This column is about the current dreadful state of the Democratic Party. But begin with this extraordinary fact: At this time eight years ago, in the first year of Donald Trump’s first term as president, the Russia special counsel, Robert Mueller, had already been appointed and had been investigating Trump for a month. What Trump calls the Russia hoax dominated media coverage. Commentators slandered Trump on a daily basis. Trump’s job approval rating fell into the high 30s in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. In the White House, the new president was distracted and on the defensive, knocked back on his feet from his first moments in office.

On the other side, the Democratic strategy was attack, attack, attack. They had a lot of help; major news organizations and a host of cable news producers gave them an opportunity to speculate about Trump-Russia every hour of every day. RussiaRussiaRussia dominated politics in 2017, 2018 and much of 2019. Trump lost a lot of what could have been his most productive time as president.

The point of bringing this up is to contrast the situation then with the situation today. Now it is the Democrats who are distracted and back on their feet, with the party engaged in bitter infighting and struggling to come up with a unified strategy to oppose Trump. Meanwhile, Trump is pushing forward on all fronts, setting the agenda and putting together one of the most consequential presidencies in years.

Part of the problem is that Democrats are still in a state of shock. Go back to last summer, when an internal coup resulted in President Joe Biden’s departure from the reelection race. Then go to November, when the party was stunned to lose to Trump. Then go to January-February-March of this year when they were overwhelmed by Trump’s audacious use of executive authority in his first months in office. Democrats are still playing catch-up.

Perhaps their biggest problem is that they don’t have a big, unifying cause, like the Russia narrative, to use as a cudgel against the Trump administration. It is hard to overstate the daily damage the Russia affair did to Trump in 2017, and its absence today has left Democrats in a far weaker position than they were back then.

Of course Democrats are trying. Some have adapted the lawfare they perfected during Trump’s time out of office; just this year, Democratic proxies have sued Trump or his administration around 300 times. The idea is to find a friendly judge — not too hard to do — to issue a nationwide injunction to stop Trump from doing whatever it is that Democrats oppose. The party has had a good deal of success so far, but it’s a short-term strategy, especially when they file preposterous cases that will lose in the courts of appeal.

Recently, we’ve seen a number of Democrats pursue a new effort to use 1960s-style civil disobedience to get themselves detained, arrested, handcuffed or otherwise in trouble while bringing attention to what they say are the administration’s lawless ways. LaMonica McIver, Ras Baraka, Brad Lander, Alex Padilla and others have tried it — so many that the Washington Post recently published a story headlined, “For Democrats, handcuffs are the latest symbol of resistance to Trump.”

It’s kind of funny, but not really — it’s more an indicator of the Democratic Party’s impotence in the face of the Trump presidency. And behind the embarrassing stories, Democrats have substantial problems that could render the party ineffective for quite a while.

First, it has fallen behind in the money race — according to recent reports, the Democratic National Committee has $18 million in cash-on-hand compared to $67.4 million for the Republican National Committee.

Many of the problems concern the leadership of new DNC chairman Ken Martin. A longtime head of the party in Minnesota, Martin seemed qualified enough, but his early months have been marked, according to critics, by too much squabbling and putting money in the wrong places.

Martin got into a fight with David Hogg, the young progressive firebrand, and ended up complaining bitterly about Hogg’s treatment of him. “You essentially destroyed any chance I have to show the leadership that I need to,” Martin, his voice choking up, told Hogg on a party Zoom call in May. “The other night I said to myself for the first time, I don’t know if I want to do this any more.”

Once that became public, many Democrats must have wondered about Martin: This is the guy we chose to lead us in the incredibly tough battle against Donald Trump, and he’s getting weepy because David Hogg said mean things about him? No wonder one DNC told Politico that Martin seemed “weak and whiny.” To make things worse, two big-money union heavyweights, Randi Weingarten of the teachers union and Lee Saunders of the public employees union, have both left their positions in the party.

Finally, Democrats are still on the wrong side of a number of issues, like immigration, wokeism and national security. At any moment, they seem in danger of taking another turn in the wrong direction — another criminal to embrace, another toxic cause that could, in the words of Politico, “further set back the party’s already beleaguered national brand.”

Back in 2017, in Trump’s first months in office, Democrats, even though they had just suffered a devastating defeat in the 2016 presidential election, didn’t spend as much time worrying about their brand. They had RussiaRussiaRussia to use against the new president, and a willing press to megaphone every wild accusation they could find. Of course, in the most fundamental sense, the Mueller investigation went nowhere when the special counsel could not establish that collusion ever occurred, much less that it involved any top Trump campaign officials. But that didn’t happen until 2019, giving Democrats and their media allies ample time to cripple Trump’s new presidency. Now, Democrats have lost again to Trump, but this time, they are still searching for the magic issue to use against him.

This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/3450484/mired-in-infighting-democrats-cant-find-their-way/.