This conceit is endlessly fascinating to me. It’s the old debate trick of performatively conceding the lesser point in order to win the broader point—but in reverse. Trump’s people concede the most significant matter just so that they can argue the ephemera.

So they employ the MAGAfied “Orange Man Bad” retort on social media as a way of stepping over his badness to address something else, rather than engage with it.

The Orange Man Bad practitioners would argue that they are simply trying to expose the shallowness of Trump’s opposition, the weakness of their argumentation.

And while the phenomena of #resistance members opposing a policy that they might otherwise support were it not for the Bad Orange Man being behind it has certainly been known to exist, as a political matter, conceding that the president is bad is not the strongest turf for pointing out your foe’s weak argumentation.