Hypocritical Democrats attack anti-Trump Republicans

Former US president Donald Trump dances onstage at a campaign rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Picture: AFP

We thought we’d seen everything in politics, but you really can’t top the spectacle of Democrats attacking California GOP representative David Valadao for – get this – voting to impeach Donald Trump.

Democrats are more worried about Trump having coattails than they are that he’ll destroy ­democracy.

“David Valadao turned his back on President Trump and the whole MAGA movement,” says a new TV spot running in California’s 22nd district. The ad cites the five-term congressman’s vote to impeach Trump in early 2021 and runs a clip of him saying, “We don’t need President Trump.” The ad concludes: “With a record like that, who needs David Valadao?”

The ad is sponsored by the Democrat group Voter Protection Project, which is funded by the House Majority political action committee, which is associated with the Democrat leadership. You can understand why House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi don’t want their fingerprints on the ad since they might look, well, hypocritical lambasting a Republican for standing against a man they say is America’s Hitler.

Pelosi recently said she agreed with retired general Mark Milley’s characterisation of the former president as a fascist. But if she and other Democrats really believed this, the party’s candidates wouldn’t be running ads that associate themselves with Trump.

Their real worry is that Trump’s popularity among working-class voters could boost Republicans in down-ballot races. Consider California’s 22nd district where Valadao faces a rematch against former state Assembly member Rudy Salas, whom he beat in 2022 by three points. Valadao then ran ahead of Trump’s 2020 finish in the district’s three counties by 15 or so points.

The popular backlash against inflation and progressive policies in Washington and Sacramento has since intensified. Unemployment in Valadao’s rural district is about double the national average, partly owing to California’s climate policies that have hurt the region’s oil and gas industry. Hispanics, who make up 75 per cent of the district, have moved toward Republicans.

A recent University of California, Berkeley IGS poll showed Trump leading Harris by 21 points in the San Joaquin Valley, which includes Valadao’s district. The Democrat ad is designed to encourage Trump voters to split their tickets. Meantime, Salas is running as a moderate despite his progressive record in Sacramento, which includes voting to extend the state’s cap-and-trade climate regime and low-carbon fuel ­standard.

The Valadao ad is a variation of the cynical trick Democrats used in 2022 to minimise their losses. They spent tens of millions in Republican primaries boosting GOP candidates who questioned or denied the 2020 election results on the bet that they’d be easier to defeat in the general election. Nearly all of the Trumpian Republicans lost in November.

Republican voters picked better candidates this year, so Democrats are now resorting to other gambits, including boosting third-party pro-Trump candidates. The next time a Democrat or never-Trump columnist denounces Republicans as cowards for “normalising” Trump, point them to the ad against Valadao – and laugh.