What we can learn from Trump’s weirdest week yet

The week before Christmas may go down as the strangest and most revealing of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Over just a few days, his sheer thuggishness, venality and corruption were laid bare. But it was also a time for Trumpian good deeds that allowed us a glimpse at how he might have governed if he had been shrewder — and had a genuine interest in the good that government can do.

Let’s start with his display of gangsterism and utter indifference to the law in a tweet calling his former lawyer Michael Cohen a “Rat” for telling the truth about various matters, including his dealings with Russia to build a Trump tower in Moscow and the president’s payoffs before the 2016 election to hide his alleged sexual conduct.

“Rat,” as many have pointed out, is a legendary organized-crime epithet and we really are gazing at something like the Trump Family Syndicate. On Tuesday, the New York state attorney general forced the closure of the Donald J. Trump Foundation for what she described as “a shocking pattern of illegality.” She said the foundation functioned “as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.” Yes, this was an all-in-the-family thing.

But that wasn’t all. Two reports commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee made it abundantly clear that Trump was Vladimir Putin’s preferred candidate in 2016 — and remained Putin’s guy after he won.

In extraordinary detail, the reports showed the lengths to which Russian social media went to demobilize Democratic constituencies, particularly African-Americans and young supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Dispelling any doubt about Russia’s commitment to Trump, Putin’s online propagandists kept up their work well after the election, targeting special counsel Robert Mueller for abuse.

Oh, yes, and there are the lawsuits about whether revenues to Trump’s hotels from foreign governments constitute a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

Less than two years into Trump’s presidency, nearly everything with his name on it is under scrutiny. So maybe the content of Trump’s character means that his political venture was doomed from the beginning. But at least where policy is concerned, he took a good path this week.

I rarely get a chance to say this, so: Good for Trump for endorsing a criminal-justice reform bill that passed the Senate on a bipartisan 87-12 vote. It’s highly unlikely this would have happened without him. The bill is not everything reformers hoped for, but it does begin to undo the draconian criminal penalties enacted largely in the 1990s, toward the end of the crime wave that began in the late 1960s.

This is a key civil rights issue of our time.

Also on Tuesday, the administration announced it will ban bump stocks, attachments that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns. Again there’s much more to do about gun violence, but this was a constructive step.

It’s often observed that Trump has few political principles. But this did give him enormous flexibility when he came into office. If only he had governed in other areas with the same eye toward bipartisan agreement that led him to criminal-justice reform.