I have spent the past three years slogging under the assumption that the entire Trump storyline would culminate in some kind of massive, public cataclysm: nukes going off, assassinations, World War III getting under way, etc. Such potential calamities still loom perilously on the horizon. But in the meantime, the horrors of what is being conducted here in America have come in steady waves: Puerto Rico being left for dead, state-sanctioned human-rights abuses at the border, law enforcement officials joining online hate groups, tanks on the National Mall, more mass shootings, the president being openly racist and staging hate rallies, and on and on it goes. I would tell you Trump is gonna get someone killed, but he has already fulfilled that prophecy. The catastrophe is already here, and it is growing.

And yet there is no urgency. All I got is a formal condemnation of a few tweets, and the House couldn't even pull that off without making an embarrassing spectacle of it. A cursory impeachment proposal from Congressman Al Green was easily voted down by a majority of Democrats. And there's obvious symbolism to be found in Trump's getting more hateful and frenzied the night an effort to oust him was tabled indefinitely. I am like millions of other suckers who put all their eggs into Robert Mueller’s basket and hoped his work would initiate President Trump’s downfall (Mueller, ever the polite fellow, seemed to encourage this initiation but erred for subtlety when blunt force was so, so necessary), but that never happened. The men beholden to Trump made certain of it, and complacent leadership from Democrats has only served to further enable the opposition.

Two weeks ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did her now infamous sit-down with perennial vicious-circle wannabe Maureen Dowd, during which Dowd called impeachment a “primal pleasure” and Pelosi explained that Trump “practically self-impeaches” in his daily transgressions, but that actually impeaching him (or at least trying to) would play right into his hands. She also told The Washington Post that trying to remove Trump from office is “just not worth it.” Hence, no serious impeachment proposal is in the offing.

Pelosi is hardly alone among Democrats in avoiding this battle, because so many of them judge impeachment to be a losing one, one that might come back to bite them in the ass in 2020. Every time a Democrat does something halfway wise, smarmy news analysts are like, "Oooh, the GOP'll use that against them for sure!" And so Democrats are skittish about even attempting such partial measures. When they do get around to executing them, they do so as tepidly as possible.

Former Congressional stalwart Barney Frank just gave an impassioned defense of Pelosi to Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, and it was a cogent defense but was enervating in the ways Frank sides with Pelosi in believing Democrats should only take what the defense gives them. This is a constant long game Democrats play, where they assume that sitting tight and giving Republicans enough rope to hang themselves will result in triumph at the ballot box somewhere down the road. That’s victory enough for them, apparently. Pelosi was somewhat validated when this strategy paid dividends this past November and Democrats reclaimed the House. But rather than take that restored power and act as a forceful check on the president, party leaders have elected to again hold back, offer the occasional tut-tut, and place their bets on future elections that could already be prematurely compromised by gerrymandering that has cut off crowded blue areas of the electoral map from the corridors of power, by foreign interference, by the spread of mass disinformation, and by a judiciary now predisposed to strike down any election result it doesn’t care for, or any law that has even a whiff of compassion to it.