As you may know, our columnist Ross Douthat has a day job as a correspondent for “60 Minutes.” It was in that role that, in the wake of the Republicans’ midterm defeat, he sat down with President Donald Trump last week. The gripping interview covered everything from the Iran war and the future of his party to whether he thinks he’s going to heaven. You can watch it here. Today in our pages, Ross reflects on his conversation with Trump, and the choices the commander in chief faces as he enters his last two years in office. —The Editors
By any reasonable historical standard, Donald Trump has reached the lame-duck phase of his presidency—with his party repudiated at the midterms, the media chattering about the ending of his era, and would-be Republican successors jockeying for position while taking shots at his administration’s policies. When I interviewed the president for 60 Minutes last week, he opened our conversation by conceding (to some limited degree) actual political failure—an extremely unusual gesture by this president, which doubled as a tacit acknowledgment that we’re in a novel dispensation now.
But since nothing about the Trump era has followed normal historical patterns, there’s no reason to expect this new era to find the president somehow sidelined or forgotten or politically irrelevant. Rather, we should expect some form of Trumpian agency to endure until the end, and look expectantly at the places where his choices may profoundly shape the next two years: in domestic policy, in war-making, and in his support for a possible successor.
Read more
