Beto O’Rourke by DonkeyHotey, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

The fashionable thing to do in the Democrat party right now is to take an extreme position. They think it worked to energize Republicans and that if they do what they think President Donald Trump is doing, they’ll win. The problem is that Trump is nowhere near “extreme,” and is simply enforcing rules on the books and is being pro-American.

So Democrats like Robert “Beto” O’Rourke go out and say that he’s going to take your guns, thinking it will energize the left. Really, it’s only divided it. It started out as a trickle, with Democratic Sen. Christopher Coons of Deleware noting that O’Rourke’s gun-grab threat would haunt the Democrats for years.

(READ: Even Democrat Lawmakers Wish O’Rourke Hadn’t Said He’d Take Our Guns)

Now, this division has reached Democrat leadership, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying publicly that he doesn’t think any other Democrat agrees with O’Rourke’s overly bold stance. It’s an obvious lie being used to attempt damage control for the Democrat party, and it’s interesting that Schumer is willing to tell that lie, but more on that in a second.

According to Politico, O’Rourke fired back by essentially accusing Schumer of being a do-nothing politician when it comes to gun violence:

“Ask Chuck Schumer what he’s been able to get done,” the Democratic presidential candidate told reporters after a town hall here, responding to Schumer’s recent dismissal of O’Rourke’s call for a mandatory buyback of assault weapons. “We still don’t have background checks. Didn’t have them when he was in the majority, either. So the game that he’s played, the politics that he’s pursued have given us absolutely nothing and have produced a situation where we lose nearly 40,000 of our fellow Americans every year.”

We’re swiftly marching into 2020, and as of right now, the Democrat party is in crisis with its 2020 candidates doing everything they can to appease the radical trend that has taken it over as Democrat leadership attempts to keep the party as centered as it possibly can.

It’s a war that is going to keep the left busy as the right continues to sail right through the election period with little to no difficulty. The great thing about O’Rourke’s comments is that, as Coons suggested, it will haunt Democrats going forward, specifically into 2020. O’Rourke essentially gave Democrats another problem to deal with, and so long as he’s is in the race, he’ll continue to make more problems for Democrats to deal with when it comes to gun control.

What’s more, it’s putting Democrat leadership in the position to tell demonstrable lies, and lies that will get other Democrats who do support that measure of gun control to turn on Democrat leadership.

So long as O’Rourke is around, the Democrats will continue to be forced to fight one another, and continue to give Republicans more momentum. It’s a house divided that will fall in 2020.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say O’Rourke is a Republican plant.

As an aside, Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey mentioned in his article that O’Rourke’s “40,000” remark dismisses details such as suicides and have little to do with the weapons he’s wanting to be confiscated:

Furthermore, the 40K figure is all deaths from firearms including suicides, not the number of deaths each year from the weapons Beto wants confiscated — so-called “assault weapons.” As noted ad nauseam, long-barrel firearms (of which “assault weapons” is a subset) represent a minute percentage of overall firearms homicides — fewer than 4% in 2017. The actual number in 2017 was 403 homicides by rifles of all kinds, roughly 1% of the figure Beto’s tossing around. (Needless to say, assault weapons get used in few if any suicides, either.)