Among Democrats, those are fighting words. Among Republicans, it would be a compliment. In the real world, the call for La Résistance 2.0 is as tone-deaf as Florence Foster Jenkins singing a Mozart aria -- the real problem Democrats refuse to acknowledge. 

That's not the only problem facing Hakeem Jeffries either. 

The Washington Examiner and Newsmax both report that Democrats have grown restive under Jeffries and the long string of losses under his leadership. They want a full-on return to Nancy Pelosi-style tactics, and that's awkward while Pelosi remains in the caucus, to be sure:

In the days since Trump won a second term, everything has changed for House Democrats, particularly for Jeffries, as he has taken the reins from Pelosi. Now, he leads a party in the minority that has descended into constant bickering about how to target a president who just received the highest approval ratings of his career.

Some colleagues want Jeffries to return the party to the thundering Democratic resistance brand of the Pelosi era. Others are burned out after years of opposition to Trump only to lose to him and warn that a decisive change of strategy is warranted to deal with the popular president. Jeffries himself has warned that Democrats are in a different and more difficult position now than they were nearly a decade ago, with less power to negotiate with the opposition.

Republicans “control the House, the Senate, and the presidency,” the House minority leader said during a press conference Friday. “It’s their government. What leverage do we have? We are going to try to find bipartisan common ground on any issue.”

Needless to say, the political environment made it a lot easier for Pelosi to conduct La Résistance 1.0 eight years ago. Despite his narrow win over Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump remained largely unpopular, and Clinton's attempt to smear Trump with the Russia-collusion hoax did a lot of damage up front during his presidency. That gave Pelosi a lot of room for her tactics, and she had other assets as well, to which we'll come in a moment.

The political environment has changed markedly at the start of Trump's second term, as Newsmax notes:

Complicating matters for Jeffries are the centrist Blue Dog Democrats, who have supported Trump's border policies such as "Remain in Mexico." Last month, 48 House Democrats crossed the aisle to pass the Trump-backed immigration reform measure known as the Laken Riley Act.

Additionally, Jeffries is grappling with Trump's soaring popularity after winning the Electoral College, the popular vote, all seven battleground states, and helping Republicans recapture control of the House and Senate.

It's not just that Trump is more popular than he ever has been, although that's certainly true. Trump's agenda is now more popular than ever, especially after taking strong executive action to immediately implement it. Poll after poll shows Democrats on fringe positions on DEI, immigration, and especially government spending and reduction of the bureaucracy, on which they have especially manned the ramparts. Their position in the past three weeks is that elections shouldn't matter at all, and that unelected civil servants have higher authority than elected officials, a position that is wildly popular with, er ... civil servants and Academia elite. And no one else. 

Democrats want Jeffries to front a popular resistance on behalf of the bureaucrats that most Americans have grown to despise, to impose policies that are anything but popular. And somehow, Democrats want to blame Jeffries for recognizing the futility and self-destruction that strategy will produce.

But even with all of that aside, Jeffries has another problem, one that Kari Lake recognized (via Instapundit):

Isn't the easiest answer to why Jeffries is struggling to mount an Anti-Trump resistance is that the President, Elon, & DOGE have shut off the money tap for the astroturfed protest operations, &, it's hard to fuel genuine opposition to an agenda that’s popular with the people? pic.twitter.com/0OzpFdOvnU

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) February 12, 2025

Exactly. The weird and interlocking spending uncovered by DOGE at USAID and elsewhere reminds me of a more sophisticated and less-prosecutable version of Canada's Adscam, only on an exponentially larger scale. I mentioned this in December, when roughly $50 billion in Biden's biggest spending bills produced almost no results but still had magically disappeared:

That money went somewhere over the last couple of years. Where did it go, and how much is left? The new Congress had better start asking those questions and getting answers under oath, because there's a fair chance that this administration used it as back-door subsidies for political allies and donors. For those who don't recall Canada's Adscam, here's the thumbnail version of that scandal: The Liberals used funds meant to promote unity in Quebec as a slush fund for the Liberal Party, through corrupt contracting and outright graft.

At least Canadians did get a few cultural events and ad campaigns from Adscam, with the eventual grift coming to $100 million. Not one home in America got connected to the Internet after $42 billion disappeared into the Biden Administration. 

Worth noting: DOGE hasn't even yet gotten around to the Biden broadband program or the mysterious way in which Pete Buttigieg turned $7.5 billion into 49 electric-vehicle charging stations. David wrote this morning about the $20 billion in "gold bars tossed off the Titanic" by Lee Zeldin at EPS. And those are just the extant examples of mystery money in the previous administration, and only at the federal level. When DOGE gets around to Gavin Newsom's high-speed rail project and the tens of billions he burned through, want to bet what we'll find when Elon Musk follows the money in California?

Don't be surprised, then, that Democrat ramparts turn out to be weak sauce compared to the riots of 2017-2020 that destabilized the first Trump term. Trump learned a hard lesson from that and is now determined to cut that government-to-activist pipeline off entirely at the start of his term. Trump will be happy to fight that out with the courts and with Congress if necessary through legal means, and while he may not be able to stop all of it, he can certainly audit the living hell out of what remains and expose it to painful sunlight.

That's the main why Jeffries can't pull a Pelosi. Those resources no longer exist, nor does the reflexive Trump hate that money produced in his first term. All efforts to launch La Résistance 2.0 now look pretty insurrection-y to the normies of the electorate, which polls suggest now comprise around 60% or more on many of the items on Trump's agenda. Have fun storming that castle, Democrats!