Gooden then crassly declared on Twitter that he wasn’t about to allow anyone to disrespect Trump while he was around. This coming from a party that has tried to make free speech its mantra.
Riddle me this, Lance. Would you sit idly by if this had been a Democratic president’s State of the Union, and a Democratic congressman ripped a sign out of the hands out of one of your female Republican compatriots? What you did is just as crass, vile, and unbecoming.
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Put simply, if Green’s behavior merited a censure resolution, Gooden’s behavior is even more so. After all, it encompasses everything the GOP has become since Trump came down the escalator, and illustrates why we call Trump and his acolytes “deplorable” and “weird.” By all rights, the Democrats should be calling the Republicans’ bluff.
Unfortunately, later in the speech, the Democrats may have lost any chance to gain any traction from Gooden’s behavior. Trump highlighted D. J. Daniel, a 13-year-old who had dreams of becoming a cop before being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2018. At the time of his diagnosis, he’d only been given five months to live. Trump made him an honorary member of the Secret Service. With few exceptions, the Democrats stayed seated.
Now, I make no secret that I despise Trump. But not standing up and applauding a little boy fighting cancer—a boy of color, no less—is a bad look, regardless of how you slice it. It would have looked far better if they’d stood up while holding up signs highlighting the steaming hypocrisy of Trump profiling little D. J. so soon after he and Elon Musk took a meat-ax to the cancer research that has allowed him to beat the odds. They knew D. J. was coming and had plenty of time to prepare a response. All they did was make it appear that this country has become so polarized that we can’t cheer for cancer survivors.
There’s no denying it—the Democrats’ messaging problems come from a lack of infrastructure. We actually had a fairly robust infrastructure, but it got ripped away from us in stages. First, after a torrent of criticism for not doing enough to tamp down disinformation during the 2016 campaign, Facebook and Google tweaked their algorithms in a way that throttled the reach of the blogs that had become staples for the left. I saw this first-hand while at Liberal America and RDTDaily. In the name of dropping the hammer on the likes of Alex Jones, they harmed blogs who followed the rules.
Granted, we rebuilt enough to harness the anger at Trump in 2018, allowing us to retake the House. But right as we were building momentum for 2020, the pandemic hit and severely crimped our ability to organize. Then in 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, and his twisted idea of free speech allowed so much bile to flow there that it was untenable for a lot of lefties to stay there—if for no other reason than our own safety.
But that doesn’t excuse not being able to use the tools we have to fight back, especially in this day and age. In order to fight a demagogue like Trump, we have to tell people what we’re for. It shows we have a competing vision for the country. Granted, poll after poll shows that Trump’s tactics aren’t playing well. But we have to convince people on the fence to trust us.
Darrell Lucus is right: Most Democrats staying seated during the moment that Donald Trump mentioned Devarjaye Daniel, who got diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, is bad optics.
