Democrats are wondering whether and how fiercely to oppose Donald Trump’ nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Some say he is too far to the right; others say it is revenge time for Republican blockage of Merritt Garland who was nominated by Obama but never given even a hearing before the Republican controlled Senate. As Rachel Maddow pointed out, approval of Supreme Court nominees has become particularly contentious since Gore v. Bush, but it goes back to the denial of a seat to Robert Bork, who was extremely well qualified, a quality which Trump pointed out about his own nominee last night. So the debate is about Senate politics. Should the Democrats oppose the nomination and possibly get the Republicans to change the rules, which is the so called “Nuclear Option” because it would mean that so many of the customs by which the Senate operates would no longer be respected by one side or another and the Senate might well as a consequence grind to a halt.

The things the President has done during the first week of his Administration are mainstream Conservative or largely symbolic and so do not yet set forth changes of policy that are as radical as the Trump posturing would have the citizenry believe, though it is also the case that really bad things may well arrive in our future, and so justify Liberal forebodings. Trump is, for the moment, instituting the policies he campaigned on, which is something for which new incumbents of the Presidency usually receive compliments because they have remained true to their promises, but Trump’s campaign issues were largely jokes, not of serious moment, and so it is largely of no consequence that he is carrying them out.

No one knows what Donald Trump will do when he assumes office this Friday, which for me and the people I know seems like the first day of the Apocalypse, the sun darkening at high noon and the ghosts of FDR’s euphonious arch-villains, “Martin, Barton, and Fish”, arising from crypts beneath the Capitol Visitors Bureau to carry out their job of stripping America not only of Obamacare and what is left of the Great Society but also of the legislation that goes back to the New Deal and to the Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt. The Cabinet appointees said about as much in their confirmation hearings. The nominee for Interior Secretary talked about how much he admired Theodore Roosevelt but also said we have to rethink the use of national lands so as to allow for more drilling. Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services made clear that he wants to gut Medicare. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education wants to reverse the seventy year old Supreme Court decision that government cannot support parochial education for children. So what his ultra-right Cabinet wants to do is clear, but what Trump wants to do is not.

The whole notion of discussing an issue is an idea that eludes Donald Trump, and that served him very well during the campaign, where he reduced his opponents to discrediting adjectives, and pronounced policies that were more sentiments than plans to be carried out. Yes, he would build a wall and the Mexicans would pay for it, but that was just a way to express his disdain for illegal immigrants rather than the glimmerings of an actionable plan. Hillary couldn’t get him to engage on issues because those are objective matters about which you might draw up better or worse plans, and so she instead, perhaps on the basis of her focus groups, decided to point out the flaws in his character, but those arguments did not have much impact on the voters she needed however convincing they were to the voters in the coastal states that she easily won.

Two metaphors for politics are that politics is like a sports competition and that politics is like war. Neither of these metaphors get to the core of things. Yes, politics is like a game in that there are winners and losers and that skill is combined with team cooperation and luck in some uncertain proportion so as to make for a win, but the reward for athletic achievement, aside from the hugh salaries for those who are the very best, is the medal or the certificate, a bit of prestige that lasts a lifetime, while there are more significant impacts for politics, which can lead to programs where people starve or are made well or wars that lead to cataclysmic disaster. Nor is politics like a war. The means to the end in politics are more restrained than they are in warfare and in politics it is not always clear who won and who lost in that people can reinterpret their programs to be, when legislated, what they wanted (or didn’t want) in the first place. Romneycare became Obamacare and that was reason enough for Romney to denounce it. That is what happens in politics. But these two metaphors are the best we can do and so let us consider what we might call the first skirmish of the Trump Administration as being over Russian hacking, understanding a skirmish as a miniature battle used to probe the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy while one moves one’s own forces into a more advantageous position for a major encounter of forces.

It is easy enough to find fault for Hillary losing the election. Her staff did not spend enough resources on Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, and so Trump took the election because of narrow margins of victory in those three states. The media did not do their job in that they first treated Trump as a clown and so gave him too much air time and never properly vetted him. And, of course, Hillary failed to provide either a galvanizing positive message or personality. Couldn’t the campaign have turned the corner by turning out some twenty thousand more women taken with the idea of the first woman President?  The campaign was not able to make them care. But the real culprits, which is always the case in a democracy, is the voting public, which did not turn out because of insufficient enthusiasm for Hillary as a candidate or else decided to vote for someone who is a bigot and an ignoramus. Mind you, that does not make the voters bigoted or ignorant. It just means that is who they voted for and that is condemnation enough.

Given the way he came to the Presidency, as an insurgent candidate with, at best, the tolerance of the Republican Party and its Congressional majorities, rather than with their blessings, Trump could have gone either way in choosing his Cabinet. He could have picked people just as much on the fringes of the party as he is, filled with the wacky ideas that inspired his supporters, even if those ideas hardly constituted an ideology in the sense of a coherent set of ideas that Trump felt obliged to carry out as best he could when he won the unlikely victory and became President. Or else he could choose a cabinet drawn from the permanent Establishment so as to carry out a traditional Republican, which means Conservative, political program, which is what Eisenhower did and what Reagan did, Reagan able after picking his Cabinet to sit back or clear brush at his ranch. If Trump had decided mostly on the latter course, that would be much to the relief of onlookers like myself who prefer competence above everything else and think that the Republic is therefore likely to muddle through, especially because the Conservative economic program, I believe, is so mistaken that it might drive us into a recession but likely not worse, and that the foreign policy program would probably not be much more belligerent than what it would have been with Hillary, although one can never count on foreign policy principles not going off the deep end, which is what happened when the George W. Bush people, who had seemed quintessentially Establishment, took power and get us entangled in a way it would take eight years of a successor to Bush to get us out from under.