Walter Shapiro: “While delving into Trump’s psyche is a risky maneuver that should only be attempted while wearing a HAZMAT suit, a plausible case can be made that the president is subconsciously rooting for a Democratic Congress in 2019. In fact, given Trump’s contempt for political norms, there is a glimmer of a chance that he might be deliberately trying to wreck the GOP’s chances.”
“The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page, a place whose outlook rarely overlaps with mine, made a related case on Tuesday in an offering entitled ‘Trump’s Lose-the-House Strategy.’ Focusing on the threatened government shutdown, the Journal blames the baleful influence of Steve Bannon and his obsession with wedge issues like immigration that motivate the Trump base.
“But suggesting that the president is still under the sway of Bannon and his ultra-nationalist views is a way of letting Trump himself off the hook. It is akin to 19th-century Russian peasants saying after the Cossacks pillaged their village, ‘If the tsar only knew.'”
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