To hear the left tell it, progressives are on the march. The Democratic Party’s left flank has taken hold of the wheel, and they’re angling to take full advantage of Donald Trump’s unique unpopularity ahead of 2018 and 2020. Superficially, it does seem as though Democrats positioned to reject the party’s leftward drift have been intimidated into keeping their objections to themselves. But the enemy gets a vote, too, and Donald Trump is better positioned to frustrate liberal advances than progressive champions seem prepared to admit.

Writing for the Washington Post on Tuesday, the Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel reveled in the new and unapologetically progressive direction in which the Democratic Party was headed. She noted that, on Wednesday, self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders would introduce a bill to expand Medicare to all, effectively socializing the country’s health-care system.

The bill will have a number of young Democratic co-sponsors—any of the myriad likely contenders looking ahead to the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, for example. Moreover, this represents a cost-free vote for the progressive senators who want to appear supportive of nationalizing medical care but don’t want to explain where the measure’s prohibitive costs are going to come from. Vanden Heuvel cited Vox.com’s Dylan Matthews, who asserted that “this is what consensus looks like,” adding, “soon, no Democratic leader will be able to oppose single payer.” That’s perhaps entirely true, but that consensus doesn’t suddenly render the policy feasible.

As vanden Heuvel and Matthews rejoiced, Democratic leaders are also united behind a substantial hike in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15. “Setting a minimum wage, either by statute or through a job guarantee plan, effectively forces the firms to pay more to everyone, which in turn drives more people to apply to work there, and fills the vacancies,” Matthews wrote last week. That’s an enchanting sentiment but also entirely unrealistic. As two 2017 studies ( the University of Washington and University of California, Berkeley) of minimum wage hikes demonstrate, respectively, the effects of such a proposal on incomes and hours worked are either substantially negative or disastrously negative.

After watching how Republicans behaved when their votes could send a bill to the desk of a president who might actually sign it, Democrats in the grassroots should temper their enthusiasm for liberal positioning statements. Meanwhile, as the progressive left celebrates its unchallenged ascendancy, Donald Trump is pulling a Crazy Ivan.

President Trump demonstrated last week that his desire to evince authority over conservative Republicans in Congress is so great that he’s willing to accept Democratic leadership’s first offer. “A senior administration official said of Trump’s deal with Chuck and Nancy: ‘He just wanted to do something popular,’” Axios reported. The feedback Trump received from the “deal” he struck with Democrats was all positive. What’s more, the food pellet dropped down when the president followed his impulses, not the advice of his establishmentarian handlers.

For the better part of his life, Trump’s political instincts—including during the 2015 and 2016 primary season—were conventionally liberal, with the notable exception of immigration policy. He can spend money like the best of them. He has a better and longer working relationship with Chuck Schumer than any other member of Congress. The media Trump consumes—the mechanically pro-Trump right and the skeptical left, too—have all been supportive of Trump’s pivot to Democrats. The president is all but certain to pursue another “deal.” Indeed, he’s laying the groundwork right now.

The Democratic Party in the U.S. Senate isn’t yet like its counterpart in the House, where the Democratic Caucus has been beaten back into their deep blue coastal and urban enclaves. In the Senate, there are still a handful of culturally conservative Democrats representing Trump states, and the president is courting them.

On Tuesday, the president will sit down over dinner with Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (as well as several key Republicans in the upper chamber) with the aim of striking a deal on tax-code reform. These Democrats have been reluctant to endorse their party’s objectives relating to changes in the tax code. By themselves, they can’t get the GOP to 60 votes, but they represent fissures in the Blue Wall that can be exploited.

The question becomes how far Trump is willing to compromise with Democrats to rescue his presidency? The president already signaled his willingness to side with Democrats not just on a temporary hike in the debt limit but in eliminating the debt limit entirely. “For all of those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about,” Trump tweeted last Thursday. “No action!” As it happens, Trump’s about-face on DACA was a product of cooperation with Nancy Pelosi. If Trump is willing to compromise enough on his alleged principles to give Democrats victories that Barack Obama couldn’t even secure, who is to say there won’t be more Democratic defections from the glorious progressive future lauded by vanden Huevel and the like.

Now, that is not to say Democrats will become the pro-Trump party. For all vanden Huevel’s assertions to the contrary, Democrats are not united on a platform that will woo back the voters they lost to the GOP from 2010 to 2016. They’re not even entirely convinced that project is worth the effort. Being anti-Trump is the Democratic Party’s most potent unifying principle. They cannot afford to let Trump undermine their core message by being anti-Trump himself. And yet, it’s not hard to envision a scenario in which the president determines that he has more to gain by compromising with Democrats than with conservative Republicans. It’s even easier to conceive of the circumstances in which Democrats become convinced they can more effectively soften Trump’s support among crossover voters by working with him than reflexively opposing him. If that happens, the Great Progressive Revival will be put on indefinite hold.