How Trump Is Winning

Ross Douthat: “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.”