The person who benefits the most from all of this, of course, is someone who was rarely mentioned this week but should have been: Donald Trump. The former President loomed offstage, sending out nasty missives, rooting for failure. Trump wants Republicans in Congress to vote against the budget bill, no matter what is in it. He wants them to vote against the infrastructure bill, as well—especially that, because he promised even bigger infrastructure spending and failed to deliver. Trump even wanted them to vote against the continuing resolution that kept the government open and avoided a shutdown, and a disturbingly large number of them did.

Trump’s entire premise is that Biden is doomed to failure—a personal political imperative that is as close to a Republican ideology as the Party has at the moment. Biden is weak; Biden must fail. Therefore, Republicans must simply oppose everything, in order to make sure that he does fail. Whatever Biden does, it will be wrong. Trump has become the permanent heckler of our democracy. A chyron on Fox News caught my eye the other day: “biden failing at home and abroad,” it said. What struck me was that it could have been about anything. Was it referring to this week’s congressional drama? The withdrawal from Afghanistan? covid? Some other obsessions of the anti-Biden right that I might have missed? The message is clear and apocalyptic: everything Biden does is a failure. By saying it, Trump hopes to make it so. No matter what…

Because it’s not just about a budget bill or an infrastructure bill. It’s about the central premise of Biden’s Presidency, the thing he sold America on: that government could actually get things done. That democracy works, that competence and calm could produce better outcomes than the chaos and craziness of the past four years. Biden’s success in getting things through Congress would be not just a policy victory but a vindication of the idea of his Presidency. But Biden isn’t there yet, nor is it clear that he will get there.