Those are their words, not mine.

Far be it from me to kick a political party while it’s down — these things, after all, tend to have a pendulum effect — but the Democrats’ self-loathing is just too good to resist. “I’m just so mad at our party,” lamented one anonymous Democrat operative recently to The Hill’s Amie Parnes. “We suck. How could we let this happen again?”

We. Suck.

If those words don’t make you feel a little Flounder-like, if they don’t bring on a gentle wave of palm-rubbing schadenfreude, well, I don’t know what will. Perhaps they were muttered by the same operative who also told Parnes that the Democrats are “spiraling” in the wake of Donald Trump’s resounding electoral victory. And then this: “In my political lifetime, this is as bad as it’s been for Democrats.”

It’s not hard to understand such frustration. Imagine working for a party that propped up a cognitively addled presidential candidate four years ago, rigged the election for him, agonized while he wrecked the nation and embarrassed us on the world stage, and then, having finally summoned up the nerve to Vaudeville-hook him off the stage, was forced to replace him with Kamala Harris. And all this while engaging in a despicable lawfare campaign against Donald Trump that only made him stronger and more popular with the American people.

What kind of people do that? The Democrats, that’s who.

And their agony shows no signs of ebbing. What they just witnessed was without a doubt the busiest and most earth-shaking first week in American presidential history — a week that saw President Trump take “hundreds of executive actions to secure the border, deport criminal illegal immigrants, unleash American prosperity, lower costs, increase government transparency, and reinstitute merit-based hiring in the federal government.”

In addition, Trump checked in with Klaus Schwab and his fellow Great Resetters at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting on Thursday, and there he was treated with the warmth and deference of a man with a mandate.

Trump’s speech heralded “the Golden Age of America” and called it “a revolution of common sense.” He then rightly affixed the blame on the party that’s spent the past nine years trying to destroy him: “My administration is acting with unprecedented speed to fix the disasters we’ve inherited from a totally inept group of people and to solve every single crisis facing our country.” He continued with an America First message meant to blunt any attempt by the Democrats to seize the economic high ground:

My message to every business in the world is very simple: come make your product in America, and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on earth. We’re bringing them down very substantially, even from the original Trump tax cuts. But if you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then very simply, you will have to pay a tariff — differing amounts, but a tariff — which will direct hundreds of billions of dollars and even trillions of dollars into our treasury to strengthen our economy and pay down debt. Under the Trump administration, there will be no better place on Earth to create jobs, build factories, or grow a company than right here in the good old USA.

Said a fairly astonished Newt Gingrich on Thursday night: “Clearly, he’s going to be as consequential as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was. … These are big moments. You don’t get them more than once a lifetime. And I think, clearly, President Trump now is moving to be one of the most consequential presidents in American history. I think, frankly, just below Washington and Lincoln, but certainly, he’ll end up in the same league with Jefferson, Jackson, and Roosevelt. And to actually be living through it, to be here, to see this, to watch the range of what he’s doing, from very detailed things to huge sweeping things, it’s remarkable.”

Newt, admittedly, has a penchant for hyperbole, but is he wrong here?

On Friday, Trump visited storm-battered Western North Carolina “because those people were treated very badly by Democrats.” He then headed out to visit fire-ravaged Southern California, where, during a roundtable discussion, he gently suggested to Democrat Congressman Brad Sherman, “Brad, we’re the party of common sense. You’re not, in all fairness. We like water to put out fires. It’s really quite efficient.”

One can begin to understand the challenge facing the Democrats: They’ve been shut out of political power, they don’t have a leader, and they don’t have a message. Beyond that, somehow, they have to mount a meaningful challenge to a president whose approval rating is higher than it’s ever been — a president who has seized the initiative and knows how to use the bully pulpit.

“The natural inclination is to fight, fight, fight, fight,” said Congressman Tom Suozzi, a centrist Democrat who sounds like he’s trying to wrest the “fight” mantra from the guy who made it indelibly his own on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Suozzi represents a Long Island district that Trump won, so he’s in a precarious position. If there’s one light at the end of the tunnel for the Democrats, it’s the razor-thin margin by which the Republicans control the House and the possibility of taking back control in two years, just as they did in Trump’s first term. So Suozzi and other swing-district Democrats need to work with Trump on occasion, even when the Angry Left of his party is calling for nonstop resistance.

It’s an unenviable task. But at this point, it’s all the “We Suck” Democrats have.