Neutralize Nancy

On Wednesday the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning President Donald Trump for racist tweets over the weekend.

Did Trump screw up?

So the thinking goes: it’s bad enough that he told four women of color to go back to their countries when only one of them is foreign-born.

The big tactical mistake was that Trump squandered a chance to let his opponents eat themselves alive.

Democratic infighting had gone nuclear—after the Squad broke ranks and Nancy Pelosi burned them, AOC said that what Nancy did was “explicit singling out of newly elected women of color” but that she’s “absolutely not” a racist aka Nancy’s a racist. Trump should have let them self destruct.

Problem is, they weren’t self destructing.

And Trump knew it.

The Democratic body was engaging in a complex immune response to the four intersectional congresswomen who threaten their chances in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections.

Even to me, as antipathetic as I am to the Democrats, I felt myself rooting for Nancy. Enough with the outrageous accusations from AOC—Nancy’s sly dismissiveness and tactical clout were helping her to seem strong and just plain likeable.

Ben Shapiro pointed out in his podcast that all the long knives were out for AOC’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti. Nancy and the establishment Dems were on the brink of a big push to unify their ranks, and their message.

Trump may have figured they were going to unify. That much, he could not control. But what he could control was who got the credit. By stealing the spotlight, Trump got the credit for unifying the Democrat Party.

Instead of Nancy taking the reigns and demonstrating strength, and power, she achieved party unity through victimhood. Trump is so mean to us, etc. And although victimology is the Democrats’ stock and trade, they’ve overplayed it. Empathy fatigue is real, people, even when the injury is fake: Trump isn’t oppressing the Democrats in congress. They’re fine. But after Trump’s tweetstorm, the tired hand was the only hand that Nancy could play.

And so the party had to unify without completing its immune response.

The squad is still visible and has more claim than Nancy does to all the umbrage and alarm. They held a press conference early this week and made it clear that off-the-rails radical leftism is still very much a Democrat thing.

But Trump didn’t just shine a light on them—he wounded them. He’s the expert at turning an opponent’s strength into a weakness.

The squad’s power comes through victimhood, and their weapon of choice: the racism accusation. It works because the unwoke are always guilty, thus blackmail always profitable. When they started in on Nancy, Trump called their bluff.

They howled. He shrugged. He showed them how weak their greatest strength can be.

And meanwhile Nancy is nowhere to be seen.