A QUARTER CENTURY OF PATHETIC PRESIDENTS.

Nothing more clearly illustrates our political class attempting to conceal that reality than the faux holiday called Presidents Day, which we observe today with furniture sales and no mail delivery.  February used to be for Lincoln's Birthday on the 12th and Washington's Birthday on the 22nd, and you'd mix in St. Valentine for the triumph of hope over experience on the 14th and because of the workings of the paschal full moon you could count on Pączki Day and the closing events of Karneval or Fasching or Mardi Gras sometime during the month, and then the faithful get their foreheads marked on Ash Wednesday.

I forgot the history.  Officially, today is Washington's Birthday for scheduling of government holidays.  Country Living's Jill Gleeson has the full story of how the day came to be known as Presidents Day.  Omit the apostrophe.  There was bipartisan agreement on the principle that another three-day weekend made more sense than two holidays tied to the calendar, and wasn't George Washington born before the British Crown switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar making his birth day and year ambiguous?  If you do family history back to the seventeenth and early eighteenth century you know of what I describe.

It has been my position, more or less, that the last serious president was George H. W. Bush, naval aviator, and somehow the Republic has made do since the end of the Cold War with a saxophone-playing philanderer, a legacy, a token who really didn't like his constituents very much, and his sock puppet; and a reality show host bracketing the sock puppet.

None of them really inspired, and each of them does a better job riling up the opposition rather than building coalitions and forming a majority.  That might be because forming a majority is a fool's errand.

Twenty years ago, when George W. Bush won the votes of enough September 12 Americans to earn a plurality of the popular vote and re-election, I made what turned out to be a rash prediction.  "The Superintendent's advice to Democrats: you cannot beat something with nothing, or hold out your hopes for a fracture between the libertarian and traditionalist parts of the Republican coalition."  That fracture did happen, if not exactly in that form, with the Trumpian populists at odds with the national greatness conservatives, to the dismay of Democrats who hoped to hang onto enough Reagan Democrats to hold together their own fracture between the corporatists and communists in their coalition.  I've referred to that situation as four political parties attempting to present as two.  Nowhere, though, does there appear to be any room in either party as currently understood for what we might understand as Henry Jackson Democrats, or even, as Jeff Jacoby laments, Reagan Republicans. "How much disillusionment can our political system tolerate before it cracks up?"

A year into the second Trump presidency, the stock taking, complaining, and wishful thinking is well under way.  Pajamas Media contributor Matt Margolis urges voters to stay the course.  "Biden destroyed America's confidence in the future. Democrats, consumed by their loathing of Trump, refuse to acknowledge the economic realities in front of them."  Sasha "Free Thinking" Stone, likewise.

I don’t regret my vote for Trump and I never will, because even now, the Left is worse. Their reaction is worse. They are never telling the truth, not to us, not to themselves. All they have to sell is hate and fear.

They aren’t getting less crazy and more sane. They are not becoming kinder, more tolerant, and more forgiving. They still have no idea what democracy means - spoiler alert: you can’t always get what you want. They have never learned the lesson in ten years. They still believe that winning their war is forcing all of us to go along with their distorted version of reality.

And add that to these crazy people on TikTok, and you start to see that the reason Trump won is that he’s closer to normal than they are.

There's nothing quite like the belief system of the disaffected former leftist to make the case for doing things differently.

They have given people like me no path back because the only option is going back to the Doomsday Cult that insists I call Trump and the other half of America racists when I know that it isn’t true. A cult that demands I buy into the oppressor/oppressed mandate, and demands I look the other way as they indoctrinate our kids and destroy every great thing this country ever built.

I could have been one of those who hovered reluctantly in the middle and held my nose and voted for Trump. Maybe I could have salvaged some of my reputation such that when I died, they might say good things about me instead of dancing on my grave.

Libertarian-minded commentators see the insanity of Democrats and wonder why nobody sees the opportunity that Trumpian populism offers to somebody who chooses not to be insane.  George Mason economist Veronique de Rugy, more frequently seen at Reason, advises readers of Washington's failing Post to change course.  "Trump is making voters uneasy. Democrats are pushing them away."  "Tax the rich" is a good way to ruin an elegant dress, and there might be better messages.

If Democrats want voters to believe they are an alternative to political excess, they should elevate voices that champion a return to rule-bound governance, stable tax policy and fiscal restraint. They would advance a national affordability agenda by expanding housing and energy supplies and dismantling the other bottlenecks making everyday life more expensive.

That train probably left sometime during the Woodrow Wilson years.  "Cut taxes, deregulate, devolve" work as practical suggestions, but the consultants don't get to wet their beaks in the swamp that way.  The editors of New York's Times give Reason editor Katherine Mangu-Ward a platform for "Libertarians: We Told You So."

On immigration, speech and trade, Americans are living in a libertarian’s nightmare. Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement. Armed National Guardsmen walk the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order. Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on Gaza and Charlie Kirk. Tariffs on China have been set at 10, 20, 54, 145 and 30 percent in just the past few months. TikTok, Intel, U.S. Steel and their ownership have become matters in which the president has taken a personal interest — and threatened dire consequences if his wishes are not taken into account.

These stories are examples of a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long-held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism.

Libertarians have argued that the only way to prevent such abuses is to reduce the power of the federal government — abolish unaccountable federal agencies, scale back the administrative state, cut spending — and to restore the balance of powers by reining in the executive. This path has generally been treated as hopelessly naïve at best and morally suspect at worst.

She goes on to note that both major parties have disregarded the libertarian-leaning voices within their coalitions in order to use the powers of government to bestow favors.  Perhaps that's inevitable when you attempt to jam four possible coalitions into two parties.  Devolution might be better than gridlock when it comes to, oh, governing, but devolution means fewer opportunities for those consultants to wet their beaks.  Perhaps it took a populist in Republican clothing to demonstrate that running a presidential cult was not the province of a Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson only.  Donald Trump "is merely picking up the weapons that previous administrations left lying around and waltzing through the loopholes they opened."

The Federal Constitution establishes a Congress in Article I, and that Congress has allowed itself, she asserts, to be run over by presidents exceeding their Article II authority for years.  So it is with the presidential cult.

Congress has abdicated its role as the body that can declare war (while lavishly financing the capacity), preferring to grant sweeping emergency powers to the president and then leave them in place indefinitely. Instead of a winner-take-all approach to power, it’s time to consider working toward a system in which there is much less power for the winner to take. No one wishes events will prove libertarians wrong more than libertarians themselves. There’s nothing more annoying than an “I told you so.” But if more Americans are now ready to limit power before it is abused again, they are welcome to join us.

But will the voters limit presidential power, or the power of the federal government?  Or will confessions of error, such as Richard Hanania's "I regret my vote for Donald Trump. I don’t regret admitting my mistake," simply lead to a Democrat majority beholden to its crazies?  His post is about having the intellectual integrity to weigh the evidence and change one's thinking.

And yet, we might have that succession of pathetic presidents because of the way in which some voters weigh the evidence and change their thinking.  A pollster named G. Elliott Morris breaks that down.

Voters who knew the least about politics were the ones most favorable to Trump in 2024. Not anymore; low-knowledge voters are now just as likely as high-knowledge voters to oppose his presidency. With fresh polling data, Strength In Numbers can report on other questions that distinguish these two groups. We can gain a better understanding of why they have changed their minds—and what this means for 2026.

Put simply:  Democrats are in a good position to flip the House and perhaps the Senate and claim a mandate, although the Strength in Numbers analysis suggests it is anything but:

1.  Low-info voters are more punishing of incumbents when conditions are poor.
2.  Low-knowledge voters are more elastic.
3.  How Trump won in 2024 (and how Democrats can win in 2026).

We have much to look forward to.

Democrats might be hoping that Trump voters will hereafter stay home: a commonplace in introductory politics courses is the reality that many non-voters hold more authoritarian views, and the Serious People well might not call too much attention to that in the hope that such voters stay home.  Did they?  Will they?

And if the Congress is gridlocked, will that stop Our President from sending out mean tweets and issuing executive orders?