Behold Our ‘Child King’<br />A couple of months ago — before we learned that Donald Trump Jr. wanted to spend quality time with people he believed represented the Russian government, before the president publicly humiliated his attorney general<br />and was abandoned by top business executives, before he claimed “some very fine people” were marching in Charlottesville, Va., alongside neo-Nazis and white supremacists — a Republican member of Congress I spoke with called the president a “child king,” a “self-pitying fool.”<br />Even then, the words that came to mind when some congressional Republicans described the president were “incompetent”<br />and “unfit.” There were concerns about his emotional stability.<br />Mr. Trump was on to something when he said in January 2016, “I could stand in<br />the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”<br />The political problem facing Republicans is that Mr. Trump’s presidency is a wreck.<br />Yet there is the simultaneous realization, as a House member told me when talking about Republicans in their home districts,<br />that “we’re never going to have a majority of people against him.”<br />Maybe, but for now this presents Republican members of Congress who are privately alarmed by Mr. Trump with a predicament.<br />If Republicans need more encouragement to break with Mr. Trump, they might note<br />that the president, who has no institutional or party loyalty, is positioning himself as a critic not just of Democrats but also of Republicans.<br />Republicans who don’t share Mr. Trump’s approach have to hope<br />that his imploding presidency has created an opening to offer a profoundly different vision of America, one that is based on opportunity, openness, mobility and inclusion.
