Some of the same polling data that those opposed to Trump are celebrating, watching his job approval rating fall to levels below where it was during his first failed term, is showing the Democratic party members in Congress getting a 29% job approval rating, with only 7% "strongly approving" of the job they are doing. That kind of puts a damper on a celebration, huh?

Well, what did you expect?

It's hard to put a finger on just exactly where it was that things turned south, but if I were a professional polling analyst, and I was interested in truth, not just projecting a political image, I'd be looking into what transpired around the time of Biden's first debate with Trump, and the fallout that happened afterward. The image that Democrats have built for themselves has never really been sharp, clear and focused, but that was a disaster of epic proportions. We looked like the GOP for about six weeks, with shadowed influence built around money interests calling the shots and trying to run the show.

That's when I realized that the hope we had placed in the fact that mountains of evidence had been produced and that Trump had finally and actually been indicted for his massive crimes would wind up coming to nothing. I realized, when the Justice Department and the attorney general Merrick Garland went completely silent after a tremendous congressional investigation made the case for proving Trump's guilt as the seditious inciter of an insurrection against the Capitol, that this was going to come to nothing.

And look, I get it. Trump was the insurrectionist, inciting violence for the purpose of overturning the results of an election he clearly could not prove was "stolen" from him. The Republicans are the ones who have basically pooped their brains out and turned into walking zombie yes men, lacking the will or the patriotism to serve their country as anything but a shill for a con artist.

But when Democrats had the chance to stop this from happening, they chose to give the old status quo, politics-as-usual, give-and-take, compromise and dealmaking that the GOP abandoned during the Reagan Administration one more try. That was the safe route. We got the rhetoric, "Trump is an existential threat to democracy." But nothing was done about bringing him to justice. Excuses were made about Republican justice appointees and the delays he made in his trials that stretched cases out for years, a travesty in a system where the rule of law is supposed to be the way things are governed.