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Still reeling from the breakneck pace and audacity of President Donald Trump’s first two weeks in office, the New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky made an intriguing comparison. “Trump 1.0,” he observed, “was a Jackson Pollock—splat splat all over the place. Trump 2.0 is painting within very precise lines. It’s terrifying.”

Tomasky was right. In his first term, Trump was undisciplined, impulsive, reactive rather than strategic, and politically naive. He underestimated the complexities of Washington and, at least initially, failed to recognize the dangers surrounding him. Eight years later, Trump’s eyes are wide open. He knows whom to trust and avoid. He is surrounded by a fiercely loyal team of Cabinet members, advisers, and staffers. His actions are deliberate. He is firmly in control.

Most notably, he has developed an invaluable new skill: a remarkable ability to force the Democratic Party into defending the most indefensible positions.

We saw glimpses of this during the campaign. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris was forced to justify her administration’s open border policy, its support for gender-affirming procedures for minors, and allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports alongside a host of other radical positions.

Trump has now compelled Democrats to defend the most egregious position of all — opposition to a comprehensive audit of the U.S. government. Cutting waste and fraud from the bloated, out-of-control federal budget is something that everyone should applaud, yet Democrats have gone to extraordinary lengths to block the Department of Government Efficiency from fulfilling its mission.

Elon Musk and his team of 20-something tech wizards have already uncovered at least $65 billion worth of waste, and most are delighted. A Harvard-Harris poll released Monday found that 76% of respondents supported “a full-scale effort to find and eliminate fraud and waste in government expenditures.” In other words, they like what DOGE is doing.

Aside from Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, which garnered only 39% support, the vast majority of those polled back Trump’s agenda. Support ranged from 57% for ending bans on offshore drilling to 81% for deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.

At any rate, Democrats are scrambling to defend their opposition to the DOGE audit — and they’re pulling out all the stops. Their first line of defense has been enlisting federal judges to block DOGE team members from accessing agency records. Last week, they added another tactic to their playbook: astroturfing, a powerful political strategy to shape and manipulate public opinion. Their goal is to push the narrative that even Republicans are turning against DOGE.

To that end, party operatives masquerading as outraged Republican constituents showed up at several House Republican town halls and staged protests outside district offices to denounce their support for DOGE. Though these demonstrations were intended to appear as organic, grassroots uprisings, they were meticulously planned. As expected, the legacy media, in its capacity as the public relations arm of the Democratic Party, seized on these staged protests, falsely reporting that opposition to DOGE was now taking root among Republicans.

On the Friday evening edition of Fox News’s The Five, the show’s lone Democrat, Jessica Tarlov, claimed that many people who voted for Trump were now experiencing buyer’s remorse. Citing the protests that had disrupted Republican town halls the night before, she said: “So [Republicans] Rich McCormick in Georgia — safe seat — people booing him, catcalling, they’re concerned with everything from spending cuts to what’s going on with DOGE to that Donald Trump is becoming a tyrant. Cliff Bentz in Oregon — similar reaction. This guy Tony Balderson — he’s in a Trump +18 district in Ohio — [constituents] saying Trump’s executive orders are getting out of control. They are hearing from the American public that what is going on, from the Oval Office to CPAC … is not what the American public wanted.”

Tarlov failed to inform viewers that these protests were generally, if not totally, orchestrated by the Democratic Party. She also neglected to mention that some of the so-called “Republicans” speaking out against DOGE were, in reality, actors sent by the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the jig was up on Tuesday. The Washington Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson exposed the charade in an article titled, “Red-District DOGE Protests, Cited As Proof of Broad Musk ‘Backlash,’ Were Organized By Left-Wing Groups.” He revealed, “In one case, a former Dem county board candidate and self-described ‘political activist’ helped organize a viral demonstration in Georgia.” Anderson noted that reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, and CBS News all drew the same conclusion from the protest at McCormick’s town hall in Georgia: it was “proof of emerging bipartisan ‘backlash’ over Elon Musk’s efforts to slash government spending.”

Such wishful thinking came on the heels of Democratic strategist James Carville’s absurd prediction that Trump’s administration would experience a “massive collapse” within 30 days — six weeks at most.

Democrats can defend the indefensible for as long as they want, but voters are starting to catch on. This may explain their defeat in November and the dismal ratings of liberal news programs. They’ve lost the public’s trust — yet they keep doubling down on stupid.