Often, he engages in battles that will gain him little or nothing, even if he wins. Worse, these senseless tussles can cost him a great deal if he loses.
Again and again, Trump puts himself in situations in which the risk far outweighs any potential reward.
A good example of this presidential penchant for self-destructive behavior can be seen here in the Hoosier state.
We’re now just days away from an Indiana primary in which Trump is waging a war that stands to gain him nothing even if he prevails.
And losing it could cripple him as he enters the last two years of his presidency—the two years that are the most difficult of every presidency.
Trump wants to purge from GOP ranks six Republican members of the Indiana Senate. These half-dozen Hoosier lawmakers wounded the fragile presidential psyche by voting against his ill-considered and quite possibly illegal plan to rig the state’s congressional maps ahead of this fall’s general election last December.
There are a lot of things about this Trump retribution campaign that make no sense.
In the first place, Trump’s indefensible gerrymandering scheme here failed not just because these six legislators voted against it.
No, his scam to rig the fall election here in Hoosier land came crashing down because 21 Republican senators—more than half the Indiana Senate GOP caucus—voted against it.
So, if his goal is to punish Republican senators who defied him, why focus on these six and give the other 15 a pass? If he’s convinced that voting against one of his schemes was so wrong, why is he letting more than twice as many slide for doing the same thing?
He’s also failing to take into consideration the reason those senators voted against his power grab.
Their constituents didn’t want it.
No, that’s not exactly true.
It wasn’t just that voters—even Republican voters—disliked Trump’s election-rigging plan. It’s that they hated it.
The senators who voted against the redistricting effort said that their constituents opposed the measure overwhelmingly. In some places, the opposition to the president’s scheme topped 90%.
That means Trump was asking—no, demanding—that those senators offer a middle-finger salute to the very people who put them in office.
Doing so over such a tawdry matter not only would have been dishonorable, but it would also have been a stupid, self-defeating political act. Trump didn’t want those senators to fall on their swords. He wanted them to take running leaps and dive onto their swords so that they’d end up impaled far more deeply.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Nonetheless, the president decided he wanted to spank six of the Hoosier senators who didn’t vote for his Congress-packing plan. He and his allies are spending vast amounts of soft money and political capital to defeat them.
He’s endorsed six challengers—at least a couple of whom wouldn’t pass the background tests required for substitute teachers—to take down the defiant half-dozen.
And what does Trump gain if he prevails in any of those contests?
Well, he sends forth into the fall election a candidate or candidates—and, again, at least a couple of his challengers would be seriously flawed candidates—representing a divided party bearing a message that their first loyalty won’t be to the voters who elect them.
If any of those Trump-backed candidates lose to Democrats in the general election, the president will receive the blame.
Because he was the one who chose to divide the party heading into the fall campaign.
And if the Trump-backed challengers lose on primary day?
Well, to resort to a cliché, there will be blood in the water. Republicans who have spent a decade terrified of Trumpian temper tantrums will realize that it is possible to flout the president’s petulant authority and survive.
They will know that, even in a Trump-friendly Republican state such as Indiana, the president is far from invincible.
That’s why this was such a stupid fight.
Even if the president wins, he loses.
And if he loses, he loses big.
For years, Donald Trump’s apologists have been depicting him as a kind of political idiot savant.
It’s easy to buy half of that.
And it isn’t the savant half.
