“We’ve had bad presidents before, but none who have personally profited as much from the office.” That line is taken from a sharply critical New York Times article written by Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor in the Obama White House, about President Trump. To make his charge of corruption, Rhodes included a catalogue of self-serving activities that the president has engaged in since the beginning of his second term.

What really caught my attention in the article were a couple of the prescriptions Rhodes offered as ways for the Democrats to hold the president accountable in light of the subservience of their Republican colleagues. He wrote this: “To build a movement powerful enough to push back on Mr. Trump’s self-dealing, Democrats must show people how it will affect their lives.” Rhodes says that apart from the corruption, the president’s erratic tariff policies will drive up prices of goods and services for regular people, including their car payments and grocery bills. He advises Democrats to spend time highlighting those issues. He further asks Democratic leaders to demonstrate “virtuous toughness” by “keeping score of who is capitulating to Mr. Trump and participating in corrupt practices.”

Those sound like pretty solid recommendations, until you stop to think about the current political environment we are in. It is quite apparent that these days, there are not that many people in America who are persuadable. Rank-and-file Democrats already have calcified opinions about President Trump. Whatever the party’s leaders would say to them about the president’s behavior would amount to preaching to the choir. To have the meaningful effect that Rhodes hopes for, Democratic officials would have to do the “showing” to a sizable number of Republican voters to try to convince them. That is a tall order. Because voters of both parties live in separate echo chambers nowadays, whatever the Democratic leadership says will either not reach that target Republican audience, or is likely to fall on deaf ears.

What would really make a difference is if the Republican base were to start feeling, in a serious way, the harmful effects of some of President Trump’s policies and actions. I strongly suspect that a good number of the president’s supporters already have some reservations about the erratic manner in which he has gone about things, but I’m also quite sure that they continue to back him firmly. For the vast majority of the president’s hardcore supporters, the culture wars and immigration are everything. They don’t mind some economic pain as long as they think he is “sticking it to the liberal left” for their “counter-cultural excesses.”

Economists understand this phenomenon painfully well. Human beings are not always the rational economic actors that theoretical economic models are built on. That is why those models break down at times in the real world. It is the reason behavioral economics has become such a popular subject in the last few decades.

Rhodes is probably expecting too much when he says that the Democrats should name and shame the Republicans who are enabling the president. Those Republicans will almost certainly counter that the Democrats are not qualified to point fingers at anyone. They will say that the leadership of the party did not push back on anything that President Biden did in office, or challenge any of the radical agendas of the extreme left.

It is quite unfortunate that today we live in a country where there is a severe shortage of voices that carry any authority to speak on any subject. Some of the things that the president and some of his close associates have done in these past few months are egregious, as Rhodes charges. There is justification in Rhodes’s blaming of the Republican leaders in Congress for enabling those behaviors. But before they can effectively call out their colleagues on the other side, the Democrats themselves have to work hard to regain the credibility they squandered by failing to stand up to members of their party when they were in power.