How Long Will Trump Keep Swimming with the Democrats? – The New Yorker

He does keep surprising us, doesn’t he? The quasi-alliance that sprang
up between Donald Trump and Democratic leaders on issues such as
hurricane aid may not last long—it’s fraying already—but then party
loyalty has never been Trump’s thing. One need only recall the first
Republican debate, more than two years ago, with ten Presidential
aspirants on the main stage. (There were seven more at the “undercard”
event.) One of the first questions was posed by Fox News’s Bret Baier,
who asked for a show of hands: Was there anyone who wouldn’t promise
to support the Party’s eventual nominee and to not run an independent
campaign? Trump, memorably, was the only one who raised his hand, which
naturally prompted a follow-up question:

BAIER: Mr. Trump, to be clear, you’re standing on a Republican-primary debate stage.

TRUMP: I fully understand.

BAIER: The place where the [Republican National Committee] will give the nominee the nod.

TRUMP: I fully understand.

BAIER: And that experts say an independent run would almost certainly hand the race over to Democrats and likely another Clinton.

You can’t say tonight that you can make that pledge?

TRUMP: I cannot say. I have to respect the person that, if it’s not me, the person that wins, if I do win, and I’m leading by quite a bit, that’s what I want to do. I can totally make that pledge. If I’m the nominee, I will pledge I will not run as an independent. But—and I am discussing it with everybody, but I’m, you know, talking about a lot of leverage. We want to win, and we will win. But I want to win as the Republican. I want to run as the Republican nominee.

Trump, being Trump, wasn’t wholly coherent (apart from saying that, if
he won the nomination, he’d definitely support himself), but, from his
perspective, he didn’t need to be. He didn’t seem to care for anyone
else on the dais (the feeling was mutual), with the possible exceptions
of Ben Carson, to whom he could act strangely sweet-natured, and New
Jersey Governor Chris Christie, with whom his relationship was
complicated. Trump, in succeeding rematches, went on to torment
Florida’s former governor Jeb Bush (“low energy”); criticize Bush’s
brother George, the most recent Republican President, for the Iraq War
(“a big, fat mistake. . . . They lied, they said there were weapons of mass
destruction.”); insult Senator (“Little Marco”) Rubio, of Florida, and
Senator (“Lyin’ ”) Ted Cruz, of Texas. He treated Senator
Rand Paul, of Kentucky, with contempt and made fun of the former Hewlett-Packard
C.E.O. Carly Fiorina’s appearance. These were not policy differences; it
was personal, just as it became personal with Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell (with his aura of a bank officer turning down a loan),
House Speaker Paul Ryan (whose loyalty to Trump was not only wobbly but
self-dramatizing), and, always, Hillary Clinton—as recently as this past
weekend, ten months after Election Day, he retweeted a video doctored to
show him hitting her in the back with a golf ball. In the company of his
fellow Republican Presidential hopefuls, Trump, a self-confessed
grudge-holder, was the foreigner.

So it was not wholly surprising that, after announcing that he would end
protections for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to
the United States as children, Trump would partly contradict that stand
by falling in with Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, and with
Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader and, perhaps above all, a
Brooklyn-born New Yorker, and urging Congress to shield the Dreamers
from—well, from himself. It was a reminder that politics is the art of
the possible, but it is also the art of the personal and of the
regional. A future agreement on repealing the debt ceiling—ending that
wasteful exercise in false suspense—would be a bonus.

It’s difficult to know what Trump believes, or if he believes the same
thing from one day to the next. It’s hard to imagine, between his
clownish, provocative tweets (for instance, referring to North Korea’s
Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man”—really?), his cable-news addiction, and
the rest, that he’s even paying close attention to the job of being
President. But, if cavorting with Democrats could bring the nation
closer to a sensible, and overdue, approach to immigration, that’s not a
bad thing—“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Schumer told the
Washington Post.

And, although the very idea of a Democratic-Trumpian coalition alarms
the left as much as the right, it wouldn’t be entirely horrible if such
an alliance helped bring the nation closer to a functioning health-care
system, or a fairer tax code, though perhaps those are hopes for another
kind of dreamer.

An unnamed Trump adviser recently told Axios’s Mike Allen that it had
“finally dawned on the President: ‘People really f@&@ing hate me.’ ”
That’s true enough. Millions of people do hate him for the damage that
his Administration has done, or intends to do, whether by defacing the
national parks, despoiling the environment, or further undermining
public schools, which already have problems enough. And that is not to
mention the white-supremacist drivel that he has, in many ways, helped
to let loose into the public forum, before and after the violence in
Charlottesville, Virginia. It doesn’t take long for even a seemingly
small wrong turn to lead to catastrophe, in political or human terms.
Trump and his crowd have already made some big wrong turns.

J. B. Priestley’s “Time and the Conways,” now in revival on Broadway,
looks at the life of a Yorkshire family—the Conways—jumping from the
postwar glow of 1919 to 1937, when they try to come to terms with
choices that they’ve made. That’s an exercise familiar to students of
history as well as to playwrights: what if, and, if not that, then
what? Priestley, in 1938, saw “the spectacle of a world behaving as if
we were in a panic on a sinking ship,” but found some consolation in
theories of time that he liked to explore. In modern America, while
trying to imagine how one thing may lead, disastrously, to another, it
would be a consolation if the men and women entrusted with elected
office, following the impulses of Chuck, Nancy, and Donald, really could
learn to swim, even briefly, together.