Sideshow Is the Real Show...

Donald Trump Is a Consequential President. Just Not in the Ways You Think.

What mattered and what didn’t in Trump’s first year.

By MICHAEL GRUNWALD

In January 20, 2017, as President Donald Trump began his inaugural address, a cold rain began to fall.

A few hours later, Trump claimed the rain had not begun to fall.

“The crowd was unbelievable today,” Trump crowed to revelers at the Liberty Inaugural Ball. “I looked at the rain, which just never came. You know, we finished the speech, went inside, and it poured!”

It wasn’t a consequential falsehood. And neither was Trump’s claim that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a whopper he sent his press secretary out to defend the next day in the face of overwhelming photographic evidence. Neither the meteorological conditions at his swearing-in nor the size of the audience that witnessed his swearing-in altered the remarkable fact that he had just been sworn in as the president of the United States. So why would the holder of the most powerful office on earth insist on juicing his narrative with petty embellishments, especially when his propaganda could be so easily and objectively disproved?

In retrospect, it’s obvious that Trump was starting to construct an alternative reality for his supporters, establishing himself (rather than the “enemies of the people” in the “FAKE NEWS” media) as the only reliable source of truth. Really, it was pretty obvious at the time. Trump aide Kellyanne Conway was already spinning that the administration was helpfully supplying the media with “alternative facts.”

I wrote back in the Week One edition of the Did-It-Matter-Meter that the crowd-size episode “laid down a marker about the irrelevance of facts to this White House” and “staked out new territory in Orwellian up-is-down-ism, forcing Americans to choose whether to believe Trump or their lying eyes.” A year later, Trump is still spinning an alternative reality in which he’s achieved more than any other first-year president, he doesn’t watch much TV, the Russia investigation is nothing but a partisan witch hunt, the successive defeats of both candidates he endorsed in a Senate race in Alabama actually demonstrated his immense popularity, the coal industry is coming back, Americans are finally free to say “Merry Christmas” without fear of persecution, and legislation that would slash taxes for the rich in general and real estate developers in particular would somehow hurt his bottom line. No matter how often the fact-checkers fact-check him, he sticks with his alternative facts.

The most consequential aspect of President Trump—like the most consequential aspect of Candidate Trump—has been his relentless shattering of norms: norms of honesty, decency, diversity, strategy, diplomacy and democracy, norms of what presidents are supposed to say and do when the world is and isn’t watching. As I keep arguing in these periodic Trump reviews, it’s a mistake to describe his all-caps rage-tweeting or his endorsement of an accused child molester or his threats to wipe out “Little Rocket Man” as unpresidential, because he’s the president. He’s by definition presidential. The norms he’s shattered are by definition no longer norms. His erratic behavior isn’t normal, but it’s inevitably becoming normalized, a predictably unpredictable feature of our political landscape. It’s how we live now, checking our phones in the morning to get a read on the president’s mood. The American economy is still strong, and he hasn’t started any new wars, so pundits have focused a lot of their hand-wringing on the effect his norm-shattering will have on future leaders, who will be able to cite the Trump precedent if they want to hide their tax returns or use their office to promote their businesses or fire FBI directors who investigate them. But Trump still has three years left in his term. And the norms he’s shattered can’t constrain his behavior now that he’s shattered them.

If the big story of the Trump era is Trump and his unconventional approach to the presidency, two related substories will determine how the big story ends. The first is the intense personal and institutional pushback to Trump—from the otherwise fractious Democratic Party; the independent media; independent judges; special counsel Robert Mueller; advocates for immigrants, voting rights, the poor, the disabled, the environment and other #Resistance causes; and ordinary citizens, who have made Trump the least popular first-year president in the modern era.

The second substory is the sometimes grudging but consistent support—the critics call it complicity—that Trump has enjoyed from the Republicans who control Congress. The uneasy marriage of convenience between Trump and the congressional GOP explains his two big legislative victories, the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and last month’s $1.5 trillion tax cut. It also explains Capitol Hill’s see-no-evil approach to investigating activities that would have triggered endless outrage and probable impeachment hearings in a Hillary Clinton administration.

In fact, this dynamic explains a lot about politics in the Trump era. Trump’s job security depends on support from GOP legislators. Their job security depends on Trump’s base showing up to support them in 2018, and on Trump improving his approval ratings enough to avert a Democratic wave that would bounce them out even if his base does show up to support them in 2018. So after campaigning as an anti-establishment populist, Trump has mostly governed as a partisan corporatist, earning loyalty points from congressional Republicans by stocking his administration with movement conservatives and embracing their unpopular agenda, ditching his promises to protect Medicaid and close tax loopholes for hedge funds while consistently siding with business owners and investors over workers and consumers. Congressional Republicans, even those who once called him unfit to serve, have mostly ignored his antics and even his sporadic attacks on them, kissing his ring in public even as they roll their eyes in private. They’d prefer their tax cuts without the white nationalist retweets, but it’s a package deal.

Anyway, it’s been a whirlwind of a year, a year of "covfefe" and Scaramucci, a year the United States quit the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accord, a year Republicans killed the Obamacare mandate but failed to kill the rest of Obamacare, a year Trump attacked Snoop Dogg and Stephen Curry on Twitter, a year Trump claimed the airport mobs protesting his controversial travel ban were merely travelers stranded by a Delta computer glitch. It was the first and last year in the White House for Trump’s first chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, national security adviser, deputy national security adviser, chief strategist, communications director, press secretary, and, uh, Omarosa’s job title, whatever that was. Trump ran on change in 2016, and he brought change in 2017, not just change from former President Barack Obama but an obsession with undoing all of Obama’s change. In this year-end edition of the Did-It-Matter-Meter, we’ll once again try to rate the immediate impact and potential long-term importance of all Trump’s changes.

The main takeaway, as it has been since Week One, is that Trump’s frenetic activity hasn’t yet transformed the way America works in too many fundamental ways. But it could. It really could.

Mueller Time

The Watergate scandal was a laborious exercise in connecting the dots, linking some hapless burglars to low-level Nixon aides and eventually to the president himself. In the Russia scandal, the dots are already connected. Mueller has already indicted two Trump aides, including his campaign manager, and gotten plea deals from two others, including his national security adviser. Trump has already admitted firing his FBI director over the investigation, and that he wanted to fire his attorney general for refusing to interfere with the investigation, which, if it doesn’t qualify as obstruction of justice, certainly doesn’t qualify as facilitation of justice. The initial claim that the Trump campaign had no contact with Russians has imploded; it turns out that the Russians had a bunch of sketchy contacts with Trump’s operatives, including his son and son-in-law. The tick-tick-tick meme that’s become popular shorthand for the Mueller investigation really shortchanges the speed with which damning new bombshells about TrumpWorld have been exploding into view. Lately it’s been more like boom-boom-boom.

The point is that the president is in trouble. A-list prosecutors are rolling up his underlings like they’re investigating a Mafia don, and the investigation has expanded into money laundering and other financial matters, which is not the kind of thing the former proprietor of bankrupt casinos wants to hear. So now Trump and his Republican enablers are calling for investigations of Mueller—along with Hillary Clinton, who remains their Public Enemy No. 1—while trashing the FBI and floating novel legal arguments about how presidents can’t obstruct justice. There’s a lot of talk that Trump might fire Mueller or pardon key witnesses, and Republican leaders have given no indication that they would try to stop him. The specter of a constitutional crisis has been looming over Washington all year.

So far, aside from the hasty firing of loose-cannon national security adviser Michael Flynn, the Russia investigation hasn’t had much substantive impact on policy. But it’s the elephant in the room of the Trump presidency, fueling the siege mentality in the White House. And Trump has maintained his strangely obsequious attitude toward Vladimir Putin, reluctantly signing but then ignoring a bipartisan bill that was supposed to strengthen sanctions against Russia, sending Putin an odd public thank-you for kicking U.S. diplomats out of Russia. (He has, however, signed off on sending sniper rifles to Ukraine.) Trump is still resisting the unanimous conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, and he has refused to demand that Russia avoid future meddling. Mueller has yet to demonstrate a quid pro quo, but you don’t have to be able to see Russia from your window to recognize the quid and the quo hiding in plain view.

Trump’s attorneys apparently assured him the investigation would end in 2017. He apparently believed them. But this mess is not going to end soon, or quietly, or well.

Never Never Trump

Last month, Senator Lindsey Graham leapt to Trump’s defense on cable TV, denouncing “this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president.” He might have been thinking of an attempt by one Senator Lindsey Graham, who said of Trump in February 2016: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.” Senator Marco Rubio, who called Trump “dangerous” and a “con man” during the campaign, has also boarded the Trump train. So has Senator Ted Cruz, who refused to endorse Trump at the Republican convention after Trump mocked his wife’s looks, implicated his father in the JFK assassination and labeled him “Lying Ted.” The Never Trump movement, to the extent it is a movement at all, consists of a few conservative intellectuals, not Republican politicians. The Republican Party is now undeniably Trump’s party.

This is one of the crucial developments of 2017, because a few Republican politicians who decided to resist Trump substantively could have become a real check on his power. A few Capitol Hill Republicans have resisted Trump rhetorically, notably retiring senators Jeff Flake, who denounced the president as a disgrace to his office, and Bob Corker, who bemoaned the lack of “adult day care” in the White House, but they have not used their considerable leverage to try to change his behavior. With Democrats voting in lockstep against many Trump nominees and most of the Trump agenda, any Republican senator could have demanded, say, that he release his tax returns in exchange for their vote on his tax bill, or that the bill include some kind of protection for Mueller against presidential interference, or for that matter that Trump defray the costs of his constant jaunts to his private clubs. But Republicans have made it pretty clear that they don’t plan to stand up to Trump. None has pushed for more aggressive investigations of his activities, and some have actively shielded him from investigations, while calling for investigations of his rivals. And while White House aides have often leaked their dismay about Trump’s defense of neo-Nazis after Charlottesville, or his attacks on the FBI and the intelligence community, or his uninterest in briefings that have more than one page or don’t flatter his ego enough, none of those aides has resigned in protest.

In recent months, Republicans have bucked Trump a few times. GOP senators recently blocked a few Trump judicial nominees—including a 36-year-old former ghost hunter who had blogged favorably about the Ku Klux Klan and failed to disclose his marriage to a White House aide, as well as a lawyer whose confirmation hearing went viral after it became clear he had never tried a case, taken a deposition or learned much about the law. A couple of Republican senators who like the Export-Import Bank also scuttled Trump’s nominee to lead it, because he was until quite recently an outspoken proponent of abolishing it. For the most part, though, congressional Republicans have given Trump a pass, even as his approval ratings have drooped into the low thirties. As countless features about Trump voters have confirmed, he’s still popular with the angry white seniors who tend to dominate Republican primaries. It’s not a coincidence that Flake and Corker chose to retire rather than try to win a primary as an anti-Trump Republican (though Corker, for his part, insists he would have won).

One lesson of 2017 is that Congress simply isn’t going to serve as a serious check on Trump’s power, unless Democrats take control of Congress in 2018.

The Triumph of the Right

Trump is not a typical Republican conservative. He used to be a pro-choice Democratic donor. He beat 17 typical Republican conservatives in the 2016 primary, running as an anti-establishment populist deal maker. But one reason Republican conservatives have turned a blind eye to his mishigas is that on almost every domestic policy issue, he has pursued an ideologically conservative agenda and nominated conservative ideologues to execute it. Republicans might be more concerned with a president who publicly threatened to challenge the license of media outlets he hates and privately fumes that all Haitian immigrants have AIDS if that president wasn’t also nominating right-wing judges and cutting corporate taxes.

Trump has struggled to get things done—comparing his promises versus his achievements for his first 100 days was good for a laugh—but those are two very big things he’s gotten done. In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, which was perhaps the most effective shattering of Washington norms—first by helping elect Trump, by giving skeptical conservatives a pressing reason to vote for him, and later by enabling Trump to fill the vacancy with Justice Gorsuch, who will keep pulling American jurisprudence to the right long after Trump has left office. So will the dozen appellate judges Trump installed in his first year, a squadron of Federalist Society conservatives who might turn out to be his most enduring legacy.

The tax bill, a deficit-exploding mix of modest temporary tax cuts for the middle class, more generous temporary tax cuts for the rich, and massive permanent tax cuts for businesses and inherited wealth, was also a major victory for the Republican establishment and its corporate donors. It was originally floated as “tax reform,” an effort to make the code more efficient by eliminating tax breaks and loopholes while reducing rates, but the final version lowered rates while preserving almost all breaks and loopholes, which will make it much harder to do reform in the future. Its immediate economic impact will probably be minimal, since the economy is already near full employment and the Federal Reserve will probably hit the monetary brakes to offset any fiscal stimulus. But the legislation could usher in a new era of trillion-dollar deficits, along with a new Republican push to cut entitlements like Medicare, Social Security and food stamps. And as Trump reportedly told some of his well-heeled guests at Mar-a-Lago, it will make rich Americans richer, exactly what he said he wouldn’t do on the campaign trail.

In fact, the Trump White House agenda bears only faint resemblance to the Trump campaign agenda. Trump never promised to make it easier for internet service providers to sell customer data or harder for ripped-off consumers to sue banks. But ever since he entered the Oval Office, Trump has sided with business owners on just about every issue other than trade, pushing to gut Obama-era rules requiring oil companies to disclose payments to foreign governments, restaurants to let their workers keep tips, financial advisers to represent the interests of their clients, and manufacturers to keep records of on-the-job injuries. In fairness, Trump and his liberal critics alike tend to exaggerate the immediate impact of his assault on regulations; dismantling rules usually requires years of bureaucratic maneuvering and litigation. Still, Trump has made it clear whose side he’s on—the side of companies that don’t want to disclose the toxic chemicals they use, coal-fired power plants that don’t want stricter pollution limits, for-profit schools that don’t want to be penalized if their students don’t get jobs, and bosses who don’t want to pay their workers time-and-a-half for overtime. He still talks about fighting for the little guy, but he doesn’t do it in the Federal Register. That bipartisan infrastructure bill he keeps promising has yet to see the light of day.

In Washington, personnel is policy, and Trump stocked his administration from the start with partisan conservative Republicans. He set the tone when he chose the self-proclaimed “right-wing nut job” Mick Mulvaney, a South Carolina congressman who helped launch the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, to lead his war on regulations as head of the Office of Management of Budget. Mulvaney was also the architect of Trump’s plan for unprecedented domestic spending cuts, which have stalled in Congress, and Trump even picked him to start defanging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was tormenting the financial industry before Mulvaney took the reins in November. Similarly, Trump’s picks to lead the Education Department, Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency were strident critics of the missions of those agencies. And after railing against Goldman Sachs on the stump, Trump chose Goldman Sachs alumni to be his Treasury secretary, top economic aide and deputy national security adviser, and a Goldman Sachs attorney to be his top Wall Street regulator.

Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was also a Goldman Sachs alum, but even though the left hated his incendiary views on race and immigration, he was the leading voice inside the White House for populist critiques of the Republican Party’s trickle-down agenda. But Bannon lost the battle for Trump’s brain and got fired. Trickle-down is ascendant. And Trump’s policies are mostly the GOP’s policies.

Over There

In foreign policy, Trump has been much truer to his America First campaign. He made the United States the only country on Earth to reject the Paris climate accord, defying most of his own advisers as well as the global community, and he is again defying an international consensus by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. He has pursued a pugnaciously nationalistic trade agenda, ditching TPP, threatening to ditch the North American Free Trade Agreement and a deal with Korea, vowing to impose sanctions on China. He has provoked U.S. adversaries, threatening to wipe out North Korea, reversing some of Obama’s opening to Cuba, decertifying the Iran nuclear deal without even claiming that Iran had violated its provisions. He has also insulted some U.S. allies—hanging up on the prime minister of Australia, accusing the United Kingdom of wiretapping him, blaming French immigration policies for a terror attack on French soil—while cozying up to a handful of others (Israel, Saudi Arabia). This would all be curious diplomatic strategy if Trump cared about diplomacy, but his administration has been shredding the diplomatic corps at the State Department, while gleefully undercutting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

So far, Trump’s breaches of diplomatic etiquette have not led to World War III. He basically threatened to nuke North Korea if it didn’t stop its provocations, but North Korea hasn’t stopped, and Trump hasn’t done anything about it. Foreign policy experts warned that his Jerusalem decision would roil the Middle East and scuttle his hopes for peace talks, which was more or less correct, but the Middle East wasn’t exactly unroiled before, and nobody had particularly high hopes for peace talks. His replacement for Flynn as national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, and his defense secretary, James Mattis, are widely viewed as “adults in the room” who can check his more extreme impulses, as Mattis did when the commander in chief rashly tweeted that he was kicking transgender troops out of the military, a policy declaration that the Pentagon figured out a way to politely sidestep.

That said, there’s no evidence that Trump’s in-your-face bombast has actually persuaded any foreign leaders to do anything he wanted them to do. And his Fortress America attitudes are definitely damaging the American brand abroad; a Pew survey of 37 countries found that under Trump, the U.S. image has taken a serious hit almost everywhere except Russia, the notable exception to his talk-tough rule.

One could argue that branding is overrated, even though it was the hallmark of Trump’s business career. The war on ISIS seems to be going well regardless of America’s slumping Q rating. The foreign despots who have started echoing Trump’s mantra of “fake news” were hostile to the free press long before Trump started sliming it. Sure, foreign policy elites are horrified by Trump, but they weren’t all that wild about Obama, who dismissed them and their conventional wisdom as “the Blob.” It isn’t necessarily dangerous that the chin-strokers of the Blob and most people around the planet seem to view Trump as an unhinged threat to global peace and prosperity, an uncontrollable id with an unimaginable nuclear arsenal.

But it’s definitely dangerous if they’re right.

A Change in the Climate

Aside from nuclear war, the most existential threat to life on Earth is global warming. The year 2016 was the hottest on record, displacing 2015, and scientists believe climate change intensified 2017’s awful wildfires in California and devastating hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. Trump, virtually alone among world leaders, doesn’t even pretend to care. He’s trying to reverse Obama’s actions to address climate change, while avidly promoting the fossil fuels that cause climate change. His administration is systematically airbrushing references to climate out of government websites and strategy documents. His top EPA appointees, led by Administrator Scott Pruitt, are almost comically simpatico with industrial polluters and hostile to climate science. His tax bill opened up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and his administration is trying to roll back a slew of regulations limiting coal pollution and oil spills.

But Trump hasn’t reversed America’s dramatic shift toward cleaner forms of energy. The president and Pruitt have repeatedly declared the end of Obama’s war on coal, but the market’s war on coal continues; since Trump’s election, U.S. utilities have continued to retire coal plants at a rate of one every two weeks. Wind and solar are still booming. Car companies are still investing heavily in electric vehicles. And even though Trump has announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris accord, a withdrawal that may never become formal if he isn’t reelected, the U.S. electric sector is about to hit its Paris emissions reduction targets for 2030.

Still, it matters that the U.S. government is no longer trying to act on climate, and that China is taking over the global leadership of the war on carbon. Pruitt may or may not succeed in erasing Obama’s strict regulations on fossil-fuel pollution, but he clearly doesn’t intend to enforce them, regardless of coral reef die-offs or Arctic ice melts or other climate-related disasters. Human activities are continuing to broil the planet, whether or not political leaders publicly acknowledge it, and future historians will find it perplexing that after finally recognizing the urgency of the climate emergency, the United States government decided to unrecognize it.

Trump’s Katrina

Did I mention that a hurricane hit Puerto Rico? The one that Trump responded to with tweets suggesting the island’s problems were its own fault, its Wall Street creditors would have to get paid, the U.S. recovery effort couldn’t last forever, and—in so many words—lazy, entitled, ungrateful Puerto Ricans weren’t appreciating what an amazing job his administration was doing for them?

More than three months later, more than a third of Puerto Rico still lacks power. Its residents are still fleeing for the mainland, unable to keep waiting for a federal cavalry that never came in force. This is a national disgrace, even if the president graded his administration’s response a perfect 10 out of 10.

The Immigration Crackdown

Trump campaigned as a CEO who would whip the country into shape, but that’s not how presidential power works. Legislation requires cooperation from Congress, and so far the tax cuts are the only major bill the Republican-controlled Congress has managed to pass. Better trade deals require cooperation from negotiating partners, and so far Canada and Mexico have rejected the Trump administration’s extreme demands for NAFTA concessions. It’s true that Trump has signed a slew of executive orders, which has made him look busy and decisive, but most of them have been glorified press releases.

The one area where Trump has had an immediate and dramatic impact on U.S. policy is immigration. He hasn’t gotten Mexico or even Congress to fund his border wall, but he has stepped up arrests and deportations of noncriminal aliens, and the crackdown inside the country has helped reduce the flow of undocumented migrants into the country.

Trump has also moved to end protections for undocumented Dreamers who came to America as children, as well as Haitians and Hondurans who had enjoyed “temporary protected status” for years. His travel ban for visitors from seven countries, which was supposed to last only “until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” is still being litigated, but America has all but gotten out of the business of resettling refugees from war-torn and impoverished countries. Trump is pushing to reduce legal migration as well, repeatedly demonizing foreigners as potential dangers to America rather than potential achievers of the American dream.

The United States has usually prided itself on being a nation of immigrants, a beacon of hope for the less fortunate and less free, but Trump is taking away the welcome mat. The next president might put it back—and Congress may yet cut a deal to save the Dreamers—but for now, it’s another way for Trump to flip off the world, and another promise he’s kept to his base.

The Sideshow Is the Real Show

When Trump’s critics aren’t describing him as a dithering narcissist with infantile impulse control, they tend to describe him as an evil genius who manipulates his enemies with look-at-the-shiny-ball misdirection. Their mantra is: Don’t get distracted! In this view, his slams at black athletes protesting police brutality, a black journalist who called him a white supremacist, and a black congresswoman who reported his dismissive comments to a black Gold Star widow were distractions from his efforts to cut his own taxes, or his inaction on guns after the massacre in Las Vegas, or his plans to cut funding for food stamps, disability insurance and other programs serving the vulnerable. Journalists and activists who make a big deal about him lobbing a Native American racial slur at Elizabeth Warren during a ceremony for Native American heroes or getting his intelligence briefings from Fox & Friends or retweeting Islamophobic videos from far-right extremists are missing the real story—his sabotage of Obamacare, or his efforts to roll back voting rights, or his right-wing judges. Focus on what really matters!

Well, it all matters. Trump’s policies matter, but so do his frequent attacks on people of color. It’s easy to succumb to outrage fatigue, but it’s not normal that only three of Trump’s 57 nominees to be U.S. attorney have been women, or that he’s interviewed only the ones most likely to oversee cases that affect him personally, or that he reportedly pressured Senate investigators to drop their inquiry into his campaign, or that he’s publicly attacked potential witnesses on Twitter. It’s not a distraction that in this #MeToo moment of reckoning, 19 women have accused the president of the United States of sexual misconduct. Granted, his public crusade against Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation was a distraction from the final GOP push to repeal Obamacare, but it was also astonishing to see Trump openly chastise his top law enforcement official and former campaign chairman for refusing to intervene in a law enforcement probe of his own campaign. Even the goofy Trumproversies—his surprise to learn that health care was so complicated, his apparent belief Frederick Douglass was alive, his shiny new presidential coin that replaced copper with gold and "E Pluribus Unum" with "Make America Great Again," his brazen lies about the magnitude of his electoral victory—often reveal extraordinary truths about the 45th president. He’s not like any of his predecessors.

The point is that the crazy stuff Trump does is not a distraction from the important stuff Trump does. It’s important when the president does crazy stuff.

The Base Is Not Enough

In 2016, Trump’s victory caught the media by surprise, so in 2017, reporters have fanned out to diners and American Legion halls in rural America and the whiter sections of the Rust Belt, checking in with Fox News-watching Trump voters who, it turns out, still like Trump. They’re not mad that he’s trying to cut their Medicaid or loosen the rules for Wall Street bankers. They like the way he fights their culture wars, taking no crap from uppity athletes or America-hating Muslims or city-slicker liberals who look down on real Americans who say "Merry Christmas." He’s not politically correct, they say, just as they did in 2016. And thus endeth the unstated lesson of these stories, which is that Trump was right when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any support.

Except Trump has lost plenty of support. Only one-third of voters approve of his job performance, while more than half strongly disapprove, even though unemployment claims recently hit a 44-year low and the stock market keeps hitting record highs. The tax bill he signed is even less popular than he is, and the Obamacare repeal he supported was even less popular than that. So is the Republican Party. The dominant Washington narrative for most of the Obama era was the president’s unpopularity, but Obama never polled anywhere near this badly. Trump is politically toxic, which is why a Democratic wave plowed through Virginia in November. The recent Democratic upset in Alabama wasn’t Trump’s fault—he didn’t pick the Republican candidate who got banned from a mall for hitting on teenagers—but exit polling found that even in a state he won in a landslide last year, his approval ratings had slipped below 50 percent.

There haven’t been a lot of feature stories on the women who have been resisting Trump ever since their January 21 march on Washington outdrew the inauguration, or the minorities who feel like targets in Trump’s America, or the educated white suburbanites who have grown increasingly disenchanted with Trump throughout the year. But while Trump has focused almost entirely on appeals to his base, giving interviews almost exclusively to Fox and other right-wing outlets, the big political story of 2017 is that he has alienated the center and fired up the left. It’s telling that not one Democrat in Congress, not even the vulnerable senators in states Trump won easily, voted for Trump’s tax bill or health bill.

The midterm elections are still far off, but presidential parties tend to do badly in off years, even when the presidents are much more popular than this. And congressional Republicans who try to distance themselves from Trump will run the risk that a big chunk of their base will stay home in November. Somehow, Trump and his party need to figure out a way to change the dynamic before then, and another lesson of 2017 is that it’s foolish to expect the president himself to change.

But if nothing changes, that blue tidal wave could swamp the entire country in 2018. And then everything could change.