Day 351

2018 Memo

Democracy Depends on the Democrats?
Now, that's scary

   CAT WAS really out of sorts.
   “It’s going on nearly six days into the New Year, and so far you have nothing  – nada, nyet, nein, zed – to say about Donald Trump in 2018,” he growled.
   “Maybe because you don’t have to go outside in the winter, Cat,” I said. “You may not have noticed that we’ve just been through a BLIZZARD here in the Northeast. It slows down a girl. The wind, the cold – have you ever heard about wind chill – and then there’s the snow drifts, four-feet high in places, and I’m only 2.5 feet!”
   “But you are part husky, so, no excuse: it’s your kind of weather,” Cat said.
   He was right, of course. Winter is my season, and I’ve got the fur coat to prove it, among my many beauty points, which happen also to be very practical. And I like to frolic. Roll around in the snow. Stick my head in a snowbank. But what I was trying to avoid  talking to Cat about was also the challenge presented by high snow drifts and girl’s ability, let’s put it delicately, to tend to her personal care functions.

   “OK, SO what’s to say about Trump in 2018 that’s different since the calendar turned over new leaf?” I said. “Trump certainly hasn’t changed just because the calendar has.”
   “I thought we had discussed this ad nauseam, Phoebe,” he said. “Our approach in the new year.”
   I really, really hate it when Cat goes full Latin on me. But he was right. We have had a lot of conversations about what we should be doing when and after we reach the dreaded Day 365 of the Trump presidency.
   Frankly, I’ve been in some shock for weeks, now that it surely seems like Trump is going to pass that one-year mark since we started our countdown last Jan. 20.
   A lot of people had predicted that Trump was so ill-equipped, so disdainful of American tradition, so repulsive, so transparently hypocritical, so traitorous, that he wouldn’t last three months, to say nothing of a full year.
   And while Cat and I surely knew better, we sort of bought into that.
   But, as with the Republican primaries and then the election, Trump has proved us and everyone else (including himself, according to the new sensational book out today by Michael Wolff – and with a last name, like that, a dog’s got to give Senor Wolff some credibility here) wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
   Proving again, that whatever Wolff writes so convincingly about the supposed dysfunction of the Trump White House, the one thing that Trump gets right is that the rest of us are always underestimating him.

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   WHICH BRINGS us to one of our year-end, new-year conclusions: Trump is, so far, indestructible, something out of a scary movie, where the monster, the visitor from outer space, serial killer, what have you, seems invulnerable to the usual things that bring down the rest of us, villain and hero alike.
   He’s not going to self-destruct. His own kind isn’t going to turn on him (as a group, his Republican enablers are more frightening than Trump himself). And Robby Mueller isn’t going to lead him away in handcuffs.
   The only antidote is what the rest of us do, meaning whether we will make sure that the Democrats take over Congress this fall and the White House in 2020.
   So, take it from a dog and a cat: Job One in 2018 is to worry not about Donald Trump, but the Democrats.
   And that’s no small task. As a group, the Democrats are frighteningly uninspired, insipid, unimaginative, dispassionate, a  group that seems to come to life only when fighting among themselves.
   That’s how perilous our democracy is today, folks: salvation depends on the Democrats.
   In the coming weeks, Cat and I will try to ignore Trump’s Tweets, his antics, cruelty, barbarism and boorishness, and focus on what we’d like to see from the Democrats.
   “What’s that, Cat? Louder, I can’t hear you.”
   Cat is yelling from his winter (spring, summer and fall) perch on the downstairs couch to remind me, belatedly, that we want to wish you and everyone in your orbit a happy, healthful, successful and rewarding New Year. 

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