On Wednesday, the hundred and forty-fifth day of his Presidency,
Donald Trump did something out of character: he acted Presidential. A
few hours after James Hodgkinson, a sixty-six-year-old building
inspector from Illinois, shot up an early-morning practice of the
Republican congressional baseball team, Trump issued a statement at the
White House. He provided an update on what had occurred, praised the two
Capitol Police officers who were shot while exchanging fire with
Hodgkinson, and said that he and the First Lady were praying for the
victims.

“We may have our differences, but we do well in times like these to
remember that everyone who serves in our nation's Capitol is here
because, above all, they love our country,” Trump
said.
“We could all agree that we are blessed to be Americans, that our
children deserve to grow up in a nation of safety and peace, and that we
are strongest when we are unified and when we work together for the
common good.”

Almost as notable as Trump’s statement was the period of dignified
silence that followed it. While some conservative media figures, such as
Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, immediately sought to blame the shooting
on anti-Trump liberals, Trump himself stayed above the fray. His Twitter
account was quiet for most of the day, until, at 9:41 P.M., he reported
that he had just left the hospital after visiting one of the shooting
victims, Representative Steve Scalise.

For once, Trump had followed protocol and done what a President is
supposed to do in a crisis: act as a unifier. Even some of his harshest
critics gave him credit. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote,
“I was impressed with President Trump’s well-crafted remarks.” Stephen
Colbert, the host of “The Late Show,”
said,
“I want to say thank you to the congressional leadership, and to the
President, for responding to this attack of terror in a way that gives
us hope that whatever our differences, we will always be the United States of America.”

The Trump transformation lasted twenty-four hours. Shortly before 7 A.M.on Thursday morning, he was back to his old ways on Twitter. Responding
to news reports that Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia
investigation, is now investigating him for possible obstruction of
justice, Trump
wrote,
“They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero
proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story.
Nice.” About an hour later, he posted
another message: “You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American
political history – led by some very bad and conflicted people! #MAGA”

Trump’s fury didn’t diminish as the day went on. “Why is that Hillary
Clintons family and Dems dealings with Russia are not looked at, but my
non-dealings are?” he
wrote in a mid-afternoon tweet. In a follow-up message, he
added,
“Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, ‘bleached’ emails, & had husband
meet w/AG days before she was cleared- & they talk about obstruction?”

These outbursts can be read in at least two ways. The “rational actor”
explanation is that Trump and his allies are engaged in a deliberate
campaign to destroy the credibility of Mueller, a Republican and a
former director of the F.B.I., by depicting him as a friend of James
Comey and the Democrats. Newt Gingrich, a key Trump surrogate, has been
taking this line in recent days, and Trump’s mention of “very bad and
conflicted people” seemed to be a reference to Mueller.

The attacks on Mueller could be preparing the ground for Trump to fire
him. But the White House is well aware that such an incendiary move
would create a constitutional crisis that would probably end with
Congress insisting on the appointment of another independent prosecutor.
(That’s what happened in 1973, after Richard Nixon forced the Justice
Department to fire Archibald Cox. Within two weeks, Leon Jaworski
replaced Cox.) The Administration, therefore, might be playing a longer
game. Few people in Washington think that Mueller will end up bringing
charges against the President. The conventional wisdom is that, if he
concludes that an obstruction case is justified, he will hand the matter
over to Congress, which would then have to decide whether to impeach the
President.

If that happens, the survival of Trump’s White House would depend on its
ability to keep Capitol Hill Republicans in line. And one way to
accomplish this is to exert pressure on them via Trump’s base. In an
interview with Bloomberg
View,
Bob Inglis, a former G.O.P. congressman from South Carolina, explained
that, even with the President’s approval rating in the thirties, his
diehard supporters “can kill you in a Republican primary, which is why
elected Republicans are terrified of those voters.” Trump must know that
he is unlikely to convince most of the country that Mueller has an axe
to grind. But it may still make sense for him to rile up viewers of Fox
News, readers of Breitbart, and his own Twitter followers.

Yet there is a second way to read these attacks on Mueller. It is
possible that Trump, having seen his decision to fire Comey boomerang on
him in spectacular fashion, is simply ranting and raving.

The reports about Mueller’s investigation shouldn’t have come as a
surprise to him. The existence of Comey’s memos, in which he recorded
what the President said to him about dropping the investigation of Mike
Flynn, has been known for a month now. And, in his testimony to the
Senate Intelligence Committee last week, Comey said straight out that
Mueller would have to reach a judgment on whether an offense had been
committed.

Officially, the White House stance is that it won’t have much more to
say on the matter until the President is exonerated, and that questions
should be directed to Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz. But Trump
clearly can’t stop himself. He reportedly watches hours of news coverage
about the Russia investigation every day, and vents about it to anybody
who will listen. “Aides have tried to change the subject, with little
luck,” Politico’s Josh Dawsey
reported on Thursday. “Advisers have tried to buck up the president by telling
him to be patient, agreeing that it is a ‘witch hunt’ and urging him to
just let it play out—and reassuring him, ‘Eventually, you will be
cleared,’ in the words of one. But none of that has changed Trump’s
response.”

It has become a cliché in Washington to say that Trump is his own worst
enemy—but it’s true. By leaning on Comey to drop the Flynn
investigation, and firing him when he didn’t, Trump transformed an
F.B.I. probe that was still focussing on his campaign aides and
associates into a special-counsel investigation in which he is now a
principal target. And, although almost all the Republicans on Capitol
Hill are still supporting him, the trends are in the wrong direction.
Earlier this week, Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, issued what was
effectively a public warning to Trump not to fire Mueller. On Thursday,
the Senate approved a bill that would impose additional sanctions on
Russia and make it difficult for the Administration to lift them.
Meanwhile, a new
poll from the Associated Press showed that Trump’s approval rating has
dropped to thirty-five per cent, while his disapproval rating has risen
to sixty-four per cent.

A different President might look at these figures and decide to change
course. But, of course, we are not dealing with a different President.
This President apparently learned no lessons from the way his measured
response to the shooting at the congressional baseball practice was
received. On Friday morning, Trump launched yet another fusillade of
tweets, in which he mocked the Russia investigation, lambasted the “Fake
News Media,” and turned against Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General,
who told Congress earlier this week that he supported Mueller’s
investigation and wouldn’t fire him without proper cause. “I am being
investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire
the FBI Director!” Trump wrote. “Witch Hunt.”

In response to this fusillade, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein issued a statement, saying that Trump was sending a message "that he believes the rule of law doesn't apply to him and that anyone who thinks otherwise will be fired…. We're a nation of laws that apply equally to everyone, a lesson the president would be wise to learn." But is Trump, in this mood, capable of learning anything?'