As we settle into the second month of the Trump administration, many themes ring familiar from 2021: The hardline talk on non-white immigration, anti-transgender grievances, blaming everything that goes poorly on DEI, and so on. Trump has fooled his supporters once again into believing that all of the problems in their lives lie at the doorstep of minorities and the LBGTQ folks. According to Trump, if we just stop DEI hiring practices and deport every minority living in the country, your income will double and your happiness will increase tenfold. It’s that easy!

But let’s be honest with ourselves here: Democrats are as much to blame for the situation we find ourselves in as Trump himself. Let’s first go back to 2008 to see where it all began. It was Barack Obama who promised a progressive administration like no other. His 2008 campaign quite literally gave us hope for change and his promises inspired many conservatives to cross over and vote for the blue team. However, the moment Obama took office, the bait and switch was on and what Americans received instead was neoliberal policy that would have made Hillary Clinton proud. Gone were any of the progressive ideals he championed as a candidate, replaced with many of the policies progressives have come to despise: a massive expansion of oil drilling, continuation of never-ending wars including a massive escalation of drone attacks on innocent civilians in the Middle East, universal healthcare replaced by the health insurance industry’s greatest gift: The Affordable Care Act, and most devastating: an unofficial pardon to the financial fraudsters who caused the 2008 meltdown of the economy.

Voters paid attention. For many, it was the final straw in the “trust the establishment” agenda and after giving Obama 8 years to enact change that never came, the backlash was furious. In 2016, Republican voters ignored establishment favorite, Jeb Bush, and instead nominated a political outsider, Donald Trump. What many liberals fail to realize, even to this day, is that many Trump voters fill in the box for Trump not necessarily because they like the Don, but because the establishment on both sides has failed them and they want something different. Is Trump that “something different”? He sure is. Voters were desperate for change, even if the vessel for that change was an old real estate developer who mocked women, the mentally ill, and minorities.

How did Trump’s nomination for the GOP presidential ticket and the subsequent scandals that followed created a disastrous sequence of events that has brought us where are today? In 2020, liberals decided that Trump was such a bad candidate that voters were urged to “vote blue no matter who”. In other words, what the Democratic candidate promised voters was no longer of consequence. The identity of the Democratic candidate was not important. The ideology of the Democratic candidate was not important. All that mattered was that you vote for that person, no matter what. “Vote blue no matter who” was explicit permission given to the Democratic Party by liberal voters to eliminate any semblance of progressive policy from their platform – it simply was not relevant anymore. Democrats were now free to tack to the right, literally as far as they wanted, and they would still be awarded with liberal votes. While the Democrats’ move to the right was telegraphed out in the open as they successfully thwarted Bernie Sander’s candidacy for the nomination in both 2016 and 2020, the mask could now come completely off. And it did.

Tired of the never-ending media headlines and the incompetence that plagued much of Trump’s first term, voters selected the only other option they had from a major party ticket, Joe Biden. Biden, a staunch conservative for his entire political career, benefitted from voters’ exhaustion over Trump and won the presidency. What happened next was a direct result of the “vote blue no matter who” campaign. Gone were any big policy proposals that benefitted voters. Medicare for all? Cutting the military budget? Reigning in the police? Vanished. Worse, the Biden administration and its Democratic colleagues in Congress put up no resistance as the Supreme Court gutted long-standing precedence on everything from abortion rights to government regulations. In one notable incident, the Biden administration failed to enact a higher federal minimum wage, hiding behind the Senate Parliamentarian, whose rulings are advisory in nature and not legally enforceable.

The Democrats went so far as to put Biden up for reelection, making an outright mockery of the “vote blue no matter who” mantra. Here were the Democrats about to re-nominate a man who was clearly well-past the ability to serve as president and whose cognitive decline was so terrifying that he was kept out of the public eye for a large portion of 2024, when he should have been the most visible. By the time the Democrats relented and replaced him, they had already committed a holocaust in Gaza, mass murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and maiming hundreds of thousands more using methods that somehow made Hitler look like a kind soul. That these horrifying actions were crimes against humanity and a gross violation of International law that could now be utilized by a Republican president did not seem to register with the administration nor blue-team voters.

The Democrats replaced Biden with a self-described Biden clone in Kamala Harris, who further mocked the concept of “vote blue no matter who” by not even bothering to list any policy proposals or stances on her website until months after she replaced Biden. Who can blame her? If you are a Democratic voter and vow to “vote blue no matter who”, why should Dem candidates waste time explaining why you should vote for them? She even went so far as to take credit for the genocide in Gaza, telling anyone who would listen that she was a key part of the decision and would not do anything differently. But the final cherry on top? She spent the final months of her campaign alongside Liz Cheney, a devoted Republican and the daughter of the one of the most egregious war criminals of all-time.

In a surprise to nobody – including Harris’ own team, this past November, Donald Trump easily defeated Team Kamala in what could only be described as a massacre. Harris flipped zero Republican counties, lost every swing state, and epitomized the collapse of the party as over 20 million independents and left-leaning liberals stayed home rather than choose between red evil and blue evil.

This leaves us where we are today, with Trump in charge, Republicans holding all branches of government, and a Democratic party that seems to have absolutely no idea why it lost the 2024 election. The “vote blue no matter who” campaign not only turned the Democratic Party into the Republican party of the early 2000s, but lost 2 out of 3 presidential elections and left the Democrats further away from electoral victory than they have been in decades.

This is a major inflection point for liberals and progressives. Those who support the Democratic Party must ask themselves: Do you continue to support a political party that makes no attempt to connect with you, promises you nothing, openly mocks you by championing Republican policies, campaigns with Republicans, commits a genocide that would make George W. Bush blush, and tells you to shut up when you raise your voice? Or do you cut your losses and work to build something better? You have less than 3 years to make the right choice.