In the 2004 comedy “Team America: World Police” a squad of terror-fighting marionettes lands in Paris to subdue a small group of terrorist infiltrators. To head off the presumed coming carnage, the Americans unleash an array of destructive weaponry without any regard for the civilian life or the city itself, destroying the Eiffel Tower and leaving central Paris a smoldering, hollowed-out war zone. “Bonjour, everyone!” one of the puppet warriors tells the surviving denizens, “Don’t worry, everything is bon. We stopped the terrorists!”

This scene, from this delightfully absurd movie, is the most fitting analogy I can think of to describe the Democrats’ efforts to save democracy from the presidency of Donald Trump. For over two years, resisting Trump has been a moral imperative, an all-consuming preoccupation, a zero-sum struggle that supersedes every constitutional and civic norm of American life. One Politico columnist compared the 2016 presidential election to Pearl Harbor, and countless others would warn of the coming Fourth Reich — because, as everyone knows, the Schutzstaffel were huge fans of religious freedom and capital gains tax cuts.