If you play Donald Trump's game, you become his equal brat. You insulate him by giving him company in the sandbox.
When the game is childishness, the bigger and more experienced infant will usually win.
Those are hard lessons for Democrats and the media.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed proud of herself when she contrived an excuse of security concerns to disinvite Trump from giving the State of the Union speech to a primetime-televised joint session Jan. 29.
The security concerns weren't real. Paid or not, shutdown or no, the elite police forces of this nation could and would have secured the venue for the speech.
What Democratic partisans liked was that Pelosi was showing Trump that two could play his game.
But two shouldn't. The Trump game ought to be left to Trump's exclusive shame.
Trump's essence is pettiness, megalomania and bloviated absurdity. Those behaviors come as naturally to him as kowtowing to Vladimir Putin.
Pelosi's essence is counting votes and designing strategy as an adept partisan congressional leader. It's not public communication, in which she frequently falters. And it's certainly not the pig-sty frolicking in which the preposterous second-place and Russian-supported president delights.
All Pelosi accomplished was to extend a "tat" to invite his "tit."
She merged herself with him for the convenience of independent and swing voters and their derision--no longer of Trump's behavior alone, or mostly, but newly of their blended behavior, their playground back-and-forth.
The frolicker-in-chief waited until the last minute to poke back, canceling the speaker's military plane for a congressional trip to Belgium and Afghanistan. It was an exercise in smallness for which he brought rich experience.
But it was clever in that it called attention to Pelosi's planning an overseas trip at taxpayer expense while federal employees were working without pay during a shutdown on which she was not negotiating.
It would have been infinitely better for her to let his State of the Union speech proceed and to sit behind him during it as a child-indulgent adult, without affect, no matter how offensively or fictionally he spoke.
Then someone more telegenic and articulate than she and Chuck Schumer--a governor or mayor, maybe, or a person pulled off the street--could have offered the Democratic response.
America's problem is not that Trump won't be allowed to give a speech or that Pelosi won't be permitted to take a trip. America's problem is ... well, Trump and Pelosi--mainly Trump, but also her, coming up strong on the outside.
Trump actually took the lesser-low road Saturday by conceding mildly on immigration and offending his handler, Ann Coulter.
Democrats, who always can be counted on to err tactically, risk appearing overly smug in their polling advantage. The tide is turning. The issue is becoming which of the parties is more responsible at the moment for the failure to put people back to work and get everyone paid.
The impasse can only end when Pelosi counters Trump's gambit and negotiates toward a co-equal offending of the over-zealous bases.
This skirmish doesn't matter. Robert Mueller's report may matter. The election of 2020 really matters.
Meantime, a digital site called BuzzFeed reported a supposedly explosive scoop that Michael Cohen had told Mueller that Trump ordered him to lie to Congress about the timing of Trump's effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
The real newspapers--The New York Times and The Washington Post--couldn't confirm it, which screamed doubt and restraint.
But MSNBC and CNN reportedly breathlessly all day that this revelation--if true--represented a new level of impeachment-worthiness, as if all the incessant "breaking news" that had come before was marginally worthy, something less than what had been represented.
Democrats were traipsing to these cable networks to say this orgy of wishful journalism, which is no journalism at all, might not have been verified but that it was certainly starting to look a lot like impeachment in snowy D.C.
All too predictably, Mueller's office found it necessary to take the extraordinary step of putting out a statement relating that the BuzzFeed report of the information it supposedly had received about Cohen's testimony was inaccurate.
Trump leapt to celebrate the credibility of the special counsel he had previously and consistently called corrupt. That's the kind of glaring contradiction that would seem intolerable only in someone who didn't engage in unreconciled self-serving blather with every syllable.
Trump had won another one by the only means available to him--breathtaking misplay on the other side.
You best combat raging Trumpism by being better than raging Trumpism.
How such a subterranean bar can loom so insurmountably high for Democrats and some in the media has become one of the great tragedies of our time.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/22/2019