The Democrats thought they were playing an unbeatable hand by going all in on the Russia narrative. They took a look at the cards they were dealt and decided to bet all their chips on the prospect of nailing Trump to the cross once Mueller concluded his investigation. They didn’t even see it as a gamble because they were so, so sure that at least something was “there” from which Trump would be unable to escape. The problem is the Democrats were dealt a hand of cards pulled from a Go Fish deck while Trump and the Republicans, in charge of the table and running the game, were playing poker with an official deck borrowed from one of Sheldon Adelson’s casinos.

The strategy of the Democrats was a veritable clinic on monumental political cluelessness. Rather than digging in on matters of pure policy and fomenting the desire of the electorate to focus on the material concerns of the working class and the poor such as healthcare, income inequality, criminal justice, and the environment, the Democrats chose to put all of those issues on the back burner in favor of a relentlessly myopic focus on the idea that Robert Mueller would find something, anything, that would be so damning to Trump that all that inconvenient policy stuff wouldn’t matter. The exorbitant folly of this calculation doesn’t end with the fact that at the beginning of Mueller’s investigation the Republicans, predictably loyal to their President, controlled the House and Senate, making impeachment extremely unlikely, but it does give us a taste of the abject political feebleness of the Democratic Party.

Trump has the greatest weapon he’s ever had going into the 2020 election. He’s facing a Democratic party in the throes of an identity crisis that put all its eggs in a basket of deplorably stupid political gamesmanship it never had an identifiable chance to win. Had the Democrats calculated differently and focused most of their attention on real issues, keeping the Russia stuff as a wild card in case it turned into something more than a glimmer of hope, perhaps they’d be in better shape.

The 2020 election is not a done deal, but it’s not looking good for the Democrats right now. What they need to do is focus sharply on matters of policy, and principally policy that directly improves the material conditions in this country for the poor and working class, reverses our disastrous and immoral foreign policy, addresses the environmental crisis, and remedies the gross lack of racial and economic justice inherent in our country’s criminal justice system (cash bail, the drug war, private prisons, and so on), for starters.

Knowing that the election is just around the corner, Trump is about to go on full offensive mode. Can the Democrats handle this? Do they have any kind of strategy that will work? I don’t know. A cursory historical analysis of that party’s ineptitude says they do not and we’ll be looking at another four years of Trump after 2020.