It’s fully possible that President Donald Trump’s high-stakes gambles, from his Ukraine peace deal to his trade with Mexico and Canada, will ultimately imperil the GOP’s newfound popularity. But even if the Donald does fail to deliver, the Democrats have made it clear that they’ve utterly lost the plot. Republicans will rightly warn that those who have bet against Trump before have been left badly burned — see: Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fani Willis, etc. But the party’s best bet for continued dominance over Washington is that Democrats are utterly lost in the wilderness and the #Resistance is nothing but a zombie they’d be wise to bury once and for all.

Lesson one of the greatest political comebacks in American history ought to have been, as evidenced by the aforementioned prosecutors now with their own legal fates up in the air, is that when you come at the king, you best not miss.

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Lesson two? If you dial up your outrage to an 11 out of 10 every time a Trump-related scuffle really warrants a two, you will have effectively desensitized the public from giving a single damn when Trump actually does jump the shark.

So when the choreographed #Resistance began before the president had uttered a single word of his address to a joint special address of Congress, it was made clear that Democrats were doomed.

Trump had barely entered the House chamber when Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) whipped out a sign to aim straight at the camera focused on Trump walking in front of her.

“This is NOT normal,” read the sign held by Stansbury, clad in a cotton-candy-colored pantsuit, only for Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) to snatch it across the aisle and throw it into the morass.

Like a throng of Barbie fans watching the 2023 summer blockbuster, the female half of the Democratic caucus all broke out their finest fuschias and preppiest pastels and, in short order, similarly monotonous signs. Rather than wait for Trump to actually tease the arguably partisan touchpoints of his agenda, a congressional army of Karens flew their grievances at full mast before the address actually began.

Trump had finally begun to take the stand when the 78-year-old Rep. Al Green (D-TX) proved himself the true future of the Democratic Party. Waving his cane wildly, Greene stood, screaming, “He has no mandate” until House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) finally ordered him out of the chamber. Behind Greene, House Assistant Democratic Leader Joe Neguse (D-CO) curled his entire body away from the spectacle and tried to melt into his chair. At least one of the supposed adults in the room saw the disaster for what it was.

It’s not just that the public is sick and tired of the #Resistance-at-any-cost schtick the institutional Left has subjected us to for nearly a decade now. Trump himself, liberated from the threat of prison and a losing conclusion in the history books, has finally learned how to have fun with his haters in a way he never truly embraced during his first term. Lampshading the sheer pathological brain rot wrought by the reflexive nature of the #Resistance, Trump called their bluff, beckoning the Democratic half of the audience to at least clap at the beginning to celebrate our great country. When the party collectively refused to bite — cameras cut away from a livid Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) toying with a loose denture — Trump shrugged his shoulders in a warning to Democrats: Your loss!

And thus progressed more than an hour of torture for the party that bet that Trump would make it easy for them to glower in silence. It was uncomfortable when they would not clap for seemingly obvious statements like “You should be hired for merit, not race.” But it was downright excruciating when Democrats would not clap for the families of the murdered Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray, let alone for the 13-year-old brain cancer survivor in the audience when Trump made him a member of the Secret Service.

Even when Trump dropped the mic on America to announce that we’re extraditing one of the terrorists responsible for the murder of the Abbey Gate 13 in Afghanistan, roughly only half of the Democrats in attendance raised their hands to clap quietly. Not one could be seen standing in ovation.

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The only Democrat to remarkably get the joke? Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who made a show of clapping when Trump called the senator his trademark moniker of “Pocahontas.” By then, Trump was getting to the actual meat of polarizing politics and any overture of fairness was too late. What good does it matter to point out that the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement supports 17 million jobs, lest a trade war threaten them, when Democrats have already spent the last two hours brandishing signs calling Trump a lying weirdo?

Trump’s unquestionable read for the moment aside, it’s still fully possible the GOP fumbles the bag. But if they do, it will be a product of a self-inflicted wound, because nearly 10 years since Trump took over the Republican Party, Democrats have never been less incapable of challenging him. An opposition party, it is not.