Dem Resistance movement follows Hezbollah playbook

Last Friday, 99 days into President Trump's first 100 days, a coalition of Democrat Party and Left wing activists and groups announced they were forming to stop Trump in New Jersey.  The Observer (April 28, 2017) reported:

"On the 99th day of Trump’s presidency, New Jersey legislators and activists launched what they called a 'legislative resistance' to create concrete protections against federal proposals that they say would undermine state values and resident safety.  

The Resistance Coalition is fronted by Sen. Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen) and Assembly Speaker Emeritus Sheila Oliver (D-Essex). It includes activist groups like New Jersey Working Families Alliance, the Communication Workers of America (CWA), the NJ Amalgamated Transit Union, Blue Wave NJ, and the Sierra Club, among others. They plan to introduce state legislative measures in areas like expanding voting rights, reinstating Obama-era environmental protections lifted by the Trump administration, minimizing 'wage theft' they say Trump’s budget cuts would aggravate, and divesting pension payments from companies that help build Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall."

That term "resistance" is intriguing.  For some, it represents just one further notch in the ratcheting up on the way to civil war.  For others it is the fashion statement of the moment, signaling "virtue" to the "virtuous."

But the idea of resistance is a negative one, in that it focuses an opposition against something instead of for a positive agenda.  In this case, organizations and people who might not agree on a set of legislative priorities have been brought together in opposition to President Donald Trump.  And it appears as though they have reached back to the 1960's -- to Democrat Party leaders like Governor George Corley Wallace -- and are prepared to use the same "states' rights" arguments for blocking federal initiatives as he did.

The example of Hezbollah is instructive as well.  Organized as a Shia Islamic political party -- the term literally means "Party of God" -- it imposed a strict religious ideology on its adherents.  But Hezbollah realized that its numbers would never be enough to constitute a parliamentary majority, so it organized a "resistance" to Israel that included a secular paramilitary wing called the Lebanese Resistance Brigades.  This "resistance" brought Christians, Druze, Sunni, and Shia together in their focused hatred of Israel and what they call "Zionism."  Hezbollah's political representatives in the Lebanese parliament are grouped under the designation, "Loyalty to the Resistance," where they form a bloc of 12 seats.

This idea of placing to one side any positive agenda in favor of bringing as many "resisters" together in a focused hatred to oppose anything and everything proposed by the legitimately elected government of the United States of America is rather chilling.  To compare Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler belittles the gravity of the crimes of the latter.  In fact, this "resistance" movement is closer in its application to the various NSDAP (National Socialists) - KPD (Communists) alliances to undermine the "establishment" of the Weimar Republic.  In his first hand account (1932-33), American Abraham Plotkin wrote of "the certain peculiarities in the similarity of the programs of both the Fascists and the Communists... they do work together occasionally, because of the similarity of their programs... to discredit the social democratic leadership."  Such is how a  "resistance" is made. 

Representative democracies have "loyal oppositions."  On the night of his inauguration as President, Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson passed over countless members of his own party to ask the Republican Senate Leader, Everett Dirksen, to join him at the White House for a private drink.  Such was their relationship.  Together they wrote and shepherded to passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.  That was a Republic at work -- an elected government and the loyal opposition -- not a "resistance." 

If you want to see a "resistance" at work -- and the threat it poses to representative democracy -- go visit Israel.  There is a very boisterous self-named "resistance movement" made up of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.  More moderate groups -- like Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) eschew the term "resistance," preferring to find compromise with the Israeli government.  Hmmmm...

Remember Senator Weinberg, Assemblywoman Oliver, you chose the term.  Now own it -- all of it.

100 days of Trump: What do the polls tell us?

100 days into his first term and President Donald Trump's polling numbers are trailing those of his modern predecessors.

Presidential Job Approval Ratings Following the First 100 Days
    Eisenhower - Trump

Citation: Gerhard Peters. "Presidential Job Approval Ratings Following the First 100 Days." The American Presidency Project. Ed. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California. 1999-2017. Available from the World Wide Web: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/100days_approval.php.

** Rasmussen Report, Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

Rasmussen reports that 32 percent strongly approve of the President, while 42 percent strongly disapprove.  That is a 10-percentage point intensity gap. 

This intensity gap is important, because the Democrats are fueling it with grassroots efforts aimed directly at Trump and the GOP.  Meanwhile, pro-Trump forces are often at odds with the Republican Party (as in the case of some Tea Party groups and organizations like Americans for Prosperity).  While AFP works to split the GOP, the anti-Trump forces are united and grow closer together every day in their determination to stop President Trump's reforms. 

On Friday, 99 days into President Trump's first 100 days, a coalition of Democrat Party and Left wing activists groups announced they were forming to stop Trump in New Jersey.  The Observer (April 28, 2017) reported:

"On the 99th day of Trump’s presidency, New Jersey legislators and activists launched what they called a “legislative resistance” to create concrete protections against federal proposals that they say would undermine state values and resident safety.  

The Resistance Coalition is fronted by Sen. Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen) and Assembly Speaker Emeritus Sheila Oliver (D-Essex). It includes activist groups like New Jersey Working Families Alliance, the Communication Workers of America (CWA), the NJ Amalgamated Transit Union, Blue Wave NJ, and the Sierra Club, among others. They plan to introduce state legislative measures in areas like expanding voting rights, reinstating Obama-era environmental protections lifted by the Trump administration, minimizing “wage theft” they say Trump’s budget cuts would aggravate, and divesting pension payments from companies that help build Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall."

Instead of meeting this challenge with a coalition of their own, groups like AFP are leading the charge to block the Trump agenda in Washington, DC, while its New Jersey affiliate has joined with several Tea Party groups to instigate primaries  against Republican legislators.  The Democrats and far-Left have joined together to kill President Trump's initiatives and are watching bemused as their opponents strangle each other.  Instead of meeting the Left's challenge, AFP and the Tea Party are battling Republicans.  Insane, but true.

Democrat and Left-wing intensity is only going to grow stronger.  A Rasmussen poll out on Friday shows that Democrats are not happy with the level of their party's obstruction of President Trump's policies.  The survey found that just 11% of Likely Democratic Voters believe efforts by the Democrats to oppose Trump during his first 100 days in office were successful.  Twenty-four percent (24%) of Democrats think those efforts were a failure, while most (63%) say they’re somewhere in between.

According to Rasmussen, voters tend to think President Trump has failed to deliver in his first 100 days in office, but Rasmussen claims that is mainly because Democrats are so partisan and unhappy with Trump.   

"But a closer look finds that 57% of Republicans think Trump’s first 100 days have been successful versus 72% of Democrats who regard them as a failure. Eighteen percent (18%) of GOP voters say Trump has failed to date; only nine percent (9%) of Democrats think he has succeeded. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, 23% say the president’s first 100 days have been a success, 43% a failure.

Twenty-eight percent (28%) of all voters think Trump has proven to be a better president than they expected. Only slightly more (31%) say he’s done worse than they expected. Thirty-nine percent (39%) feel his performance has been about what they thought it would be."

Rasmussen notes that President Trump’s job approval rating in its Daily Presidential Tracking Poll has ranged from a high of 59% in late January to a low of 43% in early April. 

Can President Trump turn this around?  Yes, with a strong and determined focus from his grassroots supporters and some popular policies. Trump's signing of the “Buy American, Hire American” executive order was one of the most popular actions he's taken since being in office.  Actions like these and supporters who are as willing to fight for him as they are against each other will turn the tide.

Stay tuned...