Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s present role – serving as the Lee to Graham Platner’s Grant at the conclusion of the Democratic Party’s civil war – is a sad, but richly deserved fate.
And make no mistake, by endorsing Platner’s campaign for the Senate, Schumer has indeed surrendered his longtime political vessel to the socialist third-worldists who have spent the last decade staging a slow-rolling, yet largely uncontested takeover of it. Schumer had recruited Janet Mills, the relatively popular governor of Maine, to run against incumbent Republican Susan Collins. “We think that Janet Mills is the best candidate to retire Susan Collins,” declared Schumer at a press conference last fall.
Nobody cared. By February, Platner had left Mills in his polling dust by a nearly 40-point margin. And while Schumer remained insistent that the more moderate Mills would prevail, he proved reluctant to close the financial gap between their campaigns.
Mills suspended her campaign on Thursday. Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairwoman Kirsten Gillibrand wasted no time in throwing their weight behind Platner, who urged Americans last November to call their senators, “and tell them that Chuck Schumer can no longer be leader.”
“Democrats are dedicated to fighting back against the chaos of the Trump administration by defeating the Republicans who enable his harmful agenda and that includes Susan Collins,” declared the New York lawmakers in a joint statement. “Senator Collins has never been more vulnerable and we will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee Graham Platner to defeat her.”
“Our North Star is winning a Democratic Senate majority,” they explained.
Regardless of who that majority is composed of, evidently.
Until a few months ago, Platner roamed the Pine Tree State with an SS Totenkopf stamped across his chest. In February, he retweeted Holocaust math enthusiast and “Jewish lobby” obsessive Stew Peters. Platner pleaded ignorance in both cases.
That explanation went from implausible to insulting after it was revealed that a month earlier, he had told another antisemitic conspiracy theorist (this one has blamed Israel for the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Charlie Kirk) that he was a “longtime fan.” Take it from he without “any patriotism” in his heart for the United States, 9/11 cheerleader Hasan Piker: “He [Platner] was pro-Hamas, okay? He was giving Hamas credit in 2014. Okay, what more do you f*cking want?”
Democratic primary voters no longer make any bones about what it is they want: revanchist, pugilistic anti-Westernism in its angriest, most resentful form – the kind that blinds its adherents so completely as to delude them into identifying America and its greatest ally as the loci of evil in the world.
And they’re willing to make any and every unsavory compromise necessary to get it. It’s public knowledge that when Platner isn’t nodding along to lunatic grifters’ latest thoughts about the Jews, he’s taking to Reddit to advise women worried about sexual assault to “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f*cked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?”
The former is just more than enough to make up for the latter.
Schumer himself stands to be a victim of his party’s leftward drift, then backward. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who opposes any military aid – including for defensive systems like Iron Dome – to Israel, would be an overwhelming favorite against Schumer in the Empire State should she choose to challenge him rather than mount a presidential campaign in 2028. One survey from last spring suggested that the far-Left congresswoman would begin a primary battle between them with a 21-point lead.
Schumer had better hope she has her heart set on the White House, because liberal New Yorkers have their hearts set on the woman who has accused her own country of enabling genocide for standing by the Israelis after the events of October 7, 2023.
It would be quite the way to go out for a self-styled shomer or “guardian” of the Jewish people.
Of course, Schumer himself bears plenty of blame for his plight. For years he watched as his peers radicalized. And instead of yelling, “Stop!”, he moved with them. Of course immigration enforcement is unjust; of course a border wall is racist; of course Maduro and Khamenei are Donald Trump’s victims; of course the Supreme Court is corrupt if it rules against Democrats’ interests – and what is a woman, anyway? The leftist appetite is such that there is no final destination, no righteous endpoint or irrefutable truths to be preserved. There is only capital-P Progress, an ever-shifting goalpost propelled by ego and self-righteousness, not principle or actual righteousness.
Schumer not only allowed such lies to take root, but he also parrotted them out of self-interest and ostracized those with the courage to be voices of reason. Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, a liberal who has been villainized by the far-Left over his support for Israel and 2000s-Democrat era views on border security, burst out laughing on Wednesday after being asked about his relationship with other members of his caucus.
“I’m not necessarily the popular guy,” he conceded.
All this time, it never occurred to Schumer that he was feeding a monster sure to swallow him eventually. Perhaps his humiliation in Maine has, at long last, clued him in.
Now, he has no choice but to wave the white flag and profess to welcome his new, bat-guano crazy overlords.
It’s Graham Platner’s party; and despite his efforts at appeasement, Chuck Schumer isn’t even on the guest list.
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Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.
