Trump 2.0: No more ‘Low-IQ Maxine’?

of Trump and his associates.

With that in mind, Trump did show a little bit of dagger beneath his love bouquet. Should Democrats decide to tie up Congress with investigations of Team Trump, he said, he is ready to work with Senate Republicans to investigate alleged leaks of classified documents and other issues among the Dems.

Message: Just play along, folks, and nobody gets hurt.

Here we see Trump as the Transactional President, the former Democrat and real estate developer whose ideology is best summed up as “Let’s make a deal.”

And there are areas on which both parties have shown enough agreement to begin fruitful negotiations. Both Pelosi and Trump have spoken of making infrastructure repair a top priority, as well as lowering prescription drug prices.

One presumes there also are tantalizing possibilities for reforms to save insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act for people with pre-existing conditions. Focusing on that issue at Pelosi’s insistence provided so much high-octane power to Democratic congressional campaigns that Trump and other Republicans began to claim they were the true champions for saving the coverage.

It remains to be seen whether Pelosi will receive as much pushback from her party’s left wing as Trump and other Grand Old Party leaders have received from the GOP’s congressional right-wingers. Pelosi herself had been demonized by progressive and populist Democrats.

But I wouldn’t count Pelosi out. So far, no other House Democrat has come close to matching her ability to raise campaign dollars for House Dems or navigate legislation. The party does need to develop new talent, as Republicans have done over the past two decades, at the state and local level. But for now, Pelosi is well-prepared for what she, too, has called a “transition” period to her party’s full recovery.

Voters have shown a preference for divided government in this midterm, but they also want to see real problem-solving through compromise. Now is the time for President Trump and his top adversaries to show they can make that work.