Democrats’ Refusal to Applaud Cancer Victim Shows They Hate Trump More than They Love America

The late Billy Graham used to remind audiences that inaction itself constitutes a choice. Among the most important events at President Donald Trump’s second address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night were the things not said or done. Virtually the entire Democratic congressional caucus refused to stand up for, applaud, or sometimes acknowledge a cancer-stricken child, a freed hostage, grieving families, or American heroes. Their purposeful inaction opens a window into the misanthropic progressive mindset, a spiteful approach that harms the national commonweal and undermines their own spiritual well-being.

Democrats understandably are not among the 69% of viewers who told CNN they had a positive view of President Trump’s speech, or the 76% in a CBS poll. No one faults the opposition party for failing to stand and cheer at every applause line in the longest speech delivered to Congress in modern times. But their (non-)response fell well beyond standard partisanship. David Closson, director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, posted “a partial list of things that Democrats did not clap for tonight,” including:

“a kid battling brain cancer
“Laken Riley’s family
“Corey Comperatore’s family
“capturing a terrorist who killed Americans
“protecting women’s sports
“tax cuts
“a police officer’s widow”

Democrats sat impassively as Americans sobbed at D.J. Daniel’s deputization and Republicans stood for a young man bound for West Point. “I don’t know who needs to hear this. But it’s OK to cheer for the kid with brain cancer who wants to be a cop,” counseled constitutional attorney Casey Mattox.

Sitting showed just where congressional liberals stand.

“They don’t stand for anything humane,” said Alexis Nungaray, whose murdered daughter, Jocelyn, President Trump honored. “They don’t stand for us, as citizens. They don’t stand for our security. They don’t stand for honorable things that we need in this country, and it’s just very disgraceful to us as U.S. citizens, that those are the people that we have here in Congress, the House, and Senate. It’s disgusting.”

The breach was worse yet: “Not only did the Dems not applaud or stand for the stories honoring average Americans but neither did their guests in the gallery,” stated Dr. Eithan Haim, a guest of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).

“The only moment during the speech that generated enthusiastic, collective applause was when Trump mentioned spending hundreds of billions on Ukraine,” the doctor diagnosed. “This was notable since their applause was not meant to celebrate any result of that spending (i.e., a tangible victory for Ukraine or benefit to America) but was in response to the mention of ‘spending’ itself. … Not the celebration of life in our homeland but death of hundreds of thousands in a foreign one.” Indeed, Democrats studiously withheld their applause when President Trump announced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky now accepted U.S. negotiations “to bring lasting peace.”

Congressional liberals acted out a Beltway-driven miasma that confuses excessive foreign aid appropriations, not even with results, but with the vague, vacuous, self-satisfactory sense that spending means “caring.” Thus, they did nothing when the president announced record-low border crossings, the release of a U.S. hostage, or the capture of an ISIS terrorist who killed 13 U.S. servicemembers but cheered his offhand mention of Ukraine — a country with a corrupt government which suppressed the nation’s Orthodox Christian majority and appears to have funneled our foreign aid to the “former” al-Qaeda affiliate which just took charge of Syria.

Some see inaction as an indication progressives have lost their way. Rep. Kat Carmack (R-Fla.) chalked up the Democrats’ immobility to “disarray” caused by historical amnesia. “They have been so subscribed to the identity politics of the last two decades that they lost their identity altogether,” she said.

But did the Left’s refusal to applaud for any positive development in America conceal their hearts, or did it reveal the leadership’s identity as a transnational, post-national, and anti-American movement brimming with malign hostility toward U.S. citizens? Do their actions show the Left has embraced hatred as a policy goal?

Irrational Hatred as a Platform and Spite as a Raison d’Etre

We may gaze further into this abyss by remembering the Left bookended its intransigence with acts of spite. Congressional Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) and Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) refused to carry out their ceremonial duties of escorting President Trump into the chamber, a petty protest Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) deemed “pathetic and embarrassing.” At least half a dozen Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), skipped the proceedings. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) walked out. Literally dozens of Senate Democrats exhibited a collective hivemind of profanity by parroting the same script in a social media video unreflectively titled “S*** that ain’t true.” During the speech, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) screamed and shook his cane at the president until he got expelled by the sergeant at arms.

After this speech, the official Democratic response, delivered by Senator Slotkin (D-Mich.), merely exhorted liberals to join The Resistance 2.0. She encouraged liberals to embrace the Democratic strategy of attending Republican town hall meetings, where disruptions have been professionally organized and astroturfed by local left-wing agitators and Soros-funded political pressure groups such as MoveOn.org and Indivisible. “Pick just one issue you’re passionate about and engage,” she said, “and doom-scrolling doesn’t count” — a possible rebuke to Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who feigned staring dully at her smartphone during the president’s speech (aside from her awkwardly prolonged applause for Ukraine spending). Warren was not alone. “I could see entire rows of Democrats staring down at their phones,” Dr. Haim revealed.

Slotkin’s rebuttal proved so uninspiring even the official internet feed dropped out halfway through. But the Left’s words confirmed what their silence implied. There is no topic the Left cannot politicize.

As usual, the worst offenders clustered on the same, struggling cable network. Rachel Maddow greeted President Trump’s mention of D.J. Daniel with maximum vitriol. “This is disgusting. The president made a spectacle out of praising a young man who has thus far survived pediatric cancer, as though the president had something to do with that,” Maddow stated.

President Trump did not, in fact, insinuate that he had personally sustained Master Daniel’s lifeforce for six years, entering his veins and fighting cancer cells like something out of “Fantastic Voyage.” But Maddow may not be the only one in MSNBC’s orbit living in a sci-fi reality simulation. Fellow anchor Nicole Wallace, a former George W. Bush speechwriter turned Never-Trump Democrat, shared Maddow’s otherworldly insensitivity.

“I think this was a lesson in finding one thing that you let yourself feel, and I let myself feel joy about D.J. … I hope he has a long life as a law enforcement officer,” claimed Wallace, trying to soften the impact of her callous conclusion. “But I hope he never has to defend the United States Capitol against Donald Trump’s supporters. And if he does, I hope he isn’t one of the six who loses his life to suicide. And I hope he isn’t one who has to testify against the people who carried out acts of seditious conspiracy and then live to see President Trump pardon those people.”

Absent a much-desired miracle, this young man’s life will end too soon; no reasonable person would seek political gain by speculating about its premature termination.

The fact that her constituency feels so ideologically hidebound that it must be reassured that feeling normal human emotions is acceptable if it could conceivably benefit one’s political enemies should have served as a dire warning. Radical, hyperpartisan liberals must realize: Your hatred is costing you your humanity. We have seen such indications in the past, as Democrats castigated anything that might “humanize” President Donald Trump (who has admitted he is, at times, all-too human). It blossomed as the Left bared its unseemly bloodlust for their enemies, cresting with the lionization of murderer Luigi Mangione.

This Lent, Choose Hatred or Humanity

Progressives, the most secular of all voters, must learn that hate is a spiritual malady. Unbounded animosity toward others inevitably turns inward. It is impossible to exclude any person from our love and not ultimately lose the ability to love everyone rightly, including ourselves. Indifference gradually, imperceptibly cools all human affections and depletes our reserve of charity for all of God’s creation. Indulged hatred drains our souls of every remaining trace of God’s imago Dei and turns human beings into stolid, frozen mockeries of humanity.

In the end, hatred is its own punishment, estranging us from the Source of all love. “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” asks the apostle (I John 4:20). Hatred of any person reveals our hellish rebellion against God by despising those made in His image until we agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that “Hell is other people.”

A far greater thinker than Sartre, C.S. Lewis, illustrated the process in his wonderful book “The Great Divorce.” Lewis appears to show Hell as a vast and ever-expanding region in which hatred drives people to move farther and farther away from their fellow man. But in the end we learn, “All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world. …[A]ll loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all.”

These words hold special resonance today, Ash Wednesday, which marks the day the West historically observed the beginning of Lent, the 40 days of fasting and prayer preceding Easter. While some religious traditions emphasize “giving something up,” or physically refusing to eat, true fasting has a much deeper meaning according to “one of the greatest preachers who ever lived.” As we abstain from certain foods, “[l]et also the mouth fast from foul words. For what does it profit if we abstain from birds and fish, and yet bite and devour our brethren?” asked St. John Chrysostom.

To be truly human — to truly love — means that whenever we have the opportunity to express our goodwill, Christians must abstain from abstention. We must never withhold approval from a fellow man, especially to spite a third party. We must celebrate the joy of others as though it were our own. We must radiate the “dazzling rays of light from the Lord’s face,” warming the world in the divine love they stream forth upon all.

The conscious effort to impede divine agape may justly be called Hell — and, sadly, Hell filled the halls of Congress on Tuesday night.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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