HOW WE GOT HERE, CONTINUED: Inventing a bigger liar than Trump!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2017

Part 1—The fruit of our own elites: Will we liberals ever confront the various roles we ourselves played in sending Donald J. Trump to the White House?

Almost surely, we won't. Yesterday, in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote the next chapter in our alternative undertaking, in which 1) we blame everything on The Others, and in which 2) we've finally decided to fight and fight hard, now that it's too late.

Exactly one day after Trump was sworn in, we staged our march on Washington! Yesterday, Kristof wrote the next chapter in this morally pleasing but embarrassing tale.

Pitiful headline included! Here's what our liberal elites are like:

KRISTOF (2/19/17): How Can We Get Rid of Trump?

We’re just a month into the Trump presidency, and already so many are wondering: How can we end it?

One poll from Public Policy Polling found that as many Americans—46 percent—favor impeachment of President Trump as oppose it. Ladbrokes, the betting website, offers even odds that Trump will resign or leave office through impeachment before his term ends.

Sky Bet, another site, is taking wagers on whether Trump will be out of office by July.

"How Can We Get Rid of Trump!" There's only one word for that:

Sad.

As he continued, Kristof examined the various ways Donald J. Trump could be removed from office now that our team is upset. "Let’s investigate." he thoughtfully wrote. "Is there any way out?"

At the end of his piece, Kristof reported his fearless conclusion. Our analysts tore their hair as they surveyed his fatuous work.

What word comes after "sad?" one of the youngsters asked:

KRISTOF: If I were betting, I’d say we’re stuck with Trump for four years. But as Sabato says: “Lots of things about Donald Trump’s election and early presidency have been shocking. Why should it stop now?”

And what does it say about a presidency that, just one month into it, we’re already discussing whether it can be ended early?

What does it say about Trump's presidency that we're having this discussion? In our view, we liberals should ask a more pertinent question:

What does it say about Us?

We liberals! With spectacular ineptitude, we showed up at the scene of the fire just in time to be too late to put it out. Yesterday, Kristof's column continued this embarrassing show, which just keeps rolling along.

In this morning's Washington Post, Kavin and Costa present the latest report about our new liberal activism. The scribes report from a New Jersey town hall, where angry liberals hectored a new Democratic House member over his refusal to fight hard enough in the crucial past several weeks.

As quoted, several of these fiery activists described their own absence from the scene over the past many years. To cite one example, a retired surgeon who carried "an 8-by-10-inch sign reading 'Resist' said he was politically active in the 1970s but did not feel the need to become so again until the Women’s March."

After an absence of forty years, the surgeon had arrived on the scene again. He had arrived just in time to be dangerously too late.

In fairness, it isn't the fault of the rank and file that we helped send Trump to the White House. To a massively greater extent, it's the fault of our liberal leadership groups, whose pitiful conduct we will sample during the course of the week.

Our cable hosts, our star liberal columnists? Our legions of silent and hapless professors? Our black assistant professors?

Where do we start with a gong-show like this? The choices are many, and hard.

That said, how absurd is the situation our leadership groups helped create? Once again, let's consider one of the ways Candidate Trump managed to draw an inside straight and find his way to the White House.

We turn to this news report from last Thursday's New York Times. In her report, Katie Rogers spoke with Trump voters who have tweeted regret for their votes.

Debbie Nelson is one such voter. What happened isn't Nelson's fault, but we'll highlight one key part of what she said:

ROGERS (2/17/17): Debbie Nelson, a secretary who lives in Orland Park, Ill., and works in downtown Chicago, said in an interview that she never liked Mr. Trump, but ended up voting for him because she was worried jobs like hers were being outsourced. She also didn't trust Mrs. Clinton.

Ms. Nelson reluctantly voted for Mr. Trump—''because of Hillary's lies''—but grew disillusioned with Mr. Trump's behavior, which she thought would change after the election. On Feb. 6, she added her message for the president to the fray: ''We need a mature adult as president. Can I take my vote back?'' (For Ms. Nelson, the tipping point was seeing Mr. Trump dismiss news and negative polls as fake that day.)

Mr. Trump entered the White House with a historically low approval rating, but Ms. Nelson is among the voters who approve of his overall policies, especially when it comes to immigration. ''I do want better security and I don't think there is anything wrong with that,'' she said.

But she was frustrated with the slapdash nature of Mr. Trump's executive order to restrict refugees and people from several primarily Muslim countries.

Just for the record, it is too late for Nelson to take back her vote. That said, as we did last week with another voter, we note a key part of her thinking last fall:

Debbie Nelson voted for Trump because of Clinton's lies!

At least in theory, it's very, very, very hard to lose an election this way. It's hard to lose to a constant, disordered dissembler like Trump because, in the minds of many voters, your candidate was the one who spilled with troubling lies.

That said, this is one of the obvious ways we managed to lose to Candidate Trump. We ran against the greatest dissembler in American political history—and somehow, our candidate was widely perceived as the one with the troubling lies!

It's actually hard to lose that way; not every group could have done it! But over here in our liberal tents, our leadership groups have stumbled, bumbled and clowned for decades, bringing this gong-show to pass!

Yesterday, Kristof flashed a shiny object. Tomorrow, we'll start to examine the ongoing, world-class gong-show performance of our liberal leadership groups.

Tomorrow: Where to begin?