Why Democratic enthusiasm is down

The answer is that a political campaign that relies on stoking voter rage against any politician, including Donald Trump, for an entire presidential term is doomed to become rather dull. This is particularly true if the iniquitous actions attributed to the President consistently turn out to be wildly exaggerated or simply fabricated. The Democrats have leveled so many absurd accusations against Trump that most informed voters just yawn when they read about yet another “bombshell” revelation that allegedly confirms his fell designs on democracy. The latest of these involves what the Washington Post’s Max Boot inevitably dubbed the “Friday night massacre.”

This is, of course, a reference to last weeks’s long overdue removal of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council and Trump’s recall of his Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland. Both of these characters should have been fired long ago. Vindman actively undermined the President’s Ukraine policy and was almost certainly involved in the composition of the “whistblower complaint” that House Democrats used as the pretext for impeachment. Sondland irresponsibly circulated the “quid pro quo” fiction despite what Trump had explicitly told him.