Remember when Donald Trump bragged about success?

“We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning,” Trump said as he started his presidency.

Approval ratings have Trump at near a record low point in public approval, but success and the perception of success remain linked.

French dramatist Alexandre Dumas said, “Nothing succeeds like success.” The local proof of that is up on the Big Island’s Mauna Kea, where Native Hawaiian protesters are rewriting local political culture.

Numbering at most a few thousand, the protesters have made Hawaii officials impotent. The officials can’t get the protesters off the mountain; permission from the protesters is needed to allow astronomers and technicians to go to work at one of the world’s most important astronomical sites. The state is forced to plow new roads instead of uprooting the demonstration.

With every week’s delay, the backers of the planned $1.4 billion 30-meter telescope, which spawned the protest, eye the alternate site in the Canary Islands with more interest.

Protesters argue that Mauna Kea’s cultural significance makes it a sacred site and cannot be despoiled with telescopes. There have been complaints from Native Hawaiians since the start of the astronomy program atop the mountain. Now with the touchstone “sacred” self-defined, there is more room to muscle-flex.

For instance, Waimanalo residents have protested the city’s plans for a renovated baseball field, claiming among other things the spot was sacred ground because it was a Hawaiian burial site.

The city issued a response, saying the claim that “92 human burials have been discovered in the Waimanalo Bay Beach Park (aka Sherwood Forest)” area is false. But, still the alarm went up and increases the sensitive nature of the issue.

That raised alarm caused the state Democratic Party Hawaiian Affairs caucus to schedule a meeting to consider supporting the protesters.

Democrats say it’s in response to the “overwhelming expression of members at the last membership meeting to support the protectors of Mauna Kea,” the meeting agenda said.

Meanwhile, the party’s vice chairman, former state Sen. Gary Hooser, had an opinion piece in Kauai’s The Garden Island newspaper praising Gov. David Ige’s lack of progress in resolving the issue, saying Ige has put “the principles of restraint, respect and dialogue above that of force and intimidation.”

Hawaii is home to an old culture that has both transformed itself while remaining true to its roots, so disrespectfully tromping around iconic and legendary areas or running a bulldozer across areas with hundreds of years of cultural history is not going to go well. The feeling that these islands have been walked on by many generations adds to the impact and resonance of the protesters from Mauna Kea to the Pohakuloa Training Area and Makua Valley. They have all at various times been described as “sacred.”

The earnest sympathy for things thought of as sacred is fast running a collision course with the important political, military and economic aspects of Hawaii.

For the protesters and Hawaii’s leaders, making the result a compromise and not a disaster, is an ability that today neither side appears to possess.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.