The more Trump wins, the angrier they get

The Democrats have little chance of winning by a preemptive strike, and that was obvious in their dejected response to his boffo performance at the Capitol last week, as they saw him poaching many of their electoral fiefdoms and giving the lie to their portrayal of him as a madman and an ignoramus. His tactical skills are already evident. He didn’t take the bait to ignore the Seattle judge, complied, and has issued a new and bulletproof order on entry of foreigners. No one will remember what the ninja vandals were doing at Berkeley, or the mobs at airports, or Schumer sniveling publicly. His accusation that Obama tapped his telephones is presumably based on something, and is a response to the Democratic moles in the administration, leaking on a scale that in ancient times caused Noah to build an ark. The administration will have to send large numbers of suspects in the public service, under a hailstorm of subpoenas, to grand juries and prosecute the main apparent offenders. It might even be time to unleash serious prosecutors on the Clintons, though it would be a regrettable indignity. This is siege warfare, and wars are not won by passivity. The credibility of the Democratic media is fungible and depleting, and they can only cry “Wolf” for no reason so many times before no one but the detritus of their supporters pays any attention to their false alarms. The Democrats are already fumbling over the extent of the Obama administration’s surveillance of Trump.

It was clear when Trump spoke to CPAC on February 24 that the Gorsuch nomination and some of his policy positions had won back the conservatives. He was booed there two years ago, but this year he could have been carried in on a sedia gestatoria like Pius XII, given the veneration he received. The highbrow conservative writers who have not changed their tune were left at the end of the branch; Trump sawed off the branch, and they are now chirping grumpily at each other on the inhospitable ground. Friendship prevents me from identifying some of them, but I cannot help but refer to the amiable David Brooks’s invocation of the Enlightenment in the New York Times on February 28. He offered a fanciful pastiche of cultural revisionism with the American mythos. The Enlightenment pursued pure reason and encouraged religious skepticism and the dilution of the power of great offices and institutions and their occupants. It hovers between atheism and agnosticism but can tolerate deism, and politically is best satisfied with decentralization bordering on libertarianism.