Connecticut Democrats Call upon Minority Republicans, But Not Other Democrats, to Denounce the Titular Head of Their Political Party

“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one” – H. L. Mencken

 

A seasoned Connecticut political reporter notes in CTMirror, “A less popular topic for [Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield] is President Donald J. Trump, whose rise in national politics has coincided with hard times for blue-state Republicans — even more so in Connecticut. Harding’s caucus issued no assessment of the president’s first 100 days…Republicans, who had come close to parity in the General Assembly when Trump took office in 2017, lost more state legislative seats in Connecticut than any other state during Trump’s first term. They now hold 11 of 36 seats in the Senate and 49 of 151 in the House.”

 

The unstated premise of such assertions, gently suggested by the reporter, is that had Connecticut Republicans more fervently denounced President Donald Trump, the titular head of the Republican Party during his first, and now second, term in office, Republicans might have fared better in state elections. In Connecticut, Republicans are outnumbered by Democrat voters by a two to one margin. Unaffiliated and Independent voters combined outnumber Democrats by a slight margin. Democrats have controlled major cities in Connecticut, reliable pools of votes, for 30 to 50 years, long before Trump opened his first presidential bid.

 

Republicans have in the recent past suffered grievous losses in political representation: All the members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation are Democrats. The last Republican Governor was Jodi Rell, who declined to run for governor in 2011 and then moved to Florida, said one wit, to avoid the state’s onerous taxes and regulations. The state’s General Assembly is tipsy with Democrats, and Connecticut’s media is fervently anti-Trump.

 

Asked why he and other state Republicans were not more resolutely anti-Trump, Harding replied, “I’ve given my assessment when asked about those things. And my communication style, and our Senate Republican communication style, continues to remain consistent: We’re focusing on the things that we actually can control here in the state.”

 

Clearly, Connecticut Democrats are hoping to repeat a strategy that had worked well for them in past elections – even in off-presidential-year elections in which Trump’s name had not appeared on the ballot.

 

It would, of course, be highly irregular – precedence breaking, in fact -- for members of the Republican or Democrat parties to throw overboard the titular heads of their parties for the purpose of hauling in a few irregular votes, and the haul would be questionable in any case. Would the Republican Party be likely to prevail in the upcoming midterm elections on November 3, 2026 by feeding Trump to state Democrat wolves? Would it not be strategically advisable for minority Republicans to appeal to disaffected Democrats by denouncing a Democrat presidential election process in 2024 that had replaced a frail sitting President Joe Biden with a Vice Presidential stand-in who could not bear to offer a straight answer to the question: How would your administration differ from that of the sitting President Joe Biden?

 

How many state Democrats have denounced the titular head of their party after Trump swept the boards in 2024? What is good for the Republican goose must also be good for the Democrat gander. And so – why have no prominent Connecticut State Democrats been cornered by an objective and non-partisan state media and pressured to denounce Biden’s dismal four year term in office, during which the U.S. Southern border all but disappeared, opening the flood gates to illegal immigration.

 

Early in Biden’s term as president, President of Russia Vladimir Putin began his assault on Ukraine. This was not the first time a thuggish communist Russia had sought to annex Ukraine.

 

In 1932-33, Joseph Stalin, “the breaker of nations,” caused a man-made famine in Ukraine, known since Roman times as “the breadbasket of Europe,” that was vastly underreported -- thanks in large part to Walter Duranty, an Anglo-American journalist who served as Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936). Robert Conquest noted the famine early on and wrote a book, Harvest of Sorrow, in which he calculated that 5 to 10 million Ukrainians had perished in the famine known as the Holodomor. Census numbers were unaccountably missing during the Holodomor. Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist later murdered by Chinese bandits, both reported on the famine after they had secretly visited the countryside by train. Muggeridge said of Duranty, who claimed famines were routine in Ukraine and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Stalin’s agricultural collectivization in the ravaged country, that he was the worst pathological liar he had met in all his years in journalism. 

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin is an unapologetic and aggressive postmodern Stalinist. When Stalin’s Soviet Union fell apart, Putin said that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the post-Cold War period of President Ronald Reagan was the greatest tragedy in European history. For Stalin, Ukraine served as the gateway to Poland and the Baltic states, all effectively annexed by the Soviets in the “peace” that followed World War II.

 

Early in the Biden administration, Connecticut’s U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal advised Biden that Ukraine desperately needed jets to ward off Putin’s ill-conceived attempt to subdue Ukraine’s resistance to Putin’s Stalinist ambitions. Blumenthal’s efforts bore no fruit.

 

Now that the Biden administration has been properly interred, some courageous journalists have come forward to note its failings, principle among them a botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a border policy that admitted to the United States millions of unvetted border-jumpers from a myriad of countries, many unfriendly to the United States, a seemingly unending post-COVID federal spending and borrowing spree that contributed to the devaluation of the dollar, otherwise known as inflation, and the soft silence of prominent Democrat members of Congress that muted what is perhaps the most important story of the last few decades – the now uncontested inability of Biden to serve adequately as president.

 

To put the matter too tolerantly, nearly every wide-awake voter in Connecticut cannot help but notice that ruling Democrats have not been tormented by sharp questions launched in their direction by the state’s milquetoast media. Americans generally have a very finely honed sense of political justice and fairness, and it was in part a violation of both that played a decisive part in Trump’s electoral victory in his recent elevation to the presidency. “Fool me once,” the old adage has it, “shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.” It is a message the national and state media, both underwater in approval ratings, should take to heart.