YOU KNOW, I’VE HEARD STUFF LIKE THIS A LOT LATELY:

I think a lot of this is because of the character of Trump’s opposition. Outside the beltway, it’s pussyhats and Black Bloc fascists. Inside the beltway, it’s as Matthew Continetti describes it:

So unlikely did the election of Donald Trump seem to Washington and its denizens that the reality of it still has not sunk in. All of the city’s worst traits—the self-regard, the group think, the obsessions with trivia, the worship of credentials, the virtue signaling, the imperiousness, the ignorance of perspectives and people from outside major metropolitan centers and college towns—not only persist. They have been magnified with Trump’s arrival. There is so much negative energy coursing through the city that circuits are overloaded. That the president still draws support from the coalition that brought him to office, that a fair number of people see his policies as commonsensical, seems not to affect any of Trump’s critics in the least. They will press on until Trump behaves like they want him to behave.

Well, perhaps this will get us civil service reform, and other changes to gut the power of the allegedly-permanent government. Meanwhile, there are so many choices.