Don't say it out loud – but Trump may have just transformed from completely unhinged to a normal President

Donald Trump has been on deck for almost eight months now and it’s been one storm after another. Most of them he either created all on his own or steered willfully into. Probably this will be proven wildly premature, but I’m wondering if maybe he is starting to find his sea-legs.

Partly it has to with the shuffling of his crew. Gone, most importantly, is Stephen Bannon, who, as campaign strategist and then top White House advisor, did more than anyone else to stoke Trump’s most destructive instincts. He is still around and spouting - notably giving a fiery interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday - but he’s no longer able to blow into the captain’s ear.

This does matter. In her just-launched book, Hillary Clinton describes Trump’s inauguration speech in January as 'a cry from the white nationalist gut’. That would be Bannon’s gut. It was his influence that led Trump to pursue a strategy of keeping this base contented while making an expansion of his support impossible. You know; failing to condemn white nationalists, not giving up on a Muslim border ban, stiffing the rest of the world on climate change, and so on.

Bannon, who interestingly said on CBS he wasn’t behind Trump’s decision in June to fire FBI director James Comey, instead calling it the worst mistake “in modern political history”, denied it was General John Kelly who forced him down the plank. No one's buying that. Kelly’s arrival as Chief of Staff to in July seems also to have calmed the swell. His disciplinarian style (some in the West Wing call him nanny) may irk Trump at times, but he has the president’s respect which was not the case for his predecessor, Reince Preibus. Trump thought him a ninny.

Fragments of Bannon and his influence linger. It was post his departure that Trump’s unveiled his decision to start winding down DACA, the Obama-era programme that allows illegal immigrants brought to the country as children, known as Dreamers, to remain without fear of deportation. It was one of the clearest promises he made during the campaign.

Yet Trump has been decidedly half-hearted about it. Rather than killing DACA outright, he asked Congress to consider codifying its provisions into law. He gave them six months to get it done and then hinted he’d take his own steps to stop Dreamers from being deported if they fail. This is most unBannon-like. Indeed, Bannon fulminated about it on CBS. “My fear is that with this six months down range, if this goes all the way down to its logical conclusion, in February and March, it will be a civil war inside the Republican Party,” he said, virtually booing his old boss.

Being soft on Dreamers is one thing, but being soft on Democrats is another. But now we’re seeing that too. When Trump invited the leaders of both parties to the Oval Office last week to discuss breaking a logjam on funding the government and raising the cap on how much it can borrow, the so-called debt ceiling, he astonished everyone by spurning a plan from top Republican dogs Senator Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and plumping for a far simpler, and shorter-term solution from their Democrat counterparts, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

open image in gallery

Thus was born The Chuck and Nancy Show, a possible game-changer. Or rather The Chuck, Trump and Nancy Show. Republicans were ashen, aghast. The president had figured out that if they, even with majorities in both chambers, can’t deliver the changes he is asking for, such as repealing and replacing Obamacare, perhaps he will have better luck by governing with the help of the Democrats. Though that, of course, would mean changes in his agenda. Keeping the Dreamers, fixing but not ending Obamacare. Maybe not building that wall with Mexico after all.

Trump has perhaps realised that even that precious base of his might not mind him nudging the compass if it means things getting done in Washington. Poll after poll suggests that there is nothing that irritates voters more than a Congress that doesn’t function. He insists he has accomplished more in a few months than any president since Truman, but even he knows that’s a lie.

This in turn makes you wonder what might have been had Trump taken a more conciliatory path from the start. What if he hadn’t barreled out of the gate demanding the death of Obamacare and creating havoc at airports with his immigration ban and begun instead with something the Democrats could have cooperated with him on, say repairing the country’s infrastructure, which was also central to his campaign, or attempting a broad resolution to its immigration muddle?

What, after all, did Trump owe Republicans who hardly hid their distress when he secured their nomination fourteen months ago? He hijacked the party last year but he was never of the party. In that brief moment between his taking the oath of office in January and his starting that inauguration speech, you could just about imagine him chosing an entirely different course for his presidency, advertising himself as neither Republican nor Democrat but as an independent, ready to govern by bi-partisanship.

Yes, well. That didn’t happen exactly. He took the Bannon tack and the country has been suffering the consequences ever since. And the more his approval ratings sank, the more he thought keeping his base intact was all that mattered. Compromise be damned.

It’s far too soon to declare that one chapter of the Trump presidency is now closed and another one has opened. Trump could revert at any moment. (Wait, let me check his Twitter feed.) Similarly, Chuck and Nancy may quickly find the limits of what their own base will tolerate when it comes to playing ball with the devil. But if it happens that Trump does somehow manage to redeem his presidency, history might say that this was the month it happened.