THE LEFT CAN'T AFFORD TO GO MAD

The Trump years had a radicalizing effect on the American right. But, let's be honest, they also sent many on the left completely around the bend. Some liberals, particularly upper-middle-class white ones, cracked up because other people couldn't see what was obvious to them: that Trump was a bad candidate and an even worse president.

- Helen Lewis

At first, liberals tried established tactics such as sit-ins and legal challenges; lawyers and activists rallied to protest the administration's Muslim travel ban, and courts successfully blocked its early versions. Soon, however, the sheer volume of outrages overwhelmed Trump's critics, and the self-styled resistance settled into a pattern of high-drama, low-impact indignation.

Rather than focusing on how to oppose Trump's policies, or how to expose the hollowness of his promises, the resistance simply wished Trump would disappear. Many on the left insisted that he wasn't a legitimate president, and that he was only in the White House because of Russian interference. Social media made everything worse, as it always does; the resistance became the #Resistance. Instead of concentrating on the hard work of door-knocking and community activism, its members tweeted to the choir, drawing no distinction between Trump's crackpot comments and his serious transgressions. They fantasized about a deus ex machina-impeachment, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the pee tape, outtakes from The Apprentice-leading to Trump's removal from office, and became ever more frustrated as each successive news cycle failed to make the scales fall from his supporters' eyes. The other side got wise to this trend, and coined a phrase to encapsulate it: "Orange Man Bad."

The Trump presidency was a failure of right-wing elites; the Republican Party underestimated his appeal to disaffected voters and failed to find a candidate who could defeat him in the primary. Once he became president, the party establishment was content to grumble in private and grovel in public. But the Trump years demonstrated a failure of the left, too.