“Hoist with his own petard” is a phrase taken from Shakespeare and means someone destroyed himself with a weapon (a petard, that is, small bomb) intended for another. President Trump has hoisted the #NeverTrumpers on theirs and is about to do the same thing to the now irremediably lunatic Democrats.

Christopher Bedard has done a brilliant job describing the downfall of the #NeverTrump scribblers. It’s worth reading it all, but here are some highlights:

The Never Trumpers say they don’t recognize a Republican Party where the core tenets are neither free trade nor foreign democracy promotion. But maybe they just didn’t know their voters by sight, because the only party that has truly departed recognition is Never Trump.

Each week brings this movement a new and bizarre position: Opposing tax cuts, supporting Obamacare; wishing North Korean talks ill, wishing Democratic investigators well; dreaming of European political meddling, pining for American political comeuppance. [snip]

Though the president’s House was defeated in the first post-Trump national elections and his two-year approval among Democrats lies at historic lows, his approval with his own voters -- those who the Never Trumpers courted not long ago -- is second only to George W. Bush after 9/11.

As the second year of Trump’s presidency ends, these former Republicans have insulted and alienated their readers until they had none. They’ve squandered their time on unimportant, self-righteous panel discussions, finally reduced to bobbing up in partisan anti-Trump venues surrounded by men and women who called them war criminals just years before, buoyed for a time by saying the right thing about the right enemy.

NAFTA, mean words and Donald Trump cannot possibly be the origin of these shattered minds, however vital those were to the breaking.

In the same classic misreading of the base, this week Mitt Romney penned a foolish anti-Trump opinion editorial in the heart of D.C. darkness, the Washington Post.

A number of writers responded to this obvious effort to make himself stand out as the new McCain, a Republican willing to destroy the party’s leader for (temporary) press approval.

Steve Hayward nailed it nicely at Power Line blog:

Romney has unwittingly provided the devastating argument against his style of Republicanism. Yes, it is quite true that nearly all Republican presidential candidates -- and presidents -- have promoted tax reform, lower regulation, getting tough with China, and appointing better judges (and add in moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem), if by “promoted” you mean giving lip service to the ideas.

None of them have delivered on these “promoted” ideas (Reagan excepted, of course). The two presidents Bush botched judicial appointments, extended regulation, delivered little in the way of serious tax or spending reform, and did nothing serious with regard to China. I wish Romney had defeated Obama in 2012, but does anyone think this Massachusetts technocrat, who gave us the state-level version of Obamacare in the Bay State, signed up for a regional climate change cap-and-trade scheme, who appointed the egregious Gina McCarthy (Obama’s second EPA administrator) to be his environmental adviser, and appointed state judges who struck the first judicial blows for same-sex marriage, would have governed as a serious conservative had he won?

The point is, Trump has proved that “mainstream Republicanism” was a colossal failure. Whereas Bush-Romney Republicans “promoted” good ideas, Trump has delivered on them.

As Mickey Kaus tweeted, he sensed there must have been a consultant behind Romney’s spectacular failing strategy -- you know, the kind of geniuses who sandbagged their candidate’s running mate Sarah Palin, the sort who talked Al Gore into wearing brown and stuffing a sock in his pants, who persuaded John Kerry to speak in phony backwoods talk to “get me a hunting license”, and who this week encouraged Elizabeth Warren to enact a folksy News Year’s Eve in her kitchen drinking beer out of a bottle.

Overpaid campaign consultants like the ones behind these stunts regularly reveal their contempt for our intelligence and we repay them by defeating their employers.

One would think that despite Romney’s half-hearted backtracking the next day on CNN, he’d be assigned to an inconsequential committee position. Instead,  he was inexplicably handed a plum slot on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.

If you think this is stupid, the opposition is even dumber.

Just One Minute Typepad’s Matt describes the first week:

Alexandria "I can't afford an apartment" Ocasio Cortez and her cast of clowns are going to be interesting to watch. The NY Post is already going after her and she is already threatening the Democratic Party's biggest donors with doubling their taxes.

Hank Johnson is still trying to find out if Guam has capsized while calling for impeachment and the nutter from Tennessee wants to eliminate the Electoral College while others are moving for impeachment. All. on. day. one.

The Circus is in town!

Ladies and gerbils, step this way to the Midway! A mere Semolian will gain you access to the Greatest Clown Show on Earth, formerly known as the U.S. House. See the Jabbering Jihadis! The Bearded Lady! The Speaker who talks in tongues! Watch as Members commit feats of strength and air their grievances! Watch as Alexandria Ocasio Cortex wrestles Nancy Pelosi on the House Floor!

Popcorn!! Peanuts!!! Get ya Red Hots!!

And folks, enjoy the show! 

Dumber still has been the Democrats’ ridiculous refusal to fund the $5 billion the President has asked to build the wall. Polls show overwhelming support for a hardened border and a halt to streams of illegals storming into the country from Mexico. Despite the best efforts of the media to show that it has created great hardships, the shutdown of about 25% of the federal government has not done so. The vast majority of the furloughed workers are Democratic voters. In effect, the Democrats handed them over to the president as hostages.

A look at Senator Schumer’s face in the public “negotiation” in the White House showed me that he realized the stunt was a loser. If I had any doubts, the picture of his face as he left the White House this past Friday confirmed it. He looked like a man being led to the gallows.

As James Freeman noted in the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web”, the Democrats are already backstroking 

Having already agreed to spend money on physical barriers to prevent illegal crossings of the U.S. southern border, Democrats are casting opposition to the particular architecture favored by President Donald Trump as a matter of conscience worth shutting down a portion of their beloved federal bureaucracy. This argument was already going to be difficult to sustain and Democrats have just made it even harder.

The problem lies in legislation passed on Thursday by the brand-new Democratic House. Reuters reports on the spending items approved after Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) reclaimed the Speaker’s gavel:

The two-part Democratic package includes a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security at current levels through Feb. 8, providing $1.3 billion for border fencing and $300 million for other border security items including technology and cameras.

The second part would fund the other federal agencies that are now unfunded including the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, Commerce and Justice, through Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year.

“We’re not doing a wall. It has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with a wall is an immorality between countries. It’s an old way of thinking. It isn’t cost effective,” Pelosi told reporters late on Thursday.

To recap, the position of the Pelosi House -- and also of many Senate Democrats -- is that fences between countries are sensible and worthy of 10-figure appropriations of taxpayer dollars but “walls” in the same locations and serving the same purpose are immoral. Anyone thinking such a distinction is ridiculous may be encouraged to know that Speaker Pelosi seems to think so, too. A serious person normally would not call a program morally unacceptable and then add that it’s not “cost effective.” Is the Speaker demanding more efficient immorality? 

The President has said he’ll keep the government shut down as long as it takes to build the wall, that the wall will be differently constructed in different places to suit the terrain and the Border Patrol’s recommendations. It may not have yet occurred to the Democrats, but the government cannot be reopened until they pass a spending bill that the Senate will vote for and the President will sign. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t do it otherwise. Basic civics.

But Nancy Pelosi seems to have missed that while flunking high school civics, because she claimed this week that the Constitution makes her the President’s equal. The consequences of failing to understand the basic federalist structure in which she heads only one-half of one of the three branches are more significant than just getting an “F” on the final exam.