No matter the final U.S. decision on licensing and waivers related to the impending Houthi designation, only one thing is clear: the job of staving off the world’s worst humanitarian disaster will be unnecessarily complicated by a terrorist designation that lacks efficacy.

Focusing solely on the ousting of this particular president and his friends — and on their considerable failures as leaders — risks missing a deeper, more fundamental point: that though Donald Trump lost reelection, the ideology and belief system underpinning so many of the debacles of his presidency prevails, and was always doomed to fail the country in the face of a disaster like this one.