As we get to the midpoint between the last presidential election and next year’s midterms, all political sides are expending extraordinary effort to ignore the 900-pound gorilla in the formerly smoke-filled room of American politics. This, of course, is Donald Trump.

The Democrats are still outwardly pretending Trump has gone and that his support has evaporated. They also pretend they can hobble him with vexatious litigation and, if necessary, destroy him again by raising the Trump-hate media smear campaign back to ear-splitting levels.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), even as she finds the ground shifting beneath her feet over the administration’s incontinent spending ambitions, is seeing her effort to promote the January 6 trespass at the U.S. Capitol as an outrage on the scale of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 overshadowed by the Afghanistan disaster and the cascade of other blunders and improvidences of the Biden Administration.

Apart from a few veteran and some recently recruited NeverTrumpers joining in the tired pieties about the regrettable January 6 episode, the Democrats appear to be repeating the mistakes of 2016. They hope formerly mainstream Republicans who failed to repel the GOP base from supporting Trump will have better luck this time.

It remains true that a large group of Republicans (and no small number of Democrats) basically agree with most or all of Trump’s policies but regard the man as a distasteful carnival operator whose “Trump University” and health care plan (consisting of urinalysis and vitamins for a healthy quarterly fee) are simply not acceptable for a holder of the great office of president of the United States. Many have implied by their ambiguity that they could live with Trump again if his manners improved and his tactics became less bombastic. The acid test being unwisely applied to Trump’s acceptability as a rehabilitated candidate is his humble acceptance of the legitimacy of the election of Joe Biden as president.