Make New York Post a Preferred Source Congressional Democrats have plainly ditched their affordability campaign in favor of political reprisals against the president, his cabinet — and you.
Rep. Robert Garcia’s cringey “LAWYER UP” post on X cut to the chase: Dem legislators are champing at the bit to go after President Trump and his team.
But a disturbing new threat from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) shows they also have every intention of going even further and continuing an ugly Biden-era tradition.
Namely, legal and political harassment of private citizens for protected political speech and free-association action.
Blumenthal issued a demand that various companies that made donations for Trump’s White House renovation provide records related to their gifts.
Other Dems, like Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), have threatened to target people pardoned by Trump, firms that received tariff exemptions and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
That Blumenthal, who closed out 2025 as the leading congressional stock trader by dollar volume, should shriek about potential corruption is laughable.
Yet his letter carried an undertone of menace that was rightly called out by the Department of Justice, noting that “the First Amendment expressly prohibits Congress from infringing the speech and association rights of Americans. DOJ will defend against threats to those rights, period.”
It might be tempting to dismiss Blumenthal’s action as aimed at shady fat cats only.
Surely these millionaires and billionaires (as Sen. Bernie Sanders used to splutter before he was outed as a millionaire himself) must have done something.
Except that for the current Democratic Party, moves against the powerful only serve as the thin end of the wedge.
What these electeds seem to truly want is to punish — indeed, criminalize — any dissent from their politics as such.
The Biden administration provides a clear, albeit incomplete vision of this.
Everyone remembers the Disinformation Governance Board, a body President Joe Biden set up to — literally — regulate what American citizens would be allowed to see, hear and think.
(Joe must’ve read “1984” and thought “Hey, that Ministry of Truth sure sounds nifty.”)
He put a figure from “Veep” central casting in charge of it: Nina Jankowicz, an aging theater kid with a penchant for writing erotic Harry Potter-themed cabaret songs and an unnerving, dead-eyed stare.
The board died on the vine after widespread public outrage.
Recall the administration’s 2021 prosecution of Douglass Mackey, a right-wing X poster sentenced to prison time in 2023 for posting Boomer-tier memes instructing Democrats to vote for Hillary Clinton by text.
Mackey’s utterly bogus conviction was overturned in 2025. Because he himself was a somewhat unsympathetic figure, the monstrous injustice he faced did not spark the national firestorm it should have.
Yet the case was a clear harbinger: When Joe sicced special prosecutor Jack Smith on Trump in 2022, Smith’s mandate soon grew to include Trump’s political allies and journalists who had made the mistake of speaking to the president — along with close to 640,000 Trump supporters, including close to 150,000 donors (many small-dollar givers).
Smith hoovered up names, addresses, birthdates, emails, credit card information, places of employment, and — perhaps most chillingly — party registrations.
What purpose could this have had beyond compiling an enemies list to surpass Richard Nixon’s most paranoid dreams?
Don’t forget then-Attorney General Merrick Garland’s subversion of the FBI into a tool to intimidate parents who dared to protest at school-board meetings.
That this attitude has been completely normalized among Democrats is evident from the ghoulish remarks by hot-dog heiress Sen. Elissa Slotkin at an October University of Chicago event.
“I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? That sounds fun, I might get an opportunity’ . . . I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message sent.”
This is a sitting member of Congress threatening college grads for the crime of thinking about working in a White House whose policies she opposes.
Slotkin issued these threats not at some fringe conference but at a major university, in full, blasé confidence that her message would be received — and received well.
When it wasn’t, she fell back on a favored politician’s ploy in response: the justified anger over her ugly remarks was “manufactured outrage.”
Democrats have, over the past decade, styled themselves as the defenders of the rule of law.
Yet again and again, they move to subvert it in their pursuit of Trump.
Which, again and again, shifts into a pursuit of anyone, rich or poor, powerful or marginal, who exercises their constitutional right to support him.
Sam Munson’s most recent novel is “The Sofa” (2025).
