2. Overlooked signs of recurrent coupish behavior. If some liberal writers like to entertain fantasies of Trump magically ceasing to be president, reality itself seems to be sending repeated signals that Trump isn’t the president at all. It’s easy to understand how we got here: The president is ignorant, angry, and impetuous — and some of his positions on policy clash loudly with the preferences of the leading members of his own party. That produces an unnerving situation in which the Trump administration pursues an agenda that explicitly contradicts the views of the man who’s supposed to be in charge.

The most recent example concerns the apparent desire of factions within the administration to punish Russia for its alleged use of a nerve agent against a Russian national living in the U.K. and for staunchly supporting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad — and the president’s staunch resistance to doing anything that might antagonize Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now maybe Trump really is so unfit, so incompetent, and so compromised by corruption that we should hope that such extraconstitutional actions continue for the rest of Trump’s presidency. But we (and certainly those who fret about the dangers confronting free government in the United States) shouldn’t delude ourselves about what this means, or what it portends for the future of American politics. Once such coupish acts become routine, it will be very hard to rule them out of bounds, even once the Trump administration has departed the scene.