At the close of the SOTU address, Speaker Nancy Pelosi ostentatiously stood and tore up her copy of the speech.  With all cameras on President Trump and her immediately behind him, the whole country could see her doing it.  Thus did Pelosi demonstrate her loathing for the president.

Better metaphors could hardly be found for Washington these days.  The speech represented Trump’s spectacularly successful administration to date.  Its shredding represented Dem petulance and refusal to countenance anything associated with Trump, even wild success.

Rather than divorce themselves from all this success, Democrats should be trying to take credit for it.  They’d be lying, but that wouldn’t be anything new; even little kids know that America’s Democrats are more interested in sliming Donald Trump than in making America great.

That’s why impeachment, and Russia Russia Russia, and Blasey Ford, and Stephanie Clifford, etc., etc.  Democrats have done their best to make America ungovernable, as they swore to do at the outset of this administration.  Unfortunately for them, they were taking on much more than just Trump— they were taking on America itself without even suspecting that that’s what they were doing.

The American public is sometimes slow to catch on to what’s transpiring in Washington, but people may finally have caught on to Democrat efforts to buy them off.  It started with LBJ and his War on Poverty, which turned out to be a War on America.  It led to the Entitlement State, costing so much that budgets haven’t been balanced in decades.  Alinsky himself couldn’t have scripted it better.

It all comes down to misreading America.  Everything Dems did was based on the allure of the famous “free stuff,” which would have kept people in a state of adolescent dependence on government.  That works for a while, until the stuff stops or something better comes along.  What’s better is a functional economy, which makes people independent and proud of it.  They don’t want to owe anybody for anything, which is an adult way of looking at the world.

That’s what Trump has delivered: adulthood for people long trapped in adolescence, often against their will, almost certainly without their knowledge, and for sure without their consent.  Adolescents are famously resentful, and we have watched that same attitude engulf the Left since the sixties.

To sum up: Democrats thought they were loved; they weren’t.  They were being used by the public even as they thought they were using the public.  They thought they had America tied up with a bow; they didn’t.  Free stuff is usually worth what it costs, and Americans have relearned that old truism.

Lastly, they thought they were going to rule from Obama to eternity.  To quote Biff Tannen, they thought wrong.  Dude.