In their defense…… there is so much madness emanating from this administration, it’s difficult to know where to begin taking a stand against it.

As I mentioned in another thread, Donald Trump's superpower is in commanding attention, in a political environment where commanding attention is valuable.

One of his tools is saying outlandish things. Sometimes crazy things, sometimes terrible things, sometimes proposing things that are completely illegal. He does this all the time. Constantly, continuously, repeatedly.

If elected officials - from either party - spent the time to refute/push back on every single thing he says like this, they'd never have any time to do much else. And the thing is, most of this stuff never actually translates into real policy. Oh, sure, it's bad that he even talks about violating the anti-Impoundment Act or subjecting shoplifters to police beatings, but most of this stuff just slips out of his mouth and ends there.

So GOP officials mostly ignore what he says until it becomes an actual thing (even then they won't do much, because their voters mostly don't want their officials to challenge the President). Democratic officials use it to fundraise and activate the base, but not much else until it becomes an actual thing - because they've started to learn that this is a little bit of rope-a-dope.

It's time to stop expecting that anything different will happen. Trump's modus operandi is to keep himself the center of the news cycle by constantly making provocations. It is to his advantage to have his opponents spending their energy chasing a thousand insane tweets rather than focusing on the stuff his administration is actually doing. It is to his advantage to have his supporters think that he's a whirlwind of energy that's fundamentally changing the course of American government, rather than a President who is bad at Presidenting, and thus has accomplished relatively little that will survive his term in office (or notice that he's not doing much on their core issues, like abortion).