A democratic socialist named Janeese Lewis George is on the verge of becoming the next mayor of Washington, D.C., and if you're wondering whether the left has finally lost all strategic instinct, the answer is a resounding yes. Lewis George, who leads opponent Kenyan McDuffie by a staggering 53% to 37% in the polls, has built her entire campaign around one promise: "stand up to Trump."
Brilliant. Pick a fight with the President of the United States in the one city on earth where he has direct constitutional authority over your government. That's like challenging the bouncer to a fistfight inside his own bar.
Lewis George first won office in 2020 and has been a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America ever since. She introduced a "Green New Deal for Housing" bill in 2022, declaring that "housing is too essential to leave solely to the private market." She also attended a DSA "Fund Care, Not Cops!" rally in June 2020. In other words, she's the full package — anti-cop, anti-market, and anti-common-sense.
D.C. is using ranked-choice voting for the first time in this election, because apparently regular voting wasn't confusing enough for a city that can't fill potholes.
Outgoing Mayor Muriel Bowser wasn't exactly a conservative darling, but at least she understood basic survival instincts. Lewis George? Not so much. She described herself as "horrified and outraged by the conduct perpetrated by federal law enforcement" after President Trump sent federal officers into the district. You know, the federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department that resulted in 1,200 ICE arrests and the deployment of the National Guard.
Trump himself was asked about the prospect of a socialist mayor running his capital city. His response was vintage Trump: "I wouldn't like it." That's the diplomatic version. We all know what the undiplomatic version looks like — and it usually involves executive orders.
Here's what makes this genuinely hilarious. D.C. is not a state. It's a federal district. Congress has ultimate legislative authority over it. The President has enormous power there. Lewis George wants to "stand up to Trump" from a jurisdiction where Trump can, constitutionally speaking, stand on her desk.
She joins a growing roster of democratic socialist politicians — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Zohran Mamdani of New York — who seem to believe that the word "socialist" is a selling point rather than a warning label. Former DC Police Chief Pamela Smith could tell them how well anti-police rhetoric plays when you actually need police.
The left had the entire country to experiment with their socialist fantasies. They could have picked Portland. They could have doubled down in San Francisco. Instead, they're installing a card-carrying socialist in the one city where the President of the United States goes to work every morning.
We wish Janeese Lewis George the best of luck. She's going to need every last bit of it.