Well, the honeymoon is over. Accusing your political enemy of a coup tends to kill the mood.
Before escaping in November with the narrowest victory of her long congressional career, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., seemed to be cozying up a bit with then- GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. Politics do make the strangest of bedfellows, and was there anything stranger than watching Wisconsin’s far-left junior senator, a very open and vocal lesbian and hero to the LGBTQ/DEI establishment, court “Trump-Tammy voters” by selling common ground on an America First program?
Desperate times called for desperate measures. Baldwin was slipping in the polls late in the campaign. She saw the writing on the wall, and the writing screamed that far-left candidates were generally out of fashion in 2024. So, as she has long done on the campaign trail, Baldwin pretended to be what she has never been: a moderate.
After her sweat-it-out victory, Baldwin pledged to work with the newly elected Trump and work toward a kinder, gentler political environment.
“We deserve a politics with less vitriol, less division, less hatred and fewer lies. Actually, no lies,” the Democrat told her supporters on election night at a steamfitters union training center.
Baldwin was back at the vitriol on Monday — taking aim at Trump.
“I don’t know what this transition is going to lead to, but it’s looking more like a coup than a transition right now,” the leftist said following a tour of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy’s Opioid Overdose Response Center.
That’s Not a Coup, Silly
A coup? We know Dems have had a hard time with the vocabulary quiz. They’ve been known to mess up the definition of “insurrection,” and “border” is a tricky concept for them. But coup? A coup directed through a free and fair election in which Trump dominated in the electoral college, won the popular vote, and took all seven swing states. Oh, yes. It’s the process of free and fair elections that’s foreign to the left.
“I guess Senator Baldwin is overlooking the election President Trump won in the electoral college and with the popular vote because Democrats screwed things up so badly,” Baldwin’s Republican colleague, Wisconsin senior Sen. Ron Johnson, told The Federalist Monday afternoon.
According to Baldwin, the duly elected president’s coup stems from his “unconstitutional” use of executive authority to pause federal grants and loans while the Trump Administration weighs continuing federal government spending that at best is useless, or worse, toxic, or worst, actually unconstitutional. The pause-and- review process is aimed at “financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
According to CBS58 in Milwaukee, UW-Madison last week issued a hiring freeze on positions funded by federal aid following Trump’s directives. On Monday, Baldwin called the executive orders an “illegal power grab,” again showing her struggle with the language. Or at least her partisan ambiguity. Not once did the junior senator describe Trump’s Democratic predecessor’s long line of truly abusive executive actions as illegal power grabs. But then again, she did vote with Biden about 96 percent of the time.
Congressman Bryan Steil, a Republican who represents Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, found Baldwin’s use of “coup” curious.
“I do think it’s appropriate to make sure that all federal government spending is reviewed and that we determine it’s a good use of taxpayer dollars,” Steil told CBS58.
Yes. It’s not only reasonable to make sure taxpayer dollars are being spent appropriately and constitutionally, it’s the job of the three co-equal branches of government to do so. It’s a job congress in particular has often abdicated.
That’s not a coup, that’s the law. But Democrats, with their strange way of defining things and their loose relationship with law and order, can’t help but mix up the terms.
A True Coup
There’s been a lot of coup talk going around these days from the left. Google the word and up pops the same story with a similar headline from corporate media. The theme is the takeover of democracy by Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE — the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency charged with cutting spending and streamlining the federal government. From the Atlantic to Al Jazeera, the headlines scream coup accusations. By design, of course.
The same publications were mostly silent about the actual coup last summer. The Democratic National Committee disregarded and disenfranchised millions of primary voters and forced Biden out of the presidential race when it appeared clear he could not beat Trump. The accomplice media gladly ran interference for Biden’s stand-in, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the big-monied power interests that crowned her the nominee without challenge. No one should be surprised. The accomplice media has trouble with the meaning of words, too. After all, they declared Trump was a threat to democracy while his opponents were dismantling the pillars of this federal democratic republic — justice, due process, free speech, etc. — to stop the Republican Party nominee from holding the office again.
Picking up on the recent memo from Democrat leadership to amp up the fight against Trump (street fights included), Baldwin called on Republicans to push back against the president on the grant freeze. A few have, and some more undoubtedly will, because they’re politicians that hold a loose relationship with conservative, limited-government values. They, too, have had a hard time with definitions, like fiscal constraint, business as usual, the Deep State, and the Swamp. American voters, however, know the language. They know what they’ve lived through thanks to business as usual in the Deep State and the Swamp. They know exactly what primaried means. And in November they gave the left a lesson in throw the bums out.
Or, in the lexicon of Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a coup.
A duly elected coup.
