Not really, not from where I sit, and that reflects the sad and alarming fact that they still can’t quite wrap their minds around the impudence of Trump and his enablers, they’re still putting too much faith in an old-fashioned rule book and they’re still not looking around corners as well as they should be.

[Get a more personal take on politics, newsmakers and more with Frank Bruni’s exclusive commentary every week. Sign up for his newsletter.]

Alas, the route to the far side of Trump probably doesn’t run through committee hearings like the one that Lewandowski predictably turned into a farce. It runs through the ballot box. Nancy Pelosi gets this, and it’s possible that some of the House Democrats who keep muttering about impeachment get it, too — and are either fulfilling what they see as their constitutional obligation or trying to mollify a restive Democratic base. But I do worry that they’re blundering, and I hope against hope that after Democratic voters pick their presidential nominee, Democratic lawmakers will concentrate their energies on getting that person elected.

How, for instance, did Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and his colleagues on that panel not realize that Lewandowski’s appearance would play out precisely as it did? Any diligent student of Trump and his loyalists could and should have expected his stonewalling, deflection and outright mockery, and if Democrats didn’t possess whatever requisite combination of legal authority and political will to hold him in contempt right then and there, they shouldn’t have given him the stage. Because to let him behave that way — he even sent out a fund-raising solicitation during a pause in the hearing — and then go merrily on his way is to look pathetically weak.

Yes, they got him to verify, on national television, that Trump had tried to enlist him in what amounts to obstruction of justice. But that was already in Robert Mueller’s report, and it got lost somewhat in the reciprocal grandstanding and ambient vitriol. The Americans who tuned in — a small minority — had already made up their minds about Trump’s culpability and how much to care about it, or they saw, more than anything else, a boatload of blowhards making a lot of nasty Washington noise. When everybody’s seething and sniping, the effect is equalizing and indiscriminate. Nobody looks good.