After a year of containment, Trump eyes his own course

For the first year of the Trump administration, the story was one of containment and constraint. President Donald Trump was constrained ideologically by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, pursuing a conventional Republican agenda on health care and taxes and letting his populist promises hang fire. But more important, he was constrained institutionally, in roughly the ways that Republican politicians had promised that he would be — surrounded by a conventional Republican Cabinet and (after a while) a conventional White House that essentially governed for him, letting him play the authoritarian on Twitter while the business of the presidency was conducted elsewhere.

The problem with this arrangement is that unlike other out-of-the-loop presidents — Richard Nixon at his nadir, Woodrow Wilson after his stroke, Ronald Reagan with a bullet in him — Trump was not actually incapacitated or about to be impeached. He was just, well, Donald Trump: a septuagenarian cable-TV addict ill-suited for the responsibilities of his office but still fully capable of attempting to exercise its powers. Which meant that the containment game had to last, not weeks or months, but three more long years to work.

And it may not last that long. From his exciting new steel tariffs to his promised summit meeting with Kim Jong Un, Trump has been acting lately like a man less inclined to listen to his handlers — and now those handlers have begun to disappear. The firing of Rex Tillerson, on the heels of Gary Cohn’s departure, evokes the wildly chaotic atmosphere that characterized Trump’s first few months in office.

But as my colleague Maggie Haberman tweeted, this time it seems less like something happening to Trump and more like chaos orchestrated from the Oval Office: “The narrative of Trump unglued is not totally wrong but misses the reason why — he was terrified of the job the first six months, and now feels like he has a command of it. So now he is basically saying, ‘I’ve got this, I can make the changes I want.’”

In other words, Trump knows that he’s been constrained and tamed and doesn’t want to play the incapacitated Twitter president anymore. He wants to actually use the office, and not just occupy it.

What would Trump becoming a real president mean in practice? In terms of personnel, it might mean that instead of easing out the hacks and cranks and TV personalities, as his staff managed to do during the year of constraint, Trump will begin to usher out his more qualified personnel and replace them with, well, TV personalities — Cohn with Larry Kudlow, or H.R. McMaster with John Bolton, perhaps.

But it also promises to further multiply the number of important vacancies within the government, since more true-to-Trump personnel choices would inevitably have some trouble with the confirmation process.

Maybe Mike Pompeo and some combination of TV personalities can do better at managing the president in the long run than the Cohns and Tillersons and McMasters, because Trump will feel that he picked them all by himself.

As a Trump critic doubtful of the most panicked narratives about this presidency, my watchword thus far has been: It could be worse. But if it eventually does get worse, a week like last week, with a president chafing against his bonds and snapping some of them, is how a descent from farce to tragedy might begin.