How Trump Is Winning
By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
May 5, 2018
As Donald Trump entered the second year in office, he seemed determined to destabilize his administration’s fragile status quo. He pushed out a cluster of advisers, replacing them with people he liked watching on TV. He forged ahead on his long-promised policy of trade war. He decided to take the starring, summit-organizing role in his own North Korean brinksmanship. And he stepped up — well, or just continued, it’s hard to make quantitative judgments — his rhetorical war against the Robert Mueller investigation.
For those of us who feared disaster from this presidency but saw the first year as a period when Trump was relatively constrained, his “I’m in charge here!†pivot was a worrying phenomenon. But it’s the nature of the Trump era to confound all expectations, so naturally what followed the Cohn-Tillerson-McMaster exits and the tariff announcements and the stock market wobbles was … the most politically successful six weeks of Trump’s presidency to date.
Now “successful†is a relative term: Our president is still deeply unpopular, still under investigation and embroiled in scandal, still unable to push a substantial agenda through the Congress, still likely to see his party lose the House of the Representatives in November.
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