If you can’t pin down Trump’s position, you can’t be mad at him for it

We’ve seen this dance before. On the campaign trail, Trump pledged sweeping, inexpensive health-care coverage for everybody. When Republican leaders in Congress started to put together a plan to overhaul Obamacare, that’s not what it looked like, but Trump went along with it anyway. As debate over a replacement unfolded, Trump vacillated on what he claimed to want, celebrating a House-passed bill and then deriding it as “mean” and, in a matter of hours, flipping back and forth on whether he wanted to simply repeal the bill or to repeal and replace it or both.

Part of the problem is that Trump’s grasp of the nuance of these policies appears to be limited. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that “[a]s late as one hour before the decision [on DACA] was to be announced, administration officials privately expressed concern that Mr. Trump might not fully grasp the details of the steps he was about to take, and when he discovered their full impact, would change his mind.” It seems as if that may have happened — that, as the Times’s Maggie Haberman speculated on Twitter, Trump saw the to-him-unexpected negative reception to his administration’s plan on television and began to waffle.