From the beginning of his foray into politics, Trump has been profoundly fortunate in his opponents, and, evidently, his luck has not yet expired.

H aving examined Donald Trump’s swiftly sliding approval rating, it would be tempting for a casual observer to assume that the consequences of the president’s decline must be Newtonian in nature. Practically speaking, we have just two political parties in the United States, and, as a result, it makes intuitive sense to expect that those two parties will exert an equal and opposite reaction when they encounter one another. If Trump is down, then, surely, the Democrats must be up, and their task, between now and the next plebiscite, must be to wait patiently for their reward.

But, as it turns out, those presumptions are all wrong. Over the last month, President Trump has inflicted a great deal of damage on himself and his party. And yet, curiously enough, this has not redounded to the Democrats’ advantage. Asked in a recent CNN poll whether Trump or Kamala Harris would be doing a better job as president, voters who cast ballots in 2024 still gave Trump the edge by two percentage points. Asked in the same survey whether Trump or the Democrats in Congress were better able to deal with America’s key problems, they opted for Trump by eight. It has become fashionable of late for political analysts to assert that the electorate has come to regret the choice that it made last November. This is false. When compared with an idealized version of himself, Trump is screwing it up. When compared with the Democrats, he’s still winning.

Or, to put it another way: The Democrats are still the Democrats. Speaking on background to the Washington Post this week, a former aide to Kamala Harris implied heavily that the public lamented its decision and insisted emphatically that “there is a clamoring for her voice right now.” Which is nonsense. Indeed, it is likely that, in the entire history of these United States, the American people have never clamored less to hear from a public figure than they are clamoring to hear from Harris. Construct a Clamoring Scale on any terms you like — linear, logarithmic, or arbitrary — and Harris will ineluctably register a big fat zero on the screen. To declare otherwise is to fall prey to the same fatal mistake as was operative during last year’s campaign, and to assume that Kamala Harris is no longer Kamala Harris, and that, with enough press-led fluffery, she can be successfully transmogrified into someone else. She cannot. This is Harris’s lot in life. She is today what she was yesterday, and what she was yesterday was a loser whom the public hopes will go away.

So, too, her running mate, Tim Walz, who this week gave an utterly excruciating interview at Harvard’s Kennedy School in which he confirmed for all and sundry that the Democratic Party has thus far learned nothing from its defeat. Walz had been placed on the ticket, he said, because he “could code talk to white guys — watching football, fixing their truck, doing that.” “I was the permission structure,” he concluded, “to say ‘look you can do this and vote for this.’”

Questions abound. Chief among them: “‘permission’ from whom, exactly?” and “dude, who talks like that in public”? More important, though, is the level of self-delusion that was on display. Apparently, the Democrats still believe that the way to appeal to white guys who watch football, fix their trucks, and “do that” — whatever “that” may be — is to present them with a Tim Walz. That, of course, is wrong. But it is not wrong in the everyday sense; it is wrong in the what-color-is-the-sky? sense. To believe that Tim Walz would appeal to white male American voters is to admit that you simply do not know anything about the country in which you live. It is telling, I’d venture, that Walz used the term “code talk,” which, by definition, casts him as an emissary or as a translator or as an outsider who seeks to convey alien ideas. Even now, it seems, he regards himself as a useful intermediary figure who can take the assumptions of those who populate the Kennedy School and explain it to the natives out West. Sadly for him, this is not how contemporary America works.

As national figures, Harris and Walz are spent. But the milieu in which they became Harris and Walz is not. From the beginning of his foray into politics, Donald Trump has been profoundly fortunate in his opponents, and, evidently, his luck has not yet expired. This week, the most recent Democratic ticket reminded Americans why they’d rejected it. Next week, when Joe Biden returns to the fray, he will perform the same feat. In the meantime, we will hear from the same old unlovely cast of characters — Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, David Hogg — and we will be shown why the Democrats have a collective approval rating that is on a par with rabies. And further into the ground will go the machine — with no Trumpian bailout yet on the horizon.