Democrats show brazen hypocrisy on Epstein, inflation, Trump’s health | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Democrats pivoted from silence to outrage on inflation, Biden health and Epstein.
- Republicans mirrored past Democratic arguments, exposing mutual partisan flip-flops.
- Partisan inconsistency erodes trust, fuels populist promises and voter cynicism.
If there’s one thing everyone knows about current American politics, it’s that the two parties have never been further apart.
So, why do they look and sound a little more like each other every day?
Why are Democrats complaining about things they were quiet about for years? Why are Republicans rebutting those charges in much the same way Democrats did?
Hypocrisy and double standards in political discourse are not new, but they blur the lines that supposedly fuel our political blood feuds and boost voter cynicism about a rigged game. Those sentiments need no further help to blossom.
There’s a long list of issues that Democrats didn’t have much to say about up to Jan. 19, Joe Biden’s last full day as president, but have portrayed as four-alarm fires under Donald Trump. Three have dominated: inflation, the president’s health and energy for the job, and hunting down anyone who ever spent time with Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump’s hands aren’t clean, either. He has downplayed Americans’ concerns about rising prices, hidden information about his medical fitness for office and governed as if his close victory was a landslide replete with a mandate for rapid, even radical, change — all things he blasted Biden for.
Blame populism for some epic partisan flip-flops
Populism is a culprit. In a campaign, it’s easy to reflect anger and promise action or retribution. When the time comes to address complex problems such as grocery prices, it can be hard to move quickly or effectively.
We’ve also come to expect, even accept, that the parties will flip-flop on certain issues based on whether they hold the White House. Democrats loved it when Barack Obama rewrote immigration policy without Congress. When Trump acts unilaterally, they yelp about autocracy. Republicans base their concern level about federal deficits or debt on the outcome of each election. And don’t even try to make sense of what each party truly thinks about partisan redistricting.
That’s politics. But these latest examples — if you’ll indulge a quick tribute to the late “This Is Spinal Tap” director Rob Reiner — go to 11.
Democrats scoffed when anyone during Biden’s presidency suggested that maybe Democratic policy of pouring more borrowed federal money into a flush economy could spike prices. Now, they suddenly can’t talk enough about “affordability.” Housing, groceries, cars — Democrats blame Trump for persistent inflation without even acknowledging that layers upon layers of government regulation they championed makes goods more complicated to make and thus more expensive.
Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, announcing her run for Senate, said with a straight face that prices had tripled in a year under Trump. If that were remotely true, it would rank among the all-time inflation disasters, the kind that requires wheelbarrows to carry enough devalued cash to buy a meal.
Democrats denied Biden’s decline but dwell on Trump’s health
Biden’s four years in office were marked by a steady deterioration of his speech, mobility and clarity. White House aides insisted he was fine, even robust. It wasn’t until Biden’s disastrous performance in a debate that they reacted to what anyone could see.
Even then, they did so not out of concern over whether the country was in steady hands but over the prospect of losing an election. They insisted that while Biden should no longer seek another term, he was fine to stay in office for six more months. His incoherence seems to have been contagious.
Now, some Democrats see a stubborn bruise on Trump’s hand and a 79-year-old man nearly nodding off in a long meeting and declare it’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office.
Trump plays the same kind of games with his health information. When the president goes for an unscheduled medical exam, as Trump recently did, the country deserves the full story. We don’t even know what caused Trump’s doctors enough concern to order an MRI.
And then, there’s Epstein. To hear Democrats over the last few months, there was no higher priority than finding out exactly who might have indulged in heinous crimes with him or helped cover them up. Lawmakers who couldn’t bring themselves to ask if Biden was functional decided transparency was suddenly the nation’s highest priority.
What happened during the years in which the Biden administration could have revealed much of the same information? Sure didn’t hear much out of Democrats, then. That’s because for every Trump reference in the much ballyhooed “Epstein files,” there’s probably something to implicate a Democrat or one of the party’s important donors.
Back to Trump for one final example. Biden’s administration tried to pin high food prices on grocers, who typically have low profit margins. Kamala Harris campaigned on a promise to ban “price gouging” in food production. Republicans rightly scoffed that it was a distraction for bad policies. Trump called Harris’ idea “communist.”
Now, Comrade Trump has ordered up an investigation of … wait for it … “price fixing” in the food industry. He’s aiming primarily at foreign companies, but then, the Soviets loved to blame their failed economies on other countries’ meddling, too.
It’s too much to expect purity in politics. Even a strain of basic consistency is more than some partisans can manage.
But it fuels the costly cynicism that has Americans throwing up their hands at politics and turning to impossible populist promises. That’s a kind of inflation we can ill afford.
This story was originally published December 19, 2025 at 10:39 AM.
