Donald Trump has been cycling through a few different messages in recent days as public support for impeachment proceedings has risen. One is insisting that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff should be arrested for treason because he paraphrased Trump’s July conversation with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky at a congressional hearing instead of quoting the White House’s non-verbatim account of the call verbatim. This borderline insane talking point has not caught on even with other MAGA Republicans.

Another, which has been echoed on Fox News and by members of his administration, is that impeachment would constitute a “coup” against not only Trump but against the Real Heartland Americans (i.e., rural white people) who voted him into office. This one at least makes some internal sense, but it won’t have much power if polls end up finding majority support for removal. (Also, Trump would be replaced in office by Mike Pence, who is closer to actually being a rural white person.)

Wednesday, the president tried out a third line of attack:

The Do Nothing Democrats should be focused on building up our Country, not wasting everyone’s time and energy on BULLSHIT, which is what they have been doing ever since I got overwhelmingly elected in 2016, 223-306. Get a better candidate this time, you’ll need it! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2019

First of all, that is not what the Electoral College totals were in 2016, which is funny. Second of all, hmm. The White House, not Congress, is the reason that negotiations on gun safety and infrastructure spending, two areas in which some Democrats would be willing to work with him, have stalled. Per recent reporting, the attention of this presidency has been occupied instead by two other concerns:

• The number of undocumented individuals crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, which, according to a Tuesday report in the New York Times, Trump has suggested reducing by filling a border moat with alligators and snakes or by shooting migrants in the legs.

• Attorney General William Barr’s inquiry into the “origins” of the Mueller-Russia investigation, one that appears to be heavy on conspiracy theories sourced from right-wing websites—like that Ukraine for some reason has one of the servers involved in the 2016 DNC hack—and currently involves a trip to Italy, during which he’s been apparently pursuing the theory that someone who told a Trump adviser that Russia had hacked Democratic emails was actually a CIA plant.

Why won’t the Democrats spend their time and energy working with Trump on these important projects?