You know what they always say. Politics makes for strange threesomes.
Confronted with the mixed signals of mild encouragement toward bipartisanship and lingering worry about presidential spitefulness, one found oneself last week trying to applaud with one hand while shrugging with the opposite shoulder.
A man could hurt himself contorting in response to the Donald, Chuck and Nancy Show, the pilot episode appearing Wednesday with no indication whether the series will be picked up.
What appears to have happened is that President Trump, thinking mostly of himself per usual but surely of Texans, too, was determined to respond to Hurricane Harvey--and the looming Irma--without the ineptitude of George W. Bush on Katrina or the rancor of Republican resistance to relief for Sandy.
He found himself rather liking what the liberal Democratic Senate leader from New York and the liberal Democratic House leader from San Francisco--Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the persons not named Clinton or Obama whom Republicans most love to hate--were offering.
They would deliver Democratic votes by the end of the week to pour billions into FEMA for Harvey and Irma, though only if the action was tied to raising the debt ceiling, but only until December.
Trump beheld that and thought it would be swell--for him and for Texas, if not for Republicans in Congress.
Republicans in Congress didn't want to re-fight the debt ceiling around Christmas, or, indeed, any time before the midterm election. They wanted an 18-month extension. Trump's deal betrays them by imposing a divisive fight on them in December and giving Democrats a quick opportunity at that time for leverage.
But those Republicans hadn't done Trump any favors, blowing health care and talking to the media about him in unflattering ways.
And it's all about Trump, you know.
Conceivably, congressional Republicans could have rejected the Trump-Democrat deal and passed on their own an 18-month debt ceiling solution.
But, as a practical matter, they'd have had defections and driven a further wedge in the party. Trump's base will vote more loyally in the midterms than Mitch McConnell's or Paul Ryan's.
By hopping in bed with Nancy and Chuck, Trump could:
(1) Direct hurricane relief more commandingly than was the case with Katrina and more agreeably than with Sandy. For good measure, he'd avoid the kind of folderol and brinkmanship over the debt ceiling that always befell Barack Obama. He'd look good.
(2) Stick it to McConnell and Ryan and John McCain and Jeff Flake and Bob Corker and the whole lot of GOP congressional critics and smart-alecks.
(3) Get what he lives for, that which motivates him above all else, meaning the ego gratification of good media.
In fact, it was during Trump's call Thursday morning to Pelosi to celebrate their "great press" when the House Democratic leader told the president that immigrant children in the "Dreamer" program needed assurance that they would not be subjected to deportation during the six months he'd prescribed for repealing and replacing the program. She told him a presidential tweet to that effect would be nice.
He promptly obliged her, at the very moment she was telling her caucus what she'd asked him to do.
Trump's mood swing of Wednesday and into Thursday was so decidedly Democratic that he went to North Dakota and praised the Democratic senator from that state whom the Republicans have targeted for defeat next year.
As one long decrying the silly games played by our two parties that serve the extremes and the monied interests but no one else--and who has long contemplated whether a benevolently independent president borrowing from both parties but beholden to neither might be a good thing--one rather liked what one was seeing.
But, ever with Trump, one must temper.
Last week's lurch toward bipartisanship happened to serve for the moment a confluence of the president's personal policy interest and his personal vindictive interest.
But bipartisanship and disloyalty are not the same thing. And perfect confluences don't come along every week.
If Trump were more nobly intended and more capable of equanimity, he would have taken last week's opportunity to construct a three-legged stool functioning more reliably than a two-legged one.
He would have said "yes" to Chuck and Nancy on the quick disaster money. He would have said "yes" to Chuck and Nancy on the three-month debt ceiling solution.
But then he would have done what his self-absorption and spite wouldn't let him do. That was bring in McConnell and Ryan and, rather than poke them in the eyes, ask what he might include for them in this deal to fashion a balanced three-legged stool that wouldn't teeter the moment it's constructed.
For now, the hurricane relief money is on its way; the debt ceiling is raised, and the breaking loose of all hell has been deferred to the season of joy and giving.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/10/2017