President Donald Trump is often perceived as an ideological paradox — at once populist and plutocratic, pro-working-class and anti-labor, pro-growth and anti-trade, maverick conservative and old-guard Republican. But for all of what looks like impulsive zigzagging, there is a consistent through line: He’s always focused on finding, spotlighting, and exacerbating the country’s most divisive cultural flash points.

So far, the strategy is working. Polls show Trump is historically unpopular, but still more popular than his Democratic opponents. Democrats have spent Trump’s first one hundred days following the advice of the Clinton clan’s political strategist James Carville, who instructed them to “embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead.”

When Democrats have woken up, they’ve toggled between berating their enraged rank-and-file voters, purging critics from their party, eschewing blame for the 2024 campaign — and now invoking TED Talk buzzwords like “abundance” to repackage their tepid agenda that keeps losing elections.