The post-mortems have been nearly unanimous: Republicans "underperformed" in the midterms due to the taint of Trump, dismay over January 6th, backlash to the Dobbs decision, and realization that President Joe Biden, as was said of Wagner's music, "is better than it sounds."

Ok…Democrats beat expectations. But where's any after-report explaining how Democrats also allowed the most lawless, lying, reactionary party in American history to narrowly control one Chamber of Congress? Campaigns, however, aren't horseshoes. According to the zero-sum math that matters—the GOP won the House by a margin of three percentage points and Jim Jordan will chair the Judiciary Committee hearings starting in January.

Good enough wasn't quite good enough.

The 2022 midterms can't predict the next presidential election (anymore than the 1982, 1994 or 2010 ones did). Still, what lessons might the Democratic party have learned to prevail in two years? To wit:

–how could they have failed for nearly all of two years to craft memorable messages and slogans to galvanize swing voters ("Build Back Better" not being it)?

–why didn't they make Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert the angry face of the GOP as they shouted at Biden during his State of the Union?

–why haven't they aggressively exploited their vanishing majority in these post-election two months to conduct hearings that set the table for the 118th Congress, say on student debt and a Censure Resolution against Greene for remarks endorsing political violence? (One exception—a House Judiciary hearing into possible misconduct at SCOTUS.)

–and why did prominent Democrats flinch at relentlessly portraying Trump's party as untruthful, unlawful, violent, even fascist?

If a review of Democratic performance last November merely concludes with a big "whew!," they'll more likely lose the next one as well. For they will soon face the amplification of both a vengeful House leadership and weaponized Twitter.

While it's obviously hard to predict what issues will dominate the next cycle, lessons from the midterms should inspire Democrats to start playing offense as soon as early 2023. Fall, 2024 is too late.

Step one means tattooing a very unpopular Trump on nearly all Republicans. Whether he runs seriously or not for reelection (since being a criminal defendant in several courtrooms during a campaign is not a plus—Trump has the potential to destroy them as a political majority for a generation. Hoover was a pinata for some 50 years. Carter for 20. Trump should be radioactive no less than they were. Notwithstanding the current hard polarization, the goal should be realignment, not merely narrow majorities.

Some Democratic pooh-bahs, however, have counseled candidates "not to look back," which is as foolish as ignoring the disgraced Nixon in l974 since he was no longer "on the ballot." Republican officeholders who have been either complicit or silent during Trump's carnage need to be held politically accountable for shredding the truth and the law.

When it comes to "accentuating the positive," the Biden White House will certainly keep touting real gains from its first term on jobs, drug prices, climate, gun safety, gay rights, Covid, Ukraine, plus what's to come in a possible second see (WinningAmerica.net, organized by Ralph Nader and the author, for a possible future agenda).

But Democrats cannot depend on this White House—helmed by two likable, lower-voltage moderates—to prosecute the negative case against a GOP playbook drafted over decades by such gunslingers as McCarthy, Nixon, Gingrich and Trump. (And given the inevitable race-to-the-bottom among 2024 presidential candidates—plus likely indictments of Trump and his clan from six grand juries—the negative side of the ledger will only grow.)

Effective counter-attacks are more likely to emerge from outside public advocacy groups, a handful of aggressive Members, and new wordsmiths at the DNC ideally with the polemical skills of a Samuel Adams (or at least a Frank Luntz). Think of how Elizabeth Warren (man)handled Michael Bloomberg in the second Democratic presidential debate. It took her ferocity to break through the billion dollar bubble protecting the ex-mayor.

Instead, Beltway consultants this past Fall failed to respond at all to GOP fear-mongering that called Democrats "Marxists, Communists, baby-killers" and, in Donald Trump's thoughtful formulation, "scum." In today's Age of Rage, there should be little space for "when they go low, we go high."

Nor did Democrats even attempt to neutralize such fatuous "culture war" slogans as CRT, groomers, vaccines, defund, woke—that is, DeSantism. All of which are variations of George Wallace, whose North Star, in his own phrase, was never to allow a political opponent "to out-n****r me." If unrebutted, to many these manufactured crises will appear undeniable.

Recently a federal court asked a lawyer for the State of Florida to define "woke" and was told it was the "belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to redress them"...as if Martin Luther King, Jr. was just some "woke" clergyman.

Hitting back will require more than disclosing additional outrages that largely serve to worsen scandal fatigue among weary voters and a cynical media. More urgent are convincing metaphors and narratives since by now the whole-is-greater- than- the- sum-of-its-parts when it comes to Trumpism and DeSantism.

As Churchill understood, galvanizing oratory matters. See how history still resonates with TR's "a chicken in every pot," Lenin's "land, bread, peace," Reagan's 'Morning in America." Recall how Newt Gingrich cleverly renamed "the estate tax" as the more alarming "Death Tax", Frank Luntz got even Democrats to talk about not "global warming" but the more anodyne "climate change", and some reactionary genius got people referring not to "Social Security" but a free lunch-sounding "Entitlement". Eisenhower's mention of a "Domino Effect'' in Southeast Asia and Reagan's concocted "welfare queen" dominated policy for decades.

Hard to think of a Democrat in memory who's said anything as enduring. Words matter and it's a mystery why Republicans—infinitely worse at policies to help families—are better at messaging which hurts them.

Last, it's corny but true that "good policies make good politics," in the estimate of Senators Schumer and Warren. As less inflation, more jobs, cleaner air and lower drug prices presumably take effect by the next election, some swing voters will take notice.

Among others, the new House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, Jamie Raskin and Eric Swalwell have shown real talent for oratory that can keep the opposing party on the ropes.

The possibilities seem endless: "Progress is America…One Party Delivers, the Other Divides…Getting stuff done beats dangerous extremism…Let's party like it's l789…It's up to you America—Freedom or Fascism?"

An honest self-appraisal from 2022 and the ethic that offense- beats-defense can improve the odds for Democrats in 2024, if not crush Trump's party. Otherwise, Greene and Musk will be happy to flood the political zone with their QAnon conspiracies and stochastic terrorism in an effort to make January 6 a trial run.

Ready for even more Trumpian disinformation?

Cornered by a continuing pandemic, teetering economy and racial strife, President Houdini has been resorting to rhetorical tricks honed over a lifetime to escape political calamity. One way to prepare for this Tuesday's first debate and his Fall barrage is to reveal Trump's "magic" beforehand so that viewers and voters can be their own BS Detector when he next tries to sliver away from lying about Covid-19 or his fascistic plans to overthrow the election.

1. Cherry-picking -- Black Swans.

This trick is based on seeing a black swan and then pretending all swans are black.

So when millions of Black Lives Matter protesters peacefully march against police brutality, Trump will cite one who years ago allegedly called cops "pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon" to imply that all are looters and anarchists. And when a Republican US Attorney in Pennsylvania this week told AG Barr that his office had found nine discarded Trump ballots (later changed to seven), the White House immediately played it up to imply that this was organized mail-in ballot fraud (though it was quickly shown to be an isolated, local administrative error, not a Democratic conspiracy).

The idea is to make the aberrational appear typical. Would anyone judge Michael Jordan's career based on a reel of three missed clutch shots rather than his career stats?

2. Adjectives and Assertions.

Since it's hard to enact legislation, why not instead just predict great or awful events since hard to prove the contrary. Or to paraphrase Nike, "Just Say It."

Hence "next year [the economy] will be the best ever." This summer Trump began declaring that Democrats would "destroy the suburbs." How? Presumably by prohibiting segregated public housing, stating that this time the 2018 "caravan" from Latin America might directly settle in White Plains, New York.

The 'tell' here his frequent refrain, "believe me!"

3. The Bully's Pulpit.

Humorist Larry Wilmore joked that Trump was indeed our Roosevelt since "the only thing Trump has is fear itself."

Politico reported that a third of his first 2000 president tweets disparaged people, totaling a hard-to-believe 598 people by the end of 2018. Here he's channeling the Italian philosopher and politician who said five centuries ago, "it's better to be feared than loved."

Like Machiavelli's princes, Trump loves being feared. And since a president's bullying can do real reputational damage, this thuggish tactic often produces the desired effect of anticipatory obedience by those fearing massive retaliation. That helps explain why 52 of 53 Senate Republicans during his Impeachment trial, faced with his open-and-shut political extortion of Ukraine, concluded that what happened didn't happen.

4. Rhetorical Questions.

This is a low-grade but popular sleight-of-hand -- burying a disrupted premise in the form of a question in order to mislead listeners to a false conclusion. "What do you have to lose?", he would repeatedly ask Black audiences in the 2016 campaign (now they know). And "why would" Putin interfere in that election? (Duh.)

5. Upside-downism.

Trump repeatedly accuses others of his own misconduct in order to confuse "low education voters" (his phrase). Recall how he indignantly declared that Democrats are the real "liars" who are trying to "rig the election" while Biden's the one fomenting violence and Harris undermining science. When Nancy Pelosi said that Trump was trying to "Make America White Again," he accused her of racism because in Trumpland even talking about race is racism.

6. Figures Don't Lie but Liars Figure.

Trump reverses the scientific method: facts don't lead to conclusions but rather conclusions lead to "facts", which is otherwise known as confirmation bias. This trick has a long history, from the 1920 Scopes Monkey trial and Lysenko-ism in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Today's version of Creationism is his river of obvious lies about Covid-19, Climate, Crime and Race, as when a whistle-blower just charged that DHS ordered staff to underplay violence by white nationalists and Russian campaign interference.

In his acceptance screech this past August, for example, he bragged how his administration "had created" nine million new jobs, which sounds good until you realize that it followed three months where the economy lost 20 million jobs.

7. Rooster-Taking-Credit-for-the-Dawn.

With vanishingly few positive accomplishments, Trump will keep claiming credit for the good work of others while shunning any responsibility for his own wrongdoing.

He's said or tweeted over 350 times a version of -- 'we have the greatest economy in our history.' Which a) isn't true since his six immediate predecessors all had better jobs and GDP numbers and b) it was Obama who turned Bush's Great Recession into seven years of steady growth, which Trump has merely coasted on, albeit at a slower pace.

This trick veered into parody when he claimed that there were no passenger airline fatalities in his first year as president. True... although there had also been none for the prior seven years. He abandoned this particular boast after Boeing's 737 Max planes twice crashed because of failures by Boeing and the FAA.

8. Both-sidesism.

Whenever criticized, he and his team search for some arguably equivalent offence in history to exonerate him. Recall how he would cite Monica Lewinsky to wave off the few dozen women accusing him of sexual abuse and famously declare there were "fine people" on both sides of that Neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville.

This maneuver can backfire. After flailing Hunter Biden's business work during the Obama-Biden administration, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was asked by CNN's Jake Tapper about Trump's sons traveling the world making deals at taxpayer expense. Replied Mnuchin, "I don't want to get into those details."

9. The Hyperbolic.

The man exaggerates exaggerations. Trump tries to explain away this repeated trick as "bravado...truthful hyperbole." Actually -- see "beautiful coal" -- it's untruthful hyperbole. So he announced that there would have been a nuclear war with North Korea if he hadn't been elected in 2016 and he is the world's leading expert on "drones, nuclear weapons, technology, banks…[plus another 30 specialized categories]."

Speaking of Kim, listen carefully and you'll hear Trump sound like the North Korean dictator who claimed to have shot five holes-in-one playing his first round of golf.

10. The Lyin' King. The problem is not merely that Trump, like all presidents, has at times lied, fibbed and cut-corners but that he nearly always does. His go-to response to any public criticism is "fake news," even as he deploys what he deplores.

It's hard to arrive at any other conclusion after Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler has documented (so far) 20,000+ lies or falsehoods from his mouth -- or 22 a day for the past year, including when he pretends that prosecuted aides were invariably minor figures to him (Manafort? Cohen? Stone? Bannon? Flynn?). His lava of lies and disinformation reflects a comment attributed to Katherine the Great, "the first lie wins."

Off camera, Trump knows exactly what he's doing. After grossly puffing up his TV ratings, he then explained to Billy Bush, of Access Hollywood fame, "Billy, look, you just tell them and they believe it. That's it. They just do."

A different approach was taken by our 32d president. FDR speech writer Robert Sherwood, in his book Roosevelt and Hopkins, wrote that "the New York Times can make mistakes but the President of the United States must not make mistakes. After 1940, Isador Lubkin, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, was constantly available and incalculably invaluable to Roosevelt in checking every decimal point."

Now we're about to find out whether, contrary to everything our parents told us, dishonesty is the best policy. Or whether truth still matters. For without truth there can't be trust and without trust civilization can fracture and collapse.

What if the research agenda of the University of Texas College of Natural Sciences were drafted not by the professors who actually conduct the studies but by, say, the alumni who funded the department? We might end up with research on the stickiness of Mr. Big's brand of glue instead of the development of an AIDS vaccine. Luckily, most research universities don't work that way. The federal government, however, occasionally does. In the Bush Administration, when the religious right or big business weighs in on a matter of science, politics usually prevails. So while this President may lack the powerful eloquence of William Jennings Bryan, in the world of science he's the modern equivalent of the Great Orator defeating the infidels of evolution in the Scopes Trial of 1925.

Scientific panels and committees have proven especially susceptible to political manipulation by the White House. In one revealing case, Bush & Co. intervened at the precise moment that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention was set to consider once again lowering acceptable blood-lead levels in response to new scientific evidence. The Administration rejected nominee Bruce Lanphear and dumped panel member Michael Weitzman, both of whom previously advocated lowering the legal limit. Instead, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson appointed William Banner -- who had testified on behalf of lead companies in poison-related litigation -- and Joyce Tsuji, who had worked for a consulting firm whose clients include a lead smelter. (She later withdrew.) Banner and another appointee, Sergio Piomelli, were first contacted about serving on the committee not by a member of the Administration but by lead-industry representatives who appeared to be recruiting favorable committee members with the blessing of HHS officials.

The supposedly nonpartisan President's Council on Bioethics -- a panel whose creation Bush announced during his much publicized stem-cell speech of August 2001 -- proved susceptible to a different arm of his political base, the far right. The council is the organization charged with leading America through the murky waters of cloning and other genetic research. But instead of appointing a calm voice to lead those difficult discussions, President Bush chose Leon Kass, a University of Chicago bioethicist who opposed in vitro fertilization in the 1970s on the basis of Brave New World-esque fears of reproduction run amok and likes to refer to abortion as "feticide." In a recent issue of The Public Interest, Kass lamented that today's young women live "the entire decade of their twenties -- their most fertile years -- neither in the homes of their fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely...." He is hostile to everything from "women on the pill" to sex education and believes children of divorce are "maimed for love and intimacy."

A similar case of politically inspired panel-stacking involved the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health, which reviews research and makes suggestions on a range of public health policy issues. When advisory committee members came up for renewal, committee chair Dr. Thomas Burke was surprised to learn that fifteen of the panel's eighteen members were going to be replaced. In the past, HHS had asked Burke for a list of recommendations; this time, it had its own list, and Burke was not on it. The new panel included chemical company favorite Lois Swirsky Gold, who denies many of the links between pollutants and cancer, and Dennis Paustenbach, who testified for Pacific Gas & Electric in the real-life Erin Brockovich court case.

None of this should be surprising from an administration that sees nothing wrong with conducting an ideological litmus test for potential scientific appointees. For example, William Miller, a nominee to the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse, was contacted by Secretary Thompson's office after he'd been asked to consider the appointment. The caller, according to Miller, asked whether he'd voted for President Bush. When he confessed that he had not, he was asked to explain himself, and did not receive a callback.

The scientific community has balked at these decisions and appointment practices. The American Public Health Association released an official policy statement in November 2002 that objected to "recent steps by government officials at the federal level to restructure key federal scientific and public health advisory committees by retiring the committees before their work is completed, removing or failing to reappoint qualified members, and replacing them with less scientifically qualified candidates and candidates with a clear conflict of interest. Such steps suggest an effort to inappropriately influence these committees."

Science magazine published an editorial signed by ten prominent US scientists railing against Bush's appropriation of the nation's scientific advisory committees and panels for political purposes. One of those scientists, Dr. Lynn Goldman at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, sees an eroding relationship between federal science agencies and the scientific community and fears that eventually scientific professionals will no longer trust crucial information gleaned from government research. Unlike previous administrations, the Bush White House, Goldman believes, has a "to the victor goes the spoils" approach to scientific research. She adds that "what they don't understand is that everybody hasn't done it that way. Science isn't 'the spoils.' Science isn't something to be politicized based on who's elected."

But if there's one thing that's been obvious over the past three years of the Bush Administration, it's that nothing is out of bounds when Bush's electoral bases are involved. The federal government funds a quarter of the scientific research in this country. When a President starts appointing scientists as he does campaign staffers, we risk an era of Lysenkoism in America -- when Soviet citizens were told (among other things) that acquired traits can be inherited. While Bush's supporters may giddily profit from such changes, it's the rest of us who lose out when science becomes another avenue for propaganda.

George W. Bush is different, very different. Other presidents have misled, deceived, even lied. When Ike was asked his worst mistake, he candidly said, "The lie we told [about the U-2]." LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin were examples of both deception and self-deception.

The problem today is not simply that "Bush is a liar." While only he knows whether he's intentionally saying untrue things, it is a provable fact that he says untrue things, again and again, on issues large and small, day in and day out. The problem is not "16 words" in last year's State of the Union but 160,000 words on stem cells, global warming, the "death tax," the Iraq-9/11 connection and the Saddam-al Qaeda connection, the rise of deficits, cuts to Americorps, the air in downtown Manhattan after 9/11. On and on. It is beyond controversy that W "has such a high regard for the truth," as Lincoln said of a rival, "that he uses it sparingly."

Why this penchant for falsehoods?

First, George W. Bush begins any policy consideration with three fundamental questions: What does the religious right want? What does big business want? What do the neo-conservatives want? If he has stood up to any of these core supporters in the past three years, examples don't come readily to mind. Convinced by political advisor Karl Rove that the way to a second term is to "activate the base," his policy process is more catechismic than empiric -- instead of facts leading to conclusions, conclusions lead to "facts."

Second, he is openly uninterested in learning and reading -- the Bushes "aren't serious, studious readers" he has said, also admitting that he now reads headlines, not articles. The point is not that he's stupid, only that he knew less about policy and the world as a presidential candidate than the average graduate student in government. Lacking Eisenhower's worldliness or JFK's intellect, however, Bush is prone to grab onto a politically useful intellectual framework like a life preserver and then not let go -- whether it's Myron Magnet's sour interpretation of the 60s in "The Dream and the Nightmare" or Paul Wolfowitz's Pollyannaish analysis of the likely consequences of an American invasion of Iraq.

The result: the most radical, messianic and misleading presidency of modern times. Frankly, no one else comes close. It has gotten to the point that President Bush appears to believe that he can do almost anything if he says the opposite: hence "no child left behind," "clean skies law," "healthy forests," and "love the poor" are mantras repeated in the hope that he can bend reality to his will. Arthur Miller calls it "the power of audacity."

Bush himself in the past has aptly called the first Tuesday in November "Reality Day" because talk ends when there's a real result. So what happens on presidential "reality days" when the results are the opposite of his wishful assertions -- when we find neither WMD nor cheering crowds in Iraq, when a surplus of $5 trillion becomes a deficit of $4 trillion, when there are so few stem cell lines for scientific research that scientists leave for London, when the ice caps melt due to global warming, when a Supreme Court of largely Republican appointees rules that affirmative action is not "quotas" but desirable -- and when the populations of even our allies regard us as a "bungling bully" (in the phrase of the Financial Times).

When Presidents Reagan and Bush 41 were shown how their pie-in-the-sky economics were producing ruinous deficits, they enacted tax hikes to begin to correct the economy. Not Bush 43. Hearing only applause as he shuttles between his financial base to military bases -- W retreats into messianic incompetence. "We don't second guess out of the White House," he announces, confusing stubbornness for strength; and he tells the G-8 leaders in 2001, "Look, I know what I believe and what I believe is right."

Whenever President Bush is now confronted with an unacceptable reality, he either changes the subject -- is steroid use really more important than the environment? -- or expresses confidence in his certainty. "I'm absolutely confident that..." he'll say, as if the issue is his determination rather than his conclusion. One is reminded of Igor in Young Frankenstein, who when asked about the foot-high hump on his back blithely answers, "What hump?"

This is not just a credibility gap but a reality gap. An empirically challenged and uninformed leader in denial and governing on a (right) wing and a prayer, however, is a big problem. What if Bush were president during the missiles of October -- would he have been able to avoid a nuclear war? That he squandered a quarter trillion dollars and 4,000 American casualties attacking Iraq because al Qaeda in Afghanistan attacked us is not encouraging.

Just when they're needed, the usual mechanisms to bring a president to his senses are badly malfunctioning. A Congress of the same party now almost never holds adversarial hearings or holds him accountable, unlike how the Republican Congress treated Clinton. And with noteworthy exceptions, most of the media essentially gave him a pass on his eyebrow-raising military and business histories. The early and continuing storyline was that he was a charming guy who made up funny names for reporters and was no pompous prevaricator like his 2000 opponent. It was strange that, until the Niger-uranium fabrication, the media wrote far more about the spectacular deceptions of Jayson Blair than the more consequential deceptions of George W. Bush.

Of course, adding to his immunity is the understandable impulse to rally around a president during a crisis -- a crisis the president regularly stokes as in his recent "State of Baghdad address" to the Congress. Or as commentator E.J. Dionne put it, W's slogan might as well be "the only thing we have to fear is the loss of fear itself."

So it comes down to November 2. If the public rewards W with a second term -- and with no re-election contest to impose any possible moderating influence -- then W's far-right impulses will be vindicated and corroborated. On that "reality day," which will prevail -- Bush's certainty or our reality?

Mark Green, president of the New Democracy Project, is the author, with Eric Alterman, of The Book On Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America (Viking 2004).