Behold Our ‘Child King’
A couple of months ago — before we learned that Donald Trump Jr. wanted to spend quality time with people he believed represented the Russian government, before the president publicly humiliated his attorney general
and was abandoned by top business executives, before he claimed “some very fine people” were marching in Charlottesville, Va., alongside neo-Nazis and white supremacists — a Republican member of Congress I spoke with called the president a “child king,” a “self-pitying fool.”
Even then, the words that came to mind when some congressional Republicans described the president were “incompetent”
and “unfit.” There were concerns about his emotional stability.
Mr. Trump was on to something when he said in January 2016, “I could stand in
the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
The political problem facing Republicans is that Mr. Trump’s presidency is a wreck.
Yet there is the simultaneous realization, as a House member told me when talking about Republicans in their home districts,
that “we’re never going to have a majority of people against him.”
Maybe, but for now this presents Republican members of Congress who are privately alarmed by Mr. Trump with a predicament.
If Republicans need more encouragement to break with Mr. Trump, they might note
that the president, who has no institutional or party loyalty, is positioning himself as a critic not just of Democrats but also of Republicans.
Republicans who don’t share Mr. Trump’s approach have to hope
that his imploding presidency has created an opening to offer a profoundly different vision of America, one that is based on opportunity, openness, mobility and inclusion.
