As awful as the second Trump administration is, very little is accomplished by criticizing it from the perspective of a leftist like me. The administration wants to appall us, even take revenge on us. That’s the point. I’ve seen multiple bumper stickers and T-shirts proclaiming “Trump: Make liberals cry again.” As far as I can tell, last time, Trump drew strength from every apopleptic tweet our team raged out about how horrible it all is. We can and should take concrete steps to fight it all – the only obvious one being to contribute to legal funds challenging his actions in the courts, of which Democracy Forward seems to be the most prominent – but we do little by publicly expressing our outrage. Our hatred of any Trump administration is a feature, not a bug.

Old-fashioned Reaganite conservatives who stay true to their principles are going to be pretty horrified, too. When an unrepentant admirer of the old Soviet Union conquers back USSR territory (at great human cost on both sides), it’s got to be crushing to see the leader of “the free world” walk away from the conflict on terms favourable to the conqueror. But it’s been startling to see how few even care about those Reaganite principles anymore. Some of the ones who do, like Dick Cheney, often already campaigned for the other side – in a way that may have served only to illustrate that side’s complete ideological incoherence. (If you advertise that you’ve got endorsements ranging from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney, does that really look like you’re the common-sense consensus candidate, or does it look like you stand for nothing at all?)

All of which makes far too much criticism of the administration effectively irrelevant. If you’re a true-blue Reaganite, let alone a leftist, it means none of the people who put this administration in power actually care what you think. And that’s a big problem, because what the administration is doing is really, really bad – even from the perspective of its sympathizers.