Ron Sachs/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Chris Van Hollen, and US House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi after their gathering with President Barack Obama to strategize on how to counter Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. A s we begin 2017, despondency covers America's progressives like a dark and enervating fog. With good reason—these are going to be a hard four years, with a great deal of suffering to come. But perhaps the biggest legislative battle of the Trump administration is beginnning, and it's one Democrats can win, if they're smart about it. As Republicans themselves are now realizing, it's easy to criticize a complex health-care law when the other party is getting blamed for everything anyone doesn't like about the system, but it's a lot harder to come up with an alternative that won't do real harm to at least some Americans. That's their dilemma, and it provides the opening Democrats need to kill the repeal of the...

Sergey Guneev/Sputnik via AP Russian President Vladimir Putin during the signing of Russian-Japan documents following a meeting in Tokyo. B efitting a man who came from a television genre in which contrived situations carefully edited to tell stories are referred to as "reality," Donald Trump is in the process of creating his own reality for his party. We should be profoundly concerned about the way in which Trump not only lies but encourages his supporters to believe the lies he tells. But can he actually remake the Republican Party in the process, to change its very identity and ideology? Consider this: Donald Trump is making the GOP, the party of Cold Warriors from Nixon to Reagan and beyond, into the most pro-Russian party we've seen in generations, if ever. Not only has Trump surrounded himself with advisers friendly to the Russian government, he himself praised Vladimir Putin again and again during the campaign, and now refuses to believe the consensus of the American...