“We are going to fight back and we’re going to punch this bully in the mouth.”
This unhinged hostility toward President Donald Trump came not from some random online troll in a comment section, but from the governor of California — the online troll who is the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.
Victor Davis Hanson cites this example of Trump Derangement Syndrome in a recent video for The Daily Signal on the subject of Democrat nihilism. “He’s completely flipped out,” VDH says of Newsom.
Consider any red-state governor who ran for president in the last decade — Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Ron DeSantis — can you imagine any of them saying this about Barack Obama or Joe Biden, or vulgarly telling Europeans they “had kneepads as if they were performing some… foul sex act” on a current president, to use another example VDH gives of Newsom’s TDS?
Successful policies are one of the reasons red-state governors don’t have to resort to this type of rhetoric. VDH explains the failures of blue-state governors that have led to a mass exodus of residents from blue to red states:
Their paradigm of high taxes, fraudulent entitlements, lax on crime, overregulation leads to … unsafe streets, poor schools, people who feel they can’t stay in the middle class because they’re taxed too high, they can’t afford a home. I’m talking about places that particularly like Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and California, and people are leaving, and the Democrats are doing what? They’re appealing to a shrinking constituency in local and state politics that has no national resonancy. It doesn’t resonate with the national population. So if you can’t win an election because your agenda either doesn’t exist, but more likely, if it did exist would offend people as a 70/30 issue — they being on the 30% — you go hysterical, you go nihilistic. You do what the Democrats are doing today.
VDH mentions Illinois, whose governor, Governor JB Pritzker, is also — amazingly — considered a frontrunner for the presidential nomination and, as our own Stephen Kruiser has pointed out, like Newsom is “trying to position himself as one of the tough guys in the Democrats’ sad ‘Resist’ tantrum.” Pritzker’s rhetoric, like the following words he said at a 2025 press conference, has been as belligerent as Newsom’s: “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have! We must castigate them on the soapbox, and then punish them at the ballot box.”
Related: Fat, Drunk, and Governor of Illinois Is No Way to Go Through Life, Son
It’s not just the middle class that is fleeing blue states like California and Illinois; it’s also the wealthy class. PJ Media has reported on the billionaires who are leaving California to join the exodus to red states because of a 2026 ballot initiative that would impose a 5% tax on the states’s billionaires.
Ironically, pandering to billionaires is one of the things that led to so many of the Dems’ problems. Globalization enriched people along the blue coasts because it rewarded those with the necessary skills in such industries as media, finance, insurance, and law with access to a “7 billion–person market.” VDH explains the dire consequences:
And they made an amount of money that was staggering. And that gave the Democratic Party the billionaire class. Go into the Fortune 400, look at two things: the size of the fortune and the political leanings of the billionaires. They were mostly left-wing, and that enriched the coffers of the Democratic Party through foundations and PACs, and gave them these boutique issues from green energy to transsexuality that they pushed down our throats — all fueled by money, all without popular support.
Open borders have had just as deleterious an effect on the Democratic Party as globalization. There are now 53 million foreign residents in the U.S., 16% of the population. Many are from poor, autocratic societies and require large amounts of federal and state subsidies. Appealing to them results in more bad ideas being pushed down our throats, like anti-Israel rhetoric. VDH says: “We see it with questions of Israel, The new DEI constituency does not like Israel. It’s radically changed the Democratic Party. We see it with visiting students. We see it with green card holders.”
That’s why politicians like Newsom will lie and say genocide is being committed by Israel in Gaza but will say nothing when the Iranian regime slaughters tens of thousands of its citizens in the streets.
As with many mental illnesses, sometimes we can’t even be sure of what leads to TDS — VDH wonders if it’s Trump’s “Queen’s accent, his appearance, his utter disdain for the media, the academic world, the deep state, the corporate boardroom.” Whatever causes it, there’s no denying how insane it makes its sufferers look, whether it’s Cory Booker screaming at the airport even as travelers are happy that ICE agents are filling in for unpaid TSA agents, senators appearing at “No Kings” rallies alongside clueless protestors, or female members of Congress kickboxing in the name of “resistance” in a TikTok video.
It make a Republican long for the sanity of the … Bill Clinton years. At least Clinton could say, “I believe that together we can make American great again.”
VDH concludes: “The Democratic Party such at is in the last ten years, at least from the advent of Barack Obama, bears no resemblance to what we saw as lately as the 1990s with the 1992 and 1996 Democratic platforms. They seem like Republican platforms.”
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