Morning Wire - Mobs, Messaging, and Midterms: What 2025 Revealed About The Left | 12.27.25

Episode Date: December 27, 2025

During President Trump’s first years back in the White House, we saw various wins for his administration. But, we also saw national movements of unrest against him, including No Kings rallies and democratic socialist political campaigns focused on thwarting his presidency. Where do we stand politically as we move into 2026? Paul Kengor, author and editor of the American Spectator, joins us to discuss that question. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. - - - Ep. 2553 - - - Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 - - - Today's Sponsor: Daily Wire Shop - Visit https://dailywire.com/shop today! - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy morning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first year of President Trump's second term was a tumultuous and politically contentious year that saw major wins for the president, but it also saw nationwide orchestrated protest movements against him, including No King's rallies and Democratic Socialist political campaigns focused on thwarting his presidency. So with the dust settling from 2025 and 26 dawning, where do the two parties stand now? In this episode, we sit down with Paul Kangor, author and editor of The American Spectator, to discuss that question and more. I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley, with Georgia Howe.

This is a special edition of Morning Wire. The Daily Wire's best deals of the year are still live, and you can get up to 70% off. Save pig on items like the Golden Leftist Tears Tumblr, Truth Bomb Golf Club covers, the collected poems of Donald J. Trump, plus hats, t-shirts, hoodies, and a whole lot more. And if you're ordered tops 100 bucks, free shipping. Head over to dailywire.com slash shop right now. That's dailywire.com slash shop. Joining us now for a look back politically at 2025 and a look ahead to 26 is Paul Kangor,

editor of the American Spectator and Political Science Professor at Grove City College, where he's also the senior director of the Institute of Faith and Freedom. Paul, you need more titles. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, good to be with you, John. Love anything I can do with the Daily Wire anytime. I'm all in. We love hearing that and we'll hold you to that. So look, this has been a crazy year.

we wanted to kind of stop and look back at it politically, specifically the No King's movement and some of the anti-Trump efforts that we saw over the course of the year. Big picture first. How effective do you think the demonstrations, the activism against Trump were this year? Did they actually work? Well, I mean, it's hard to judge that, right? I mean, they did, you know, the left did do well in the elections. They put a lot of people out in the streets throughout the summer through the No King's rally.

So if the, you know, to use an old Soviet word agit prop, right, agitation and propaganda, if the idea was to agitate with their propaganda, they did. And I would call the no kings kind of a perfect example of agitation and propaganda, especially propaganda, because the whole thing was just, you know, I thought frankly silly. And, you know, the first time, John, that I even heard the idea or the phrase no kings is from my wife. And I said, no kings. no kings? I said, are they talking about Trump? She said, yeah, they're talking about Trump. Who else, right? And I thought, yeah, but, I mean, of all things, why don't they do, go with their old thing, right? No dictators, right?

You know, no fascists, you know, no democracy destroyers or whatever, but no kings. It's like patently ludicrous on its face. I mean, everybody knows that Trump is not a monarch, right? I mean, you know, the first kind of thing you do, in sloganeering and marketing, you come up with a clever, kind of tested slogan, right? Black Lives Matter. Brilliant. No matter what you think of the organization, who could argue with Black Lives Matter, right? Marriage equality from the LGBTQ people, right? Even an old group, like, you know, the 1930s, 1940s, communist front group, the American League against war and fascism, right? Who isn't against war and fascism? But no Kings. I mean, you immediately, your response to that is, huh? I mean,

who are they talking about? I mean, obviously Donald Trump isn't a king. You could debate whether he's destroying democracy. You could call him, you know, a racist, a bigot, a narcissist, a brain jackass, whatever you want to call him, right? More subjective terms.

But no kings? I mean, obviously the guy isn't a king. So I thought the whole premise was really just kind of fatuous nonsense. Right, and there's positive connotations with a king. We want the return of the king, there's fascination with the royal family in England for a reason. People actually kind of like this. No Hitler's would have been much better. Yeah, well, you're making a great point. I mean, actually there are, I mean, historically,

there have been good kings and bad kings, right? And they're probably, in fact, to really do, if you wanted to do a deep dive on this, I teach political science at Grove City College and Grove City, Pennsylvania. And the most common form of government in the history of humanity has been monarchy. That all changes with World War I to make the world safe for democracy. Monarchy was the governing rule of type of government

even in Europe until 1914. So there have been good kings, there been bad kings. I mean, look at, this will be real easy for Americans. St. Louis, right? St. Louis. I mean, that king,

the Louis, not the bad, Louis the 14th or Louis the 16th, you know, Le Tasse-Mois, you know, the 1700s of the time of the French Revolution. But in the 1200s, that King Louis was a saint, canonized by the Catholic Church. So there have been good monarch. St. Trump, I'm not sure that'll fly. Yeah, St. Trump. Even in Britain right now, right, Kate and forget which one she's married to.

But they're popular, right? They're popular. Well, it's not Harry. It's the other guy. It's the other guy. That's right. It's not Harry and Megan. All right, so in terms of marketing strategy, maybe not a great move, but they were very active, they were organized.

Does it seem like the left and Democrats have become better organized over the course of the last year or not? There's always been a sense that they do have a high level of activism and organization. Are they in a better position going into 2026 than they were in 2024 and 2025? Well, I think they're just natural activists, right? They're natural ideologues. They're natural agitators. In fact, Ben Shapiro and I talked about this the last time we spoke. We were talking about Russell Kirk, the conservative mind and conservatism.

And Russell Kirk famously said that conservatism should not be called an ideology. It's more an attitude, right? The idea of like an enduring moral order, whereas ideology is for ideologues, and ideologues are on the left, right? So when you think of ideology and ideologues, you think of the French Revolution, You think of radical progressives. And so for the American left, they're just doing what they always do. And so in a way, No Kings was just the latest manifestation, whatever slogan or protest movement they wanted to come up with. I thought a silly one.

But, yeah, so you could, the one thing you can count on, you know, as sure as the sun coming up tomorrow, is that American leftists are going to go out and act like leftists, which means they're going to go out and protests and often act like a mob. Who was it? The famous monarchist, Eric von Kuhnhold Leden, said something like, this is why he was pro-monarchy and anti-democracy. And he said, you know, the mob is, the mob is never a Nero. No, the mob is always a Nero. It's never a Marcus Aurelius, right? And that's what the left is good at. It's good at organizing mobs. The ideologue discussion is interesting to me. And actually speaking of Ben Shapiro, he makes this point a lot, that Trump is a common sense, practical sort of real world president. He operates in the real world, not in terms of ideology. And he pivots very frequently when the results don't show

that his actions are working like he thought they would. And conservatism should also be grounded in reality, correct? So is that the counter to this sort of ideologue approach of activism, pointing to practical results? Yeah, in fact, you're making a great point because Trump most definitely is not an idologue, right? Probably not. And Trump doesn't follow really a specific ideology. And, you know, other conservatives like Robert Nisbitt have said, well, Kirk, you're overdoing it, right? Conservatism is an ideology, right?

We get what you mean about ideologies for ideologues, and ideologues are unlawful. All right, we got it. But it's about a system of ideas, so you would really call it a modern political ideology. And in that sense, Reagan was a conservative in terms of ideology. but Donald Trump is kind of, you know, outside of ideology, right? He actually brags about not reading much. I don't know that he reads National Review. He probably doesn't read National Review at all.

I think he reads Our Magazine, The American Spectator, every now and then. But I doubt he's read The Conservative Mind by Kirk or a book like that. Trump is really kind of a common sense practitioner, businessman who, I don't know what his IQ is. You can tell it's a high level of intelligence, a high level of energy. The founder of the American Spectator, R.M. Material Jr., always says, what is Trump? Trump is somebody who first and foremost loves America, right? If there was any ism for Trump, it might be nationalism.

It might be patriotism. But it wouldn't be so much conservatism. To maybe put a button on this, and then actually I wanted to talk to you about Reagan since you brought him up, In terms of the state of politics for the Republicans going into 2026, do you feel they're in a healthy position or are they divided or are they facing a lot of headwinds coming into this next year? Midterms are always really tough for the party in power. What do you expect to see from Republicans? Well, you'd have to predict that they would lose seats, right? I mean, they typically do.

And so I would expect that. So it's probably only going to be a matter of how many seats. But on the other hand, you know, the American left is not popular. The Democrats are not popular. In fact, even within the Democratic Party, the biggest defeats that the Democrats have had in the last few months have been at the hands of Democratic Socialists, someone like a Zohran Mamdani in New York. The woman who won the mayoral seat in Seattle is a Katie Wilson, I think it might be the name. They are challenging Karen Bass, the Democrat mayor in Los Angeles. So these are people coming from the far left. They're not Democrats, right? They are Democratic Socialists. They are DSA. They are the Democratic Socialists of America, which if you go to the DSA's website calls itself the largest socialist organization in the United States. They're running as Democrats to transform an Obama term, right, fundamentally transform the Democratic Party from within. So they've been successful lately, maybe even more so than

the Democrats in that sense, you know, the kind of farther left. But I'm getting a little bit off subject from your question. I would expect the Republicans in the midterm to lose seats because that's just simply what happens in midterms for the party in the presidency. It's only a question of how much and we'll have to wait and see. Yeah, do you expect Trump if he loses a majority? What would the second part of his final term look like? Would that be all messaging? Is it all executive orders fighting with the courts? A lot. Yeah. A lot of it might be messaging, and in fact, this circles back to our original point about no kings. Trump can't even abolish the Department of Education, right?

Because Congress has veto power. If Trump was a king, he'd be able to do all the things that he wants to do. And when you're talking about executive orders, I mean, no one did executive orders like FDR. I mean, you could have probably, you know, thrown the term king FDR more at FDR than you could have at Donald Trump. Trump, Woodrow Wilson, LBJ, yeah, these guys, Joe Biden, right? Obama. These guys were masters of the executive order. So a lot of this is really just kind of hot air by liberals and Democrats. But for Trump, yeah, a lot of it might be messaging, pushing an idea, pushing ideas,

but legislatively, probably not getting all that much done, frankly. Foreign policy could be a difference, as it always is, which is one of the reasons for one of his great successes so far has been the Abraham Accords, because that's something he was able to do on his own with his staff and without, you know, King Trump's approval of his National Assembly. Final question. You've written a lot on Reagan, and Trump himself has talked about the comparisons between himself and Reagan. Every Republican president is put up against Reagan at some point

as sort of a standard of excellence for the Republican Party. How do you believe the brand of Reagan stands now? This used to be Reagan's party. Does he still have a presence that's powerful and effective in this party in terms of inspiring people? Well, I would say you can look at the enduring impact. What do we call Trump's movement? The MAGA movement. What does MAGA stand for and make America great again?

That was actually Ronald Reagan's slogan in 1980. In fact, I recently went back and was looking through my book, The Crusader on Ronald Reagan on the Fall of Communism, because it was the basis of the Reagan movie starring Dennis Quaid. And so I went back. I had written that book 20 years ago. And I went back, John, just to try to kind of familiarize myself because I was going to be doing interviews. And I think part two of the book is called Make America Great Again.

And I thought, jeesh, that's exactly right. That was Reagan's slogan. I actually have a button, a campaign button in my office. Someone gave me with Reagan's faces, Make America Great Again. So that shows that it's still Reagan's impact. and Reagan is the standard bearer of the party. Look, you and I are probably old enough to remember. Republican parties around the country, in different states, localities, counties, they hold Lincoln Day dinners. They now call most of those Reagan Day dinners. And I don't think they'll be calling them, nothing against Trump, but Trump Day dinners.

And Reagan was reelected by winning 49 out of 50 states. The Electoral College, 525 to 13. Twice won, New York. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, even Massachusetts twice. So I think Reagan's still the standard. Yeah, and I've seen the left. There are attempts to tear down this myth. I remember a book titled that about Reagan. They've failed to do so, and he continues to be very powerful. And the film that was based off your book, it's an excellent film.

We love Quaid. We love that production. It was great to see that having a lot of cultural relevance now and the ability to make movies like that now, which we hadn't seen for decades. Well, it's hard. I mean, it's hard to raise the money. Yeah, it's hard to raise the money. And, in fact, if I would just tell people here right now, support conservative filmmakers because it took us 20 years to make a movie about the icon of the conservative movement, about this American icon of the Republican Party. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, there were already three scripts ready in Hollywood, all fully funded. All right. We need to support conservative filmmakers. And I think that's something daily-wire. has been doing. And it's very, very important. Well, we appreciate that shout out. And yeah, it's something we do for sure find very important and central to our business. Paul, thank you so much for joining us just a total delight to talk to you. Same here, John. Anytime. Give me a call.

Happy to come back. That was Paul Kangor, editor of the American Spectator and Professor of Political Science at Grove City College. This has been a special edition of Morning Wire.