Resistance 1.0 Was Not Crazy

Donald Trump celebrated the defeat of one of his first impeachment nemeses—retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman, who lost the Democratic Senate primary in Florida on Tuesday—in typical form.

“SleazeBag Vindman loses tonight to a Radical Left Lunatic.

How cool is that???” Trump exulted on Truth Social.

Vindman served as a witness in Trump’s first impeachment.

Whatever currency this once gave him with Democratic voters has long since expired.

In this, he is not unique.

Democrats such as Dan Goldman, George Conway, and Tom Steyer, all of whom pushed for or played prominent roles in Trump’s first impeachment, have discovered in primaries this year that this credential means little to their party’s voters.

Diana DeGette, a House manager during Trump’s second impeachment trial, and Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who battled insurrectionists, have also lost primaries.

The rout of the Democratic Party’s impeachment stars has been interpreted, generally, as a sign of the end of resistance politics .

“The string of losses for resistance candidates from the first Trump term illustrates a new era for the restive Democratic base, where vocal opposition to the president through official channels and public remonstrations no longer guarantees success,” Politico reports. [ David Frum: The ‘resistance’ is over ] The “resistance,” once a dominant mode of Democratic politics during the first Trump administration, was never cool.

But in the second term, the “resistance liberal” has fallen out of favor so completely that the phrase has become a derisive punch line across the political spectrum.

Which is a shame, because the resistance was, broadly speaking, correct.

It was right about Trump’s nature, and also right about how to defeat him.

Resistance politics depicted Trump as a crook and an aspiring authoritarian with a troubling fondness for dictators, especially Vladimir Putin.