Even at this late date, with just nine months before the next presidential election, the Democrats, who apart from Jimmy Carter, have not lost the reelection of one of their incumbent presidents since Grover Cleveland in 1888 (who went on to get reelected in 1892), are not doing anything right to win reelection for President Biden.

The economy does appear to be improving but not sufficiently quickly for the administration to be able to pose on election day the question of whether Americans are in a better financial condition than they were four years before, and get a positive answer.

What history will surely regard as the last stand of the bipartisanship of the McConnell-Schumer Senate is this insane effort to link approval of badly needed assistance to Israel and Ukraine as they are at war defending themselves from mortal aggression, to a southern border reform measure that claims, with fragile credibility, to limit Illegal immigration at 1.825 million a year. This is a threshold that is five times the level of illegal immigration that President Obama’s homeland security secretary regarded as a crisis.

Since the administration has no way of calculating with any precision how many people are entering illegally and nothing in its record implies that anything it says on the subject can be relied upon, the Democrats are trying to placate the national concern over this invasion of nameless foreigners with a worthless scheme that will not significantly reduce the problem, in exchange for assistance to the gallant Ukrainians and Israelis, of which they are more strenuous advocates than the Republicans.

Ransacking my reasonably extensive acquaintance with American history, it has been impossible for me to produce a more conspicuously absurd and profoundly cynical legislative proposal than this one. Whatever happens in November, Senator McConnell must have written his adieu as Republican Senate leader by collaborating in this appalling measure.

Mr. McConnell and the Democrats apparently believed they could effectively blame President Trump for the failure of this splendid compromise to pass, when it will be spontaneously derailed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and will be so widely seen for the fraud that it is, it will backfire like all the other dirty tricks that the Democrats have thrown at Trump except for the avalanche of harvested ballots in 2020.

Collusion with Russia, improper inquiries about the Bidens’ conduct in Ukraine, the rubbish about fomenting an insurrection on January 6, 2021, violations of the Espionage Act, illegal campaign contributions, and the supreme insolence of the claim that it was Mr. Trump who tried to tamper with the 2020 presidential election: all of these have failed, as they deserved to fail.         

Israel and Ukraine, of course, must be assisted, and it is a disgrace for the administration to try to tie that assistance to the most pallid possible moderation of the catastrophic open-door policy permitting the invasion of the country by unidentified masses of foreigners, in collusion with the slave and fentanyl-trafficking gangs of Mexico. Most of the new-comers evince little interest in becoming conscientious and law-abiding Americans.

Despite the Democratic Party’s endless chicanery, it is slowly sinking because the administration is incompetent and shows no persuasive leadership, and the tactics that it employs to fend off its principal adversary are increasingly repugnant and alarming to sensible voters.

The president waffled at the start of the Ukraine war, then made a lot of flippant remarks about the impending defeat of the Russians and the need for regime change in the Kremlin, and instead of giving the Ukrainians promptly what they needed to end the war satisfactorily and quickly, has fed it in gradually, prolonging the bloodshed and attaching exaggerated credence to Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s nonsensical saber-rattling about nuclear weapons. 

What has been needed since before the war began was a clear definition of our objectives, which were to preserve and assure the independence of Ukraine without driving Russia permanently into the hands of Communist China, and a strategy to produce that result. Instead, we have had sanguinary gradualism and no visible will to produce the necessary result: a secure Ukraine without a dangerously humiliated Russia.

It is the Republicans who are waffling over Ukraine because President Biden is giving the nation and the Western Alliance no guidance on an exit plan or strategy. On Israel, as with many domestic policy areas, Mr. Biden and his entourage are paying a heavy price for mortgaging a great and historic political party to the self-destructive forces of racist and authoritarian wokeism.

At the same time that the Democrats are splitting profoundly between their traditional responsible liberals and the destructive radical passengers of the last five years. They are playing a dangerous game with their unprecedented politicization of large sections of the Justice Department, their conversion of the impeachment process into a routine no-confidence vote as in a parliamentary system, and the frivolous and vexatious indictment of the leader of the opposition.

This is forcing ever larger numbers of responsible voters into support of President Trump, a candidate many of them would otherwise find distasteful. The lesson of this sequence of spurious indictments of the former president is that by an increasing margin Americans disapprove the partisan corruption of the justice system as was effected by the Clinton campaign; the FBI director, James Comey; and intelligence directors John Brennan and James Clapper in 2016; and again by the whitewash of the Bidens and rigging of the vote counting system in the name of assisting voter turnout during the Covid pandemic in 2020, than disapprove of Trump himself.

The Democratic Party is committing temporary suicide by continuing to court the votes of the extreme left who are despised by at least two-thirds of Americans, while trying to deny office to an opponent by methods considerably more obnoxious and unacceptable to most Americans than the candidate they are trying to defeat, Mr.Trump.  

Almost anything can happen in nine months, but as of now this administration and the Democrats generally appear to be accelerating towards the political graveyard. Although they have left it awfully late and are relying on their ability once again to produce enough ballots to win, it still seems possible that they will shuffle out Mr. Biden and Vice President Harris and bring in some tandem linking Gavin Newsome and Michelle Obama.

That would be messy and it probably wouldn’t work but at least it would give this terribly inadequate regime a brief Indian summer of marginally more presentable candidates and slightly better policy choices. As of now, they are headed for the last round-up.