Imagine, if you can, that you work for Donald Trump. Your boss, above all, wants to be popular, and to be seen as “the man.” He has a bad temper and a thin skin. He doesn’t have fixed ideological views on most subjects, but he does have personal biases, and he thinks it is essential to maintain good relations with his base. He hates being told that he can’t do anything he really wants to do. Having complained about essentially everything that Obama did in office, he is determined to obliterate his legacy. Finally, he values loyalty over competence, but for him, loyalty is purely a one-way street; if anything goes wrong, he will throw you under the bus.
The problem is that most of what he wants to accomplish is clearly harmful to his party and to the American people. How do you make him happy without leading the country to destruction?
The answer clearly is, encourage him to take half-measures and leave the rest to Congress. By doing that, he appears to keep faith with his base, while leaving open the possibility that Congress can fix the problem he is creating, maintaining plausible deniability for any resulting damage, and opening GOP congressional leaders to criticism if they don’t clean up the mess. And so, we have the DACA decision, the sort-of decertification of the Iran deal, and his efforts to compel action on Obamacare repeal by damaging the insurance market.
Given the differences of opinion among the GOP factions, it is far from clear that Congress is in a position to address the issues that Trump is creating. If you’re a sane and moderate GOP congressman, that should terrify you, because Trump is likely to blame you and the other swamp creatures for everything that goes wrong between now and the 2018 election, and his supporters will probably agree with him.