(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) When the ink has dried on the newly written history of the 2024 election, it will be clear that hubris, above all else, cost Democrats the opportunity to stop what they claimed would be the end of democracy as we know it.
While it was the gods of yore who punished figures like Oedipus, Icarus and Achilles for their vainglorious temptations of fate, in American politics it is the citizens themselves who must hold their elected leaders accountable.
And in modern parlance, hubris—the ancient Greeks’ term for the excessive pride that invariably leads to the demise and suffering of every tragic hero—goes by a different name: FAFO.
Those unfamiliar with what the ubiquitous acronym stands for can Google it or consult TikTok. (Hint: The second half stands for “find out.”)
Not surprisingly, in the spirit of Saul Alinsky, leftist social-media users now are pre-emptively trying to appropriate the #FAFO hashtag, sharing stories about how they are inflicting passive-aggressive punishments on Republicans, such as boycotting the family Thanksgiving.
But it is clear that they are the ones who will soon reap the consequences of their own arrogance.
More than any immediate danger President-elect Donald Trump may pose, the biggest problem Democrats now face is that they have no cards left to play, and voters have just called their bluff.
After ceding any moral high ground to engage openly in vicious political games over the past eight years, their scorched-earth attempts to smear Trump and his supporters have left little room for retreat, and their own credibility is now severely eroded.
Adding insult to injury, the damage to Trump’s political enemies is entirely self-inflicted, based on their unwavering commitment to trying to dupe the public and sell it a bad bill of goods.
THE PARDON PARADOX
President Joe Biden’s decision on Sunday to issue a “full and unconditional pardon” for his son Hunter perfectly underscored the dilemma that the Left’s recklessness has wrought.
The edict’s thoughtfully crafted, almost-11-year retroactive timespan ensures that the degenerate-drug-fiend-turned-Burisma-bagman will permanently avoid accountability in his Ukrainian influence-peddling scandal—one for which House Republicans were likely to recommend charges to the incoming Justice Department following a frustratingly meticulous and sometimes overcautious investigation.
However, the gesture of clemency—while it is the president’s prerogative to grant it—also carries with it a tacit admission of guilt. And it is an especially damning one at that, since the Left’s entire 2019 impeachment of Trump was predicated on the claim that he had targeted the Bidens for purely political reasons.
Because of those actions, impeachment no longer carries the stigma it once did but has become yet another political tool, like the filibuster, for fighting the opposition.
Trump, who already has been the victim of two bogus impeachments, will undoubtedly see the toothless threat for what it is, should Democrats invoke it once more in his second term.
Worse yet, corrupt prosecutors didn’t stop there. They proceeded to push case after case of lawfare against the GOP leader, weaponizing—and thereby delegitimizing—the entire justice system in many blue areas, where judges and juries shamelessly and unscrupulously based their legal determinations solely on their Trump Derangement Syndrome.
In that context, the Delaware jury’s guilty verdict in a cut-and-dry case in which Hunter Biden was on record admitting he violated the law was a rare moment of redemption.
Yet, Biden’s defenders spuriously claimed political persecution, while others made hay of the idea that Hunter would be held accountable—an outcome that few actually believed would come to pass.
Ironically, the initial reaction from the Left following the announcement of the pardon was not to condemn Biden for having broken his promise—humiliating those who grandstanded over his hollow pledge to preserve DOJ independence.
Rather, many lashed out over the fact that Biden had cleared the way for Trump to follow his unethical precedent.
Still, it is possible, as some have pointed out, that Joe Biden may yet be hoisted with his own petard.
Hunter can no longer incriminate himself—and, consequently, is free to testify against other unpardoned members of the Biden family crime syndicate without any protections from the Fifth Amendment.
Thus, by gaming the system to protect Hunter, the end result may be that Joe Biden, himself, faces greater exposure to criminal prosecution.
The same is true of nearly every strategy that Democrats deployed during the recent campaign, many of which not only failed spectacularly, but have since begun to backfire due to the audacity with which they were undertaken.
CAMPAIGN AND SUFFERING
While most of the topics below have already been discussed to death in the wake of Kamala Harris’s historic defeat last month, it is worth drilling down into the unique ways in which the Left’s FAFO strategy managed to compound its woes in the long run.
In some instances, it may have involved the breaking of laws—or at least ethical norms—with callous disregard for the customary precedents and conventions that Americans have come to expect.
In others, it was the sin of omission, or a simple refusal to enforce the laws that those in positions of power and trust were tasked with upholding.
In many cases, though, the biggest strategic failure of all was the Left’s sheer dishonesty in exaggerating and distorting the terms of debate to cover up its weak hand on issues that it either had handled ineptly or veered too far to the extreme on.
The Disappearing Primary
It was obvious to most that the Democratic National Committee and party powerbrokers were seeking to avoid a contentious primary that might weaken Biden’s political hand with attacks on both his age and his record. But why this runaround seemed like a good idea may, in hindsight, remain one of the biggest campaign mysteries, short of what happened to all of Biden’s 2020 voters.
The lack of criticism—and the determination to ignore and deny Biden’s weaknesses as “cheap fakes”—ultimately left the campaign in a severely compromised position when it finally made the decision to do the bait-and-switch that most had long assumed was inevitable.
Moreover, Democrats’ dearth of intra-party debate allowed Trump’s campaign to court liberal critics such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, forcing progressives to relinquish their long cherished status as the party of tolerance and diversity.
When DNC elites finally settled on Harris, the trainwreck was equal parts comical and cringeworthy.
Buoyed by what was clearly an astroturfed effort to rehab the deeply unpopular vice president, fake news flooded the mediascape with phony fundraising data and phony polls. But the only people who came off looking worse than the shills who insultingly peddled such lies to the public were those who evidently bought into them.
Donors and celebrity endorsers have since expressed their regret at having been “seduced” by the nonsensical claims, such as the one that Harris was outperforming Trump in deep-red Iowa. But the warning signs were present from the beginning as the Harris campaign routinely overpromised and underdelivered when it came to things like a much-hyped Beyonce concert that never materialized.
Harris never made history for the reasons she hoped, but she did set a record that will be difficult to break for having squandered the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time.
Hedging Bets on Hamas
In the spring, it seemed as if Hamas supporters were on the verge of mobilizing into another “summer of love” movement similar to the 2020 race riots that Democrat officials openly embraced, with agitators paid directly or indirectly by billionaire oligarchs and Middle Eastern shahs. But not only did the movement fail to coalesce, it actually generated significant backlash.
Left-leaning universities faced consequences for allowing the on-campus disruptions, especially after they became overtly anti-Semitic. Fearful of losing too much Jewish support, the Biden administration remained deafeningly silent on the matter, which in turn outraged Muslims who expected greater support.
Already annoyed by the encroachment of LGBT issues into public spaces, including schools, Islamic voters in key battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin either decided to sit out the election or throw their support to Trump, who seemed the better bet for de-escalating Middle Eastern tensions by taking a hardline stance on Iran.
Ignoring Illegal Immigration
There was only one way for Democrats to benefit politically over the Biden administration’s open-borders agenda, and that was enabling illegal immigrants to vote, whether through amnesty/blanket citizenship or a brazen disregard for enforcing election integrity.
They attempted both, but with little success. However, the mishandling of the immigration issue—although it may have been a cause célèbre for the NIMBYist Martha’s Vineyard set that was cushioned from the consequences—resonated deeply with lower- and middle-class voters who despised being treated like second-class citizens while noncitizens had the red carpet rolled out.
Even legal Latinos, who shared a cultural heritage with the majority of the so-called newcomers, condemned seeing scofflaw behavior rewarded as gangs of roving illegals took over apartment complexes in Colorado, ate the pets in Ohio and left a trail of innocent victims of violent crimes, including Laken Riley in Georgia and Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas.
But it may have been simple economics that drove away others, including blue-collar union workers, already walloped by the Biden economy’s inflation crisis, who resented having their wages undercut.
The immigration issue proved to be a major liability for Harris, in particular, as it was the one responsibility as vice president that everyone knew she had been delegated. To deny having been the border czar meant she had to admit that she altogether lacked any sort of leadership experience.
The Democrats’ “great replacement” plan might still reap its rewards in the long term if Trump’s promise of mass deportations falters. But if the party finds itself boxed in by the Biden–Harris policies, there is no guarantee blue-collar voters will return to the fold.
Ambiguity on Abortion
Democrats went big on abortion, seeing it as a winning issue after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision and subsequent special elections, including some in red states, that did not follow the pro-life path.
While they tried to spread panic that Trump supported a national abortion mandate to stir up single-issue female voters, the fact that Trump was clear about keeping the issue at the state level ensured that their Handmaid’s Tale and Project 2025 propaganda only resonated with the lowest of low-info news consumers.
As it turned out, the fact that red states like Kanas, Kentucky and Ohio had already voted in favor of preserving abortion was not the “own” that Democrats thought it would be.
Instead, it underscored the fact that there was no existential threat to “women’s rights,” and that those who chose to live in a state where abortions were restricted could simply vote with their feet if they felt that strongly about it. Or, alternatively, they could split the ticket, as voters in Arizona, Missouri and Montana did, by supporting Trump and backing constitutional protections at the state level for abortion.
Meanwhile, many of the women who seemed to have their passions stoked by the issue also happened to seem like the least likely candidates for an accidental or involuntary impregnation. As the Harris campaign doubled down on radical feminism, Trump again cornered the middle ground, winning libertarians who supported abortion but did not put it in their top-5 priorities list, and also courting young males who felt alienated by the constant barrage of attacks on “toxic masculinity” as the source of all women’s woes.
Trapped by Transgenderism
On the flip side of the abortion issue, Republicans made controversies over transgenderism a major focal point of their campaign in a $17 million marketing push that seemed to resonate with many voters.
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The culture-war issue had been embraced by the Biden administration to the point of having several underqualified officials—such as Rachel Levine and puppy-playing, luggage-stealing cross-dresser Sam Brinton—serving in significant roles.
Moreover during a White House “pride” celebration, a transgender influencer generated scandal by publicly flashing a pair of female-presenting breasts.
Biden also used executive order to subvert Title IX rules in public education, threatening schools with a loss of federal funds if they refused to capitulate to the arbitrary demands of gender-identity politics, including pronoun selection.
Even many in the gay community were aghast at being lumped in with perverts and mental patients who denied basic science—or those who, at best, threatened to roll back LGB progress with their extreme overreach.
Voters ultimately rejected the cognitive dissonance of refusing to acknowledge obvious biological differences, particularly when confronted by it in gender-exclusive spaces like locker rooms.
But the damage the Left inflicted on vulnerable young people in its efforts to push the “woke mind virus” was incalculable. It was a price that not even the richest man in the world could bear to pay. Literally.
The red-pill transformation of billionaire Elon Musk came about in large part after his son, Xavier, underwent the transformation to become Vivian and disavowed the Musk name (but not the money that came with it, necessarily).
Musk’s multi-pronged impact on the election, in turn, may also be immeasurable. His purchase of Twitter gave conservatives their voice back and leveled the social-media playing field following years of censorship.
His infusion of money provided a boon to the Trump campaign, which appeared to be vastly outraised by Harris’s network of dark-money donors.
But Musk also was considered to be one of the greatest geniuses of our time, making it acceptable for other liberals straddling the fence to likewise make the leap. That included Joe Rogan, who hosted Trump and running mate JD Vance on his highly popular podcast in the waning weeks of the race at Musk’s behest.
Best of all, Democrats who sank tens of thousands of dollars into buying Teslas to virtue-signal their embrace of electric vehicles now must bear the brand of one of their greatest nemeses.
Fortunately, in the hourslong wait for their batteries to charge, they should have ample time to meditate on the eternal koan “What is a woman”—and to reflect on how their lives took the tragic turn from FA to FO.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
