“How did we do it?”
If you’ll forgive a brief reference to the TV show The Office as a starting point for the political point I want to make this morning, there’s an episode where two characters try everything they can think of to try to save their branch, only to learn at the end that they succeeded. As they celebrate, one says “We did it!” The other, realizing the odds of success and the absurdity of the positive outcome, confusedly asks, “How did we do it?”
As I try to assess the trajectory of the past ten weeks, I keep coming back to that question. We haven’t saved American democracy. We’re not yet within a country mile of that goal, and we won’t get there for some time. Things over the past two and a half months have been every bit as ugly as we expected, and in some ways even uglier. But at the same time there’s something quite surreal going on: we just might be winning this war.
How is that possible? For one thing – and this is a big piece of it – we haven’t given up. Election day was the kind of body blow that you’re not supposed to be able to recover from. Yet we didn’t give up, because as it turns out, we’re just not the type to quit on our country.
Then there’s the other side of the story, and that’s one of remarkable incompetence. Donald Trump and his people keep tripping over their own shoelaces with such catastrophically cartoonish results that it would make Wile E. Coyote blush. Nearly every evil thing they’ve tried to do has been overturned or shut down in court. It’s difficult to screw up your approach so badly that you end up losing every time, but that’s what we’re seeing happen. Basic competence would give the Trump regime enough legal benefit of the doubt to win at least a fraction of these cases. But their competence level appears to be zero.
It’s not just that Trump and his regime are screwing up everything they’re trying to pull off. It’s that they’re screwing up transactional things that should have been of no consequence. Hegseth and his crew could have simply used a secure method of discussing whatever it was they were blowing up in Yemen, and there would be no scandal. But because These People Are Idiots, they’ve created a national security scandal that just won’t go away.
Then there’s Trump himself, who spent his first term keeping his head just barely above water by knowing who to scapegoat at any given time. In February 2017, Trump forced his National Security Adviser to resign just three weeks into the job in order to make an early scandal go away. And then he kept scapegoating his own people one by one for four years. But this time around Trump doesn’t seem to remember his own strategy, and instead he’s just sitting there while his first major scandal completely envelops his entire administration.
To give you an idea of how far removed from reality Trump has become: even as Signalgate has spun out of control this week, Trump had JD Vance in Greenland to try to convince the people there to become part of the United States. The trip was a laugh out loud failure, because you’d have to be as dementia riddled as Trump to think that “acquiring Greenland” was ever going to be a thing. Not only was the Vance trip a waste of time that made the Trump regime look weak, it prevented Vance from being able to help fend off Signalgate. In fact, when Vance held a press conference in Greenland, he predictably received questions about Signalgate. Trump’s people can leave the continent, but they still can’t gain any distance from their own messes.
So here we are, ten weeks into a fight that seemed nearly 100% stacked in Trump’s favor the day after the election, and yet we somehow have something of an upper hand. How is that even possible? Who knows. But the key is that we never gave up fighting. And it tells us that we need to keep fighting.
