrophe’s course?” asked a gleeful Emmett Tyrrell in his 1984 book, The Liberal Crack-Up, which he penned just months before Ronald Reagan won 49 of 50 states and 525 electoral votes. “How does one chronicle the liberal saga from mountaintop to the padded cells?”

Tyrrell was referring to the period between FDR’s New Deal dominance and Jimmy Carter’s cardigan-clad fecklessness, but he might just as well have been writing about the years between rock star Barack Obama’s meteoric rise and Joe Biden’s painful and precipitous fall. Political fortunes ebb and flow, of course, but the Democrats do seem bound for the padded cells.

The agony of today’s opposition party is profound, and it doesn’t show any signs of abating.