A lot of unusual and disturbing things have happened in Washington this year. Yet for sheer bizarreness, it’s hard to think of anything that matched the scene on Wednesday afternoon on the South Lawn of the White House, where Republican leaders, celebrating the passage of their terrible tax bill, lavished praise on Donald Trump in the manner of Communist functionaries addressing Mao or Stalin.

“This has been a year of extraordinary accomplishment for the Trump Administration,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said. “Thank you, Mr. President, for all you are doing.” Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, added that passing the tax bill “could not have been done without exquisite Presidential leadership.” Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, spoke directly to Trump, saying, “You are one heckuva leader, and we’re all benefitting from it.” And Congresswoman Diane Black, of Tennessee, put it even more bluntly. “Thank you, President Trump, for allowing us to have you as our President,” she said.

It is well known that Trump, his ego as fragile as an eggshell, demands constant flattery. But this was cravenness of a level rare even for Washington. Perhaps the Republican senators and representatives were taking their cue from Mike Pence. At an end-of-year Cabinet meeting that was held shortly before the celebration on the South Lawn, the Vice-President praised his boss fourteen times in three minutes—once every 12.5 seconds, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake pointed out—and after Pence had finished his obsequious speech, other Cabinet members chimed in with their own gushing tributes.

I’d wager that many Democrats, independents, and Never Trump Republicans felt queasy after watching, or reading about, these events. I hope, though, that the sight of the G.O.P. celebrating its first big legislative success of the Trump era in such a degrading fashion will also remind everybody who opposes Trump and the Republicans about what’s at stake going into the critical election year of 2018. It’s the same thing that’s been at stake since November 6, 2016: the future of democracy in this country.

Not only do we have a chronically insecure President with Napoleonic pretensions. We also have Republican leadership that is happy to feed those pretensions in order to get its way. For much of 2017, many Trump antagonists, myself included, have taken consolation from the belief that he wasn’t achieving much. His approval rating has plumbed record lows; the first two versions of his travel ban were blocked by the courts; his White House is in the sights of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election; he failed to fulfill his campaign pledge to repeal Obamacare; and in the Alabama special Senate election, he somehow managed to endorse two losing candidates. To be sure, Trump has been a nightmarish President. But he has also been a failing one—at least, that’s what we told ourselves.

On one level, there was much truth to this narrative. Trump hasn’t been ranting and raving on Twitter all year because things have been going well for him. But in focussing on the President’s personal travails, there is a danger of missing, or misunderstanding, some things that the White House and its Republican allies have accomplished. The appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court received a lot of attention, of course. At least equally important, though, was the appointment of more than seventy conservative judges to lower courts. And right-wing zealots have also been parachuted into the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and other regulatory agencies, where they are busy stripping away many of the protections that previous Administrations put in place, such as clean-air regulations, workplace rules, and guarantees of net neutrality.

By pulling out of the Paris climate accords and approving the Keystone XL pipeline, the Trump Administration achieved two more of the conservative movement’s longtime goals. Corporate-friendly tax reform was another G.O.P. objective. And the tax bill also fulfilled three Republican objectives that weren’t tax-related: the abolition of the individual mandate to purchase health insurance; the opening up of part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in Alaska, to oil and gas drilling; and the introduction of tax breaks for private-school tuition fees. Ted Cruz wasn’t exaggerating when he described the latter provision, which he proposed, as potentially the biggest piece of federal school-choice legislation in history.

Looking at this record, it’s not surprising that so many Republicans were willing to abase themselves before Trump. For all the chaos and controversy that surrounds him, his presence in the Oval Office has enabled the G.O.P. to push through some of the reactionary agenda it has spent many years developing. And now that they experienced one legislative victory, congressional Republicans will turn to their other goals. Paul Ryan has already signalled what that means: a renewed assault on Medicare and Medicaid.

Despite being the minority party, the Democrats haven’t been powerless—beating back the effort to repeal Obamacare was a major accomplishment. To prevail in the over-all struggle, however, Democrats desperately need to regain control of at least one legislative chamber next November. And after Congress returns from the Christmas recess, midterm politics will quickly overshadow everything except the Mueller inquiry. (That’s assuming Trump doesn’t upend the investigation by firing the special counsel.)

The electoral map won’t be working in the Democrats’ favor next year: in the Senate, they will be defending ten seats in states that Trump won. But in midterm elections, the party with the most fired-up supporters usually wins, and the recent elections in Alabama and Virginia showed that Democrats are raring to go. On the G.O.P. side, Trump’s antics have put off some potential voters. Surveying the Republicans’ prospects for the midterms last week, Charles Cook, of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, wrote, “The odds of them losing the House are now at least 50-50 and the Senate is in real doubt.”

That’s encouraging for Democrats and others who want to see change, but a lot can happen in the next ten and a half months. The passage of the tax bill and the celebrations at the White House reminded everybody that Trump and the Republicans still control the primary levers of power. They won’t give them up unless they are forced to—by democratic means.