Good morning and welcome back to today’s edition of the Wolf’s Den. It’s Saturday, and today, we are breaking down everything you need to know about how Democrats are fighting back against Donald Trump’s insanity.
Thursday night’s address was billed as a look forward. It wasn’t. The president spent most of it relitigating the 2020 election — new “reports,” new “findings,” the same old claim that the vote was compromised. Once again he is casting doubt on the machinery of American democracy and signaling that he wants to control how future elections are run.
Here’s the problem with the argument, and it’s not a small one: Trump’s own record refutes it. He was the sitting president when the 2020 election was administered. He lost. His own Republican colleagues certified the results. He was removed from power — and then, in 2024, with essentially none of the rules changed, he ran again and won. A system rigged against him does not produce that sequence. You cannot be the victim of a stolen election you later won cleanly.
Let me be precise, because it matters. None of this means foreign interference isn’t real. China, Russia, and other adversaries are actively working to shape how Americans think and vote, and that deserves to be taken seriously. But meddling at the margins is a different thing entirely from the claim that our elections are rigged. Conflating the two is how you turn a genuine national-security concern into a culture-war grievance.
So why the fixation? The honest answer is simple: the president doesn’t have much else to point to. He was elected on the cost of living, on the border, and on the promise of the largest deportation in American history. Give him credit where it’s due — the border is meaningfully more secure, and that’s a real accomplishment. But the deportation numbers tell a different story; he’s removing a smaller share of violent criminals than either Obama or Biden did. And on the issue that actually got him elected, most Americans still say groceries are unaffordable and gas costs too much. When the kitchen-table promises don’t materialize, you change the subject. 2020 is the subject.
It isn’t working. The polling is brutal — the president is scraping bottom, his hand-picked candidates are losing, and Republicans up and down the ballot are getting beaten badly in special elections and trailing in the polls. That’s why Democrats are now favored to take back the House and, increasingly, the Senate.
Democrats aren’t sitting still, either. When the administration demanded access to individual states’ voter files — Pennsylvania’s among them, in a critical swing state — Gov. Josh Shapiro’s answer was flat: absolutely not. That kind of pushback, paired with lawsuits from Shapiro and others, is exactly the posture the moment requires.
The single most powerful response is still the simplest one. Turn out in November, and win decisively enough that no one can plausibly cry fraud. The map is bending that way. The job now is not to lift a foot off the gas.
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Ethan
