Trump's weather-vane presidency gyrates wildly with the winds - By E.J. Dionne Jr.
President Trump rose to power on a combination of meanness, incoherence and falsehoods. His strategy depended almost entirely on playing off the unpopularity and weaknesses of others.
Every aspect of his approach has blown up on him since he took office, but as is always the case with Trump, he will not take any personal responsibility for what’s going wrong. He must find a scapegoat. The latest object of his opprobrium would seem to be Stephen K. Bannon, the chief White House strategist.
But dumping Bannon would only underscore the extent to which Trump is a political weather vane, gyrating wildly with the political winds. He’s “populist” one day, conventionally conservative the next and centrist the day after that. His implicit response is: Who cares? Let’s just get through another week.
At the moment, he is basking in praise from large parts of the foreign policy establishment for his decision to fire missiles into Syria. This is the hour of maximum danger for Bannon. Trump may now figure he should ride for a while with his newfound friends in the elite. The presence of the disheveled, ultra-nationalist Bannon just won’t do at the tony country-club party Trump wants to throw for himself. And so Trump, in an interview with the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin, did to Bannon what he has done to everyone else: He offered an entirely misleading account of their relationship.
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