Earlier this week, I spoke to a local Republican women’s group, and one topic of conversation which came up is something often discussed in this space; namely, the Left’s tone-deaf insistence on cultural aggression as a form of power politics.

In my speech I described the effect of this thusly: it makes little difference what Trump’s approval rating is, because the Democrats’ rating is a lot lower.

That might be hard to poll, because the Democrat Party might poll better than Trump and at the moment none of the potential candidates of that party are under the kind of scrutiny and constant attack Trump is.

None of it matters. The Democrats, as the party of the Left, are cutting their own throats. They can’t beat Trump and, as an excellent column by David Benkof at the Daily Caller earlier this week notes, they’re on course for an ugly bloodbath in next year’s midterm elections.

Why? Lots of reasons.

Consider this monument-removal binge they’re on, for one example. It started with the bowdlerization orgy of wannabe 2020 presidential candidate Mitch Landrieu in New Orleans, but now it’s virtually everywhere – New York’s resident moron mayor Warren Wilhem, who does business as Bill de Blasio, is demanding a review of all that city’s statuary, while in Baltimore they’ve removed monuments not just to confederate figures but to Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision. And it’s happening pretty much everywhere Democrats are in control now, despite a lack of any evidence the public at large has an appetite for re-enacting ISIS at Palmyra or the Taliban at Bamiyan.

Here’s the thing. It may well be a majority of Americans might sympathize with getting rid of Jefferson Davis statues, though it’s unlikely that’s much of a majority or a very passionate cohort in the bargain. What matters, though, is absolutely nobody in this country has the slightest degree of trust that the Left will respect any limits or stop there. Everybody knows that this is just another spoke in the wheel for the social justice crowd and it’ll just build momentum for the next exercise in stupidity.

And people are exhausted with cultural aggressions from the Left. They’re ready for normality for a while. That’s why Trump’s approval rating doesn’t matter; they might think Trump stinks as a president, but they’re not going to vote him out so some wild-assed leftist like Kamala Harris or Liz Warren can turn the rest of America into Evergreen State College.

That’s what happens when you’ve overstepped your bounds and shown your contempt for the people.

Plus, it’s the stupidity. By now our readers certainly have heard about the ridiculous ESPN/Robert Lee story, in which the Chinese-American sportscaster (no, I’m not going to call him Asian-American, because Asian means he could be Pakistani or Kazakh and he’s clearly not; you wouldn’t call Paddy O’Shaughnessy a European-American) was bounced off the network’s scheduled telecast of the William & Mary-Virginia game next weekend because of the unpleasantness in Charlottesville and the likeness of his name to that of the Confederate general whose statue was a subject of the protests there.

When the country heard about ESPN’s actions and widespread condemnation of them started taking hold, the network’s president John Skipper said in an internal memo which soon leaked that the decision to lift Lee from the UVA assignment was made for his “safety,” as though someone would confuse him with the dead white guy from the statue.

This is the kind of thing that will destroy the Democrat Party, because voters know it’s the Democrats’ activists who are pushing it and voters also know it’s elitist Democrats who are sapping their morale with one cultural aggression after another. Dumb things like this only remind them of the times.

And more, they’ll especially resent it coming from ESPN — those voters who watch ESPN want to watch sports to get away from politics and its attendant divisiveness. When they’re robbed of even that distraction, they’re going to be pissed off.

I’ve complained about this before, but not having U.S. Attorneys in place is a truly damaging state of affairs for the country and some of it is Trump’s fault. Virtually all of our readers could bring up stories of rampant political corruption in the cities near their homes, and as it’s the federal government’s role these days to police that corruption it’s a terrible idea for the Democrats to still be in charge of the U.S. Attorney’s offices around the country.

In Washington, Trump has made a nomination for U.S. Attorney. His name is Jesse Liu, and by all accounts he’s an excellent choice no honest Democrat could oppose. But Liu’s nomination is bottled up in the Senate, and for some reason Trump didn’t force the resignation of the current U.S. Attorney in D.C., a lifelong Democrat apparatchik named Channing Phillips, whose father was actually placed in nomination for president at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

That decision reared its ugly head when last week an indictment was returned in the Imran Awan case by Phillips’ office — and lots of heads were scratched. The indictment is a masterpiece of omission and it looks an awful lot like the U.S. Attorney is throwing the case in order to let Awan off and make the entire embarrassing scandal surrounding him and his family and their potential theft of sensitive information and even possible blackmail of Democrat congressmen go away.

This can’t happen. Trump ought to demand Phillips’ resignation and then make a recess appointment of Liu — and every other US Attorney he’s chosen. Get these people in office and put them to work draining the swamp at the local level starting with a hell of a lot more aggressive prosecution of the Awan case.

If you haven’t watched Ozark, the new Netflix drama starring Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, it’s worth a quick binge in advance of the start of football season. The writing has some holes here and there, but the acting is terrific and the story, though familiar, is compelling. Bateman’s character is a financial manager who a decade ago made the choice to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel, and when things eventually go badly he sells his angry — and psychopathic — client on the highly underrated prospects of investing in the bucolic area around the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, which he knows nothing about.

The show is one near-death experience after another, and it can be stressful to watch, but watching the moves he makes to stay ahead of the FBI and the cartel, not to mention the local crooks, amounts to terrific TV.

But just like every other show on TV now, there is a gay angle with one of the major characters. And just like every other show on TV, that gay angle adds nothing of value to the story line. Once again, this is the kind of thing that leads to Trump’s re-election — people are tired of having the Left’s cultural agenda forced down their throats when they try to escape politics by watching a TV show.

A final thing on politics: last year John Kennedy, who was Louisiana’s state treasurer, won a special election to replace David Vitter in the Senate. So this fall, there is a special election in Louisiana to replace Kennedy.

As some of our readers might know, Louisiana operates with a jungle primary rather than the usual party primaries, which means there are three Republicans – state representative John Schroder, state senator Neil Riser, and former commissioner of administration under Bobby Jindal Angele Davis — and only one Democrat among the major candidates.

That Democrat is Derrick Edwards, and he’s basically a Powerball ticket of identity politics. Edwards, who is black, is a former football player who was paralyzed during a high school game. It was expected he’d have to be institutionalized, but instead he managed to earn two degrees from Tulane University and a law degree from Loyola University and is a practicing attorney — which is an incredible story you’d expect to see highlighted by the party which pretends to care about the less fortunate.

Except there’s a short-circuit somewhere, because not only is Edwards, who ran for the Senate last year and got just three percent of the vote, not being turned into a household name but the Louisiana Democratic Party won’t even endorse him. Why? Who knows. So much for the Democrats’ “we care” rhetoric, right?