President Trump has officially broken these people.
They now find themselves in the final, acute stages of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has turned on her handmaids in the press and is attacking them for quoting fellow Democrats who say she should be negotiating with Mr. Trump on a coronavirus aid package.
“I don’t speak to the president,” Mrs. Pelosi snarled at Wolf Blitzer on CNN after he quoted Democrats critical of her leadership in this pandemic.
Then she re-contorted her face to pretend sunniness.
“What makes me amused, if it weren’t so sad, is how you all think that you know more about the suffering of the American people than those of us who are elected by them to represent them at the table,” she spat through her plastic smile.
Over on “social media,” the master titans of Twitter and Facebook are desperately scrambling to censor very real and serious accusations that during 47 years in Washington, longtime senator and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden has enriched himself so extravagantly that he belongs among the pantheon of Wealthy Oligarchs of Russia and Ukraine.
Mr. Biden lives like royalty on a public salary. And the largest media companies in America are doing all they can to black out any mention of it.
At the very center of this maelstrom sits Amy Coney Barrett, wearing dresses before the Senate Judiciary Committee that are precisely the same color as the cloaks dutifully worn by women in the dystopian television show “The Handmaid’s Tale.” (Oh, glory be! Humor still lives!)
Judge Barrett is nominated to replace the late liberal icon, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is President Trump’s third and most consequential nominee to the high court.
First they attacked her religion. Then they attacked her family, including her family’s decision to adopt two children of color from a third-world country.
One Democrat on the committee embarrassed herself by questioning whether Judge Barrett was some kind of sexual predator. (Humor is not dead. But neither is perverted insanity.)
Among the other Democrats who embarrassed themselves was Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who is often presented as one of his party’s few reasonable and house-broken members. Sadly, even the best house-broken dogs still sometimes have accidents indoors.
Mr. Coons repeatedly demanded to know whether Judge Barrett would be capable of ruling on the court without her judicial mentor — the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — to mansplain cases and opinions for her.
Heaping undeserved respect on Mr. Coons, Judge Barrett finally responded: “I hope you aren’t suggesting that I don’t have my own mind. Or that I couldn’t think independently.”
Mr. Coons silently fidgeted papers and twiddled his pencil around his bald dome as Judge Barrett stripped the bark off him.
“I assure you I have my own mind,” she explained as if rubbing his nose in the carpet he had just soiled.
To his credit, Mr. Coons looked fairly ashamed — a remarkable feat for any Democrat on that committee.
But this is where Mr. Trump has broken these people. For 50 years, the highest pitched political battles in Washington have played out on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Good people have been destroyed in this committee.
One of the most impressive jurists ever nominated to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Miguel Estrada, was openly denied a job by Democrats because he was a “Latino,” according to staffers for Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat. That made Mr. Estrada “dangerous,” wrote Durbin staffers.
The judicial wars only got hotter and nastier and more unhinged until Mr. Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In fits of fantasy and rage against Mr. Trump, Democrats invented hysterical and utterly unfounded stories about the nominee.
Mr. Trump never budged. Never buckled. He fought fire with fire.
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh now serves a lifetime tenure on the highest court in the land.
Now comes Judge Barrett to replace the greatest liberal icon of a generation. Despite threadbare attempts to smear her, Democrats are out of ammo. Their guns are melted.
They are defeated.
And, now, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee lie down like little shorn lambs, bleating and begging for mercy. But not fighting.
Mr. Trump has finally broken them.
• Charles Hurt is opinion editor of The Washington Times. He can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com or @charleshurt on Twitter.
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