… But I do know an animal when I see one.

Yesterday, the White House put a fine point on President Trump’s description of MS-13 gang members as “animals.” In a 491 word posting on the White House website, White House staff used the word “animals” no fewer than 10 times in describing MS-13 atrocities.

The knee jerk reaction since 2016 of the Resistance left and the Resistance media is that if Trump said it, they have to be against it.

With his MS-13 comments, Trump has put his political opponents willingly in the position of defending the dignity of a group whose motto is “Kill, Rape and Control.” A gang that, as White House staff artfully describes in their press release, stands accused of “stabbing a man more than 100 times and then decapitating him, dismembering him, and ripping his heart out of his body.”

As soon as the press release hit the web, the left half of the partisan media immediately began their usual spin.

Philip Bump, writing in the Washington Post, compares Trump calling the MS-13 “animals” to him speaking out about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. While I have seen some really hard hitting in NFL games, I’ve not seen the opposing lineman’s heart ripped from their body. Perhaps before writing about MS-13 again, Bump should take a walk through MS-13 territory in Fairfax County.

E.J. Dionne, also writing about Trump’s comments in the Post, thinks “...dehumanizing others always leads us down a dangerous path.”

As if on cue, a Facebook group called Vocal Progressives dehumanized Trump by comparing him with Hitler. It made Snopes.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in response to Trump’s comments, wondered if Trump does not “believe in the spark of divinity? In the dignity and worth of every person?”

Regardless of how she feels in her soul about the opportunity for redemption of people who regularly beat little girls to death with baseball bats and machetes, progressives are in all-out war with the Democratic establishment. Strategically, Pelosi needs every opportunity to appeal to the far left.

And the progressives are fulfilling their role in pulling her to the left. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, a rising star among far-left progressives, called Trump’s comments about MS-13 “racist” and referred to MS-13 as a "vulnerable population."

Notably, Schaaf is not now nor will she ever be in a race against a Republican, unlike her 100 or so Democrat colleagues currently competing in swing seats. That loud groaning noise you hear is the collective grumbling of every Democrat campaigning against a Republican in a swing district. They are trying to figure out how to explain to suburban mothers why we should all speak more kindly about the most violent gang in the world.

As groups like the Justice Democrats pull the Democratic Party further to the extreme with knee-jerk opposition to everything Trump says, it might be hard for any independent-minded voter to believe that the they actually stand for something of their own.

The generic congressional ballot gap - would you prefer a Republican or Democrat for Congress - was as wide as 14 points at the beginning of 2018. Meaning that just by virtue of having a D by your name, you had a 14 point advantage. It has since shrunk to 4 points in the most recent poll.

If you look deeper into the polling, you find that a third of swing voters are most interested in the economy, 23% say North Korea is most important to them and 22% are most concerned about immigration. Using good manners with violent street gangs is not even on the list.

Something has driven the Democrat drop in the polls. Much like the Tea Party with the Republicans, perhaps it is the leftward pull of Progressives.

With this act of messaging jiu-jitsu, Trump has gotten the Democrats off any message that independent voters care about, and on to one that could drive them away. This is a day that, love him or hate him, you think Trump could be a genius… or at least the best troll the Internet has seen.

BREAKING: Neither Trump nor Pelosi, Schaaf nor virtually anyone in the mainstream media have yet commented on the Tuesday sentencing of MS-13 member Joel Martinez, AKA “Animal,” to forty years for murdering a fifteen-year-old boy.