Democrats were blindsided by one statement in Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech.
They never saw the attack coming.
And the left was in shambles after Donald Trump spoke the seven words that left Nancy Pelosi quaking in her boots.
President Trump used his second State of the Union speech – a President’s first is an address to Congress – to frame the terms of the debate for his 2020 re-election campaign.
And in doing so, the President jammed the Democrats in a trap of their own making.
Beginning in 2016 with Bernie Sanders challenge to Hillary Clinton, socialism ascended in the Democrat Party.
That energy manifested in the 2018 primary season as avowed socialists like Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stacey Abrams all seized party nominations for offices up and down the ballot.
These victories dragged the Democrat Party far to the left with demands to adopt wealth taxes and Soviet-style “Green New Deal” programs to combat so-called “global warming.”
In President Trump’s speech, he addressed the crisis in Venezuela where the socialist government has bankrupted the country and hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans are in the streets demanding the corrupt regime leave power.
President Trump transitioned from the failures in Venezuela and declared that, “America will never be a socialist country.”
“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence – not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free,” the President began.
President Trump continued, “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country. One of the most complex set of challenges we face and have for many years is in the middle east. Our approach is based on principled realism — not discredited theories that have failed for decades to yield progress. For this reason, my administration recognized the true capital of Israel — and proudly opened the American embassy in Jerusalem.”
Bernie Sanders looked like a boy whose favorite toy had been taken away.
"We are alarmed by the new calls to adopt socialism in our country," Pres. Trump says.
"Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country." https://t.co/aiCxLU221a #SOTU pic.twitter.com/XEh4Ia1nAo
— ABC News (@ABC) February 6, 2019
Of course, Sanders reaction was not surprising.
Venezuela represents the greatest embarrassment of Sanders career.
In a 2011 essay, Sanders claimed that you had a better chance of achieving the American dream in Venezuela and other socialist South American countries than in the United States.
“These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?” Sanders wrote at the time.
The nonsensical nature of that statement should have been obvious to anyone.
But Sanders is a Democrats Socialist whose ideology has proven not to work at every turn.
So being able to identify the obvious has never been his strong suit.
What did you think of Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech?
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.
