RUSH: San Francisco Chronicle. Willie Brown — the former speaker of the California assembly, the former mayor of San Francisco and a leftist activist — had a piece that ran a couple days ago: “Trump Is More Popular Than Dem[ocrat]s Want to Admit — Like it or not, a significant number of Americans are actually happy these days. They are making money. They feel safe, and they agree with the president’s protectionist trade policies, his call for more American jobs, even his immigration stance.

“The jobs growth reports, the North Korea summit and the steady economy are beating out the Stormy Daniels scandal and the Robert Mueller investigation in Middle America, hands down. So you are not going to win back the House by making it all about [Trump]. Rather than stoking the base by attacking Trump, Democrats need to come up with a platform that addresses average voters’ hopes and concerns. Not just the needs of underdogs or whatever cause happens to be the media flavor of the week.

“Democrats need to look like the adults, not like another pack of screaming kids on the playground. And they need to start now.” That’s Willie Brown — and I’m telling you, he’s right on the money. This characterization — “need to look like the adults, not like another pack of screaming kids on the playground” — is as much directed at CNN and MSNBC as it is to any Democrat Party member or activist. He clearly sees what is happening, and it is nothing leading to a blue wave.

In fact, you’re starting to see some stories out there today of people predicting a red wave — and that the red is gonna be blood from defeated Democrats. But the problem the Democrats have is they cannot admit their agenda and hope to win. They’re caught. This is why they spend so much time beating up Trump as incompetent, as whatever they’re saying about him. And it isn’t working. They’re not stopping him, folks. They have not slowed him down. They’re not stopping Donald Trump at all.

They can’t abandon this and switch to a promotion of their own agenda, because they’re too busy trying to portray themselves as moderates when they are not. There aren’t any moderates left in the Democrat Party or on the American left. The American Democrat Party is as radical as the American left is, and if they try to moderate, they’re gonna infuriate their base, which is where their donations come from. It doesn’t help that one of their big donors, this guy Tom Steyer, is out now accusing Trump of morphing into Hitler and his supporters — his voters — as supporters of Hitler.

You know, Salena Zito has a new book out that we’ve been talking about. One of the things… She characterizes Trump voters into seven different categories. One of the seven categories features people who love Trump, who voted for Obama twice. Well, here the Democrats are trying to portray Trump voters as Hitler youth, Hitler-like, a bunch of racists and sexists and bigots. And yet many Trump voters also voted for Barack Obama. And when they see and hear the way they’re being characterized, it makes ’em mad.

A backlash is brewing.

David Brooks, New York Times’ ostensible conservative columnist… Something’s happened. Something has happened. Let me just read a couple of excerpts from his latest piece called, “Donald Trump’s Lizard Wisdom … And yet I can’t help but wonder if that kind of background has provided a decent education for dealing with the sort of hopped-up mobsters running parts of the world today. There is growing reason to believe that Donald Trump understands the thug mind a whole lot better than the people who attended our prestigious Foreign Service academies.

“The first piece of evidence is North Korea. When Trump was trading crude, back-alley swipes with ‘Little Rocket Man,’ Kim Jong-un, about whose nuclear button was bigger, it sounded as if we were heading for a nuclear holocaust led by a pair of overgrown prepubescents. In fact, Trump’s bellicosity seems to have worked. It’s impossible to know how things will pan out, but the situation with North Korea today is a lot better than it was six months ago,” and the only person treating it any differently than it’s been treated the last 40 years is Donald Trump.

“Maybe Trump is right to intuit that the only right response to a monster is to enclose it. Maybe he’s right that when you sense economic weakness in a potential threat, you hit it again. … The second piece of evidence is our trade talks with China. Over the past few decades, the Western diplomatic community made a big bet: If we all behaved decently toward [the ChiComs] leaders, then they’d naturally come to embrace liberal economic and cultural values and we could all eventually share a pinot at the University Club.

“The bet went wrong. … The president has pushed back harder on the [ChiComs] and has netted some results. After some Trump swagger, Xi Jinping promised to ‘significantly lower’ Chinese tariffs on imported vehicles.” This, folks, I can’t tell you, ’cause Brooks is one of these guys… Now, he’s a media denizen, but he’s still one of these guys who thinks that he and his buddies are the betters of the world. They are the rare and unique, brilliant elites. Only they are capable of running the world, of policing and navigating the world order.

How many times have they been proven wrong over the years and yet they still have standing. Reagan proved them wrong. Trump is proving them wrong. They themselves demonstrate their own ineffectiveness. How many years have they been negotiating Middle East peace, for example, and not a single acre, not a single bit of movement has happened? Nothing is different. Take any diplomatic effort you want, and these people believe the United States is the problem, that if we would just tone it down, that if we would just say we understand…

Look at after 9/11. These are the people that had the forums at the State Department asking, “What did we do to make them hate us?” As these people run the world, they always seem to conclude the United States is at the center of the problem — and you know why? Because we’re so much more economically wealthy. Something about that makes them feel inherently guilty. Something about that makes them need to cut us down to size. It’s not fair. Just that great inequity itself, in their world, makes it impossible for us to be liked and respected.

This is a sick bunch of people, folks, and this has been educated into them. It’s been bred into them. They’re born into families that believe this garbage. They’re raised this way. They’re educated this way. They come out of their Ivy League schools knowing how to dress, how to speak, how to act, how to think, and it’s uniform. They’re all identical! They’re cookie cutters. They all think the same. They have the same reaction to every event in the news. It doesn’t matter. Same thing in the media, same reaction. No diversity of thought, diversity of mannerism, diversity of belief.

“NYT Columnist: Reporters Miss Important Stories Because They’re Obsessed with Trump.” This is New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof. Jimmy Kimmel, he’s in New York to do the stand-up routine this week for ABC’s Upfront advertising push, says he’s not gonna be hitting Trump in his stand-up routine, that people have had enough of Trump bashing.

Saturday Night Live is starting to be criticized for its one-note samba on Trump, how it’s become predictable, it has become boring, but more importantly it isn’t working. Colbert hasn’t taken Trump out, Kimmel hasn’t taken Trump out, Jimmy Fallon hasn’t taken Trump out, none of these people have, Saturday Night Live has not damaged Donald Trump.

So now all of a sudden they’re saying, “Well, maybe we’ve become too predictable. Maybe the American people are tired of it, they want us to move on.” It’s only because they’re ineffective.

Story from TheHill.com: “Dems Worry Trump Will Win Over Economy — Democrats are growing worried that the strong economy, and President Trump’s messaging about his economic stewardship, will help Republicans in this year’s midterm elections.”

Notice wherever you look, talk of the blue wave has evaporated. And now there are stories the Democrats have overstepped, the Democrats have overextended. The Democrats have expectations way out of line with reality, generic ballot is narrowed to where Democrats do not have a lead in it anymore. Their whole world is in the process being turned upside down.

‘Another New York Times column: “Liberals, You’re Not as Smart as You Think,” written by a liberal, Gerard Alexander, professor of political science at the University of Virginia. And this piece is all about the backlash that is just starting against the American left for their irresponsible behavior and singular focus on Trump and how it’s bombing out with mainstream America.

Don’t worry. The left isn’t gonna listen to any of this stuff. They’re incapable of changing their tune about Trump. It’s just that some worried types are now beginning to write about it.