2017 has been a brutal war – but yes, the Resistance is still winning

| 7:59 pm EST December 20, 2017
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The Republican Party and its dying quail Donald Trump finally managed to score a victory this week by ramming through a tax scam that will steal trillions from the middle class and give it all to the wealthy. It’s a devastating development, if one that’s been predictable for several weeks. What’s more remarkable is that even though the GOP has been in majority control all year, the Resistance has managed to defeat it at nearly every turn. Even this tax scam is little more than a pyrrhic victory for the GOP.

For the Republicans to succeed with their tax scam, they would have needed to sell the bulk of the American public on the lie that it’s somehow a middle class tax cut. Instead the polling on the tax scam reveals that the vast majority of the public knows it’s a tax scam. The Republicans failed in their goal of sneaking this garbage through without anyone noticing it was garbage. Facing the no-win choice of either scuttling the whole thing, or ramming it through and paying a devastating price for it in the 2018 congressional elections, the GOP chose the latter. The party has made its choice, and it’ll bleed dearly for it on election day.

So yes, this is an awful bill. And yes, we won’t be able to begin repealing it until we retake control in upcoming elections. But as I’ve been pointing out all year, this is war. It has been all along. In war, both sides spend every losing badly. Costs. Casualties. Things they hold dear. On any given day, whichever side loses the least is considered the “winner” that day. When one side has lost everything, the other side – which has also lost a bunch – wins the war. It’s ugly as hell. It’s also how war works.

We’re all too keenly aware of what we’ve lost this year. Let’s remind ourselves what the other side has lost. We’ve exposed Donald Trump’s abhorrent and criminal nature so thoroughly, he’s become so toxically unpopular that his party has only been able to pass one bill, out of the dozens of evil bills they had been eyeing. The GOP is now so unpopular nationwide, it’s losing in places like Alabama. Republicans in Congress are announcing their retirement because they know their party has no chance in 2018. No one truly wins in war. But the other side is bleeding like a stuck pig, and it just had to burn its own house down so it could claim a single lonesome victory in what should have been a year full of GOP wins. Ugly as this all may be, the Resistance is still winning this fight.