At this time eight years ago, in the first year of Donald Trump’s first term as president, the Russia special counsel, Robert Mueller, had already been appointed and had been investigating Trump for a month. What Trump calls the Russia hoax dominated media coverage. Commentators slandered Trump on a daily basis. Trump’s job approval rating fell into the high 30s in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. In the White House, the new president was distracted and on the defensive, knocked back on his feet from his first moments in office.

On the other side, the Democratic strategy was attack, attack, attack. They had a lot of help; major news organizations and a host of cable news producers gave them an opportunity to speculate about Trump-Russia every hour of every day.

RussiaRussiaRussia dominated politics in 2017, 2018 and much of 2019. Trump lost a lot of what could have been his most productive time as president.

The point of bringing this up is to contrast the situation then with the situation today. Now it is the Democrats who are distracted and back on their feet, with the party engaged in bitter infighting and struggling to come up with a unified strategy to oppose Trump. Meanwhile, Trump is pushing forward on all fronts, setting the agenda and putting together one of the most consequential presidencies in years.

Part of the problem is that Democrats are still in a state of shock. Go back to last summer, when an internal coup resulted in President Joe Biden’s departure from the reelection race. Then go to November, when the party was stunned to lose to Trump. Then go to January-February-March of this year when they were overwhelmed by Trump’s audacious use of executive authority in his first months in office. Democrats are still playing catch-up.

Recently, we’ve seen a number of Democrats pursue a new effort to use 1960s-style civil disobedience to get themselves detained, arrested, handcuffed or otherwise in trouble while bringing attention to what they say are the administration’s lawless ways. LaMonica McIver, Ras Baraka, Brad Lander, Alex Padilla and others have tried it — so many that the Washington Post recently published a story headlined, “For Democrats, handcuffs are the latest symbol of resistance to Trump.”

It’s kind of funny, but not really — it’s more an indicator of the Democratic Party’s impotence in the face of the Trump presidency. And behind the embarrassing stories, Democrats have substantial problems that could render the party ineffective for quite a while.

It has fallen behind in the money race — according to recent reports, the Democratic National Committee has $18 million in cash-on-hand compared to $67.4 million for the Republican National Committee.

Finally, Democrats are still on the wrong side of a number of issues, like immigration, wokeism and national security. Back in 2017, in Trump’s first months in office, Democrats, even though they had just suffered a devastating defeat in the 2016 presidential election, didn’t spend as much time worrying about their brand.

Democrats have lost again to Trump, but this time, they are still searching for the magic issue to use against him.