Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, Dec. 26, 2017<\/p>\n
To travel the liberal byways of social media over recent weeks was to learn that Donald Trump was on the precipice of axing Robert Mueller and was likely to use the days just before Christmas, when we were distracted by eggnog and mistletoe, to lower the blade.<\/p>\n
Christmas has come. Christmas has gone. Mueller has not.<\/p>\n
To listen to Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, the tax overhaul that Trump just signed into law is no mere plutocratic folly. It\u2019s \u201cArmageddon\u201d (Pelosi\u2019s actual word<\/a>). Their opposition is righteous, but how will millions of voters who notice smaller withholdings from their paychecks and more money in their pockets square that seemingly good fortune with such prophecies of doom on a biblical scale?<\/p>\n Some of these Americans may decide that the prophets aren\u2019t to be trusted \u2014 and that the president isn\u2019t quite the pestilence they make him out to be.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not minimizing Trump\u2019s capriciousness or cupidity. He could yet fire Mueller, the special counsel. Some conservatives\u2019 intensifying attacks<\/a> on the counsel and the F.B.I. are clearly grist for that.<\/p>\n And the tax bill is indeed a messy, fiscally reckless means for Republican lawmakers to please their donors and crow that they are getting big things done.<\/p>\n But the end of the world? Come on. That\u2019s not par-for-the-course hyperbole. It\u2019s peculiar-to-Trump hyperventilation, an understandable response to such an indecent president but quite possibly a tactical mistake. It could weaken the odds of hobbling him next fall, in the midterm elections, and of putting him far behind us in November 2020. And that\u2019s where I, for one, want him: in the rearview mirror, growing tinier and tinier as we zoom, pedal to the metal, toward a saner, more dignified horizon.<\/p>\n But I worry. When Trump\u2019s opponents react to so much of what he says and does with such unfettered outrage, that howl becomes background noise, and it\u2019s harder to make sure that his unequivocally foul maneuvers stand out from his debatably foolish ones. When we constantly conjure the direst scenarios, we risk looking like ignorable hysterics \u2014 and bolstering his grandiose claims of martyrdom \u2014 if events unfold in a less damnable fashion.<\/p>\n Fury isn\u2019t strategy, and there\u2019s no need to extrapolate beyond the facts already in our possession. Take the inquiries into the Trump campaign\u2019s dealings with Russia. They could screech to a halt tomorrow and we\u2019d be left with more than enough evidence<\/a> of corrupt business dealings, conflicts of interest, shady back channels, awful judgment and outright lies among Trump\u2019s intimates to present voters with a powerful case against his fitness for office.<\/p>\n But by obsessing over clear \u201ccollusion\u201d and insisting on visible puppet strings by which Vladimir Putin controlled Trump, we have set the bar dangerously high. Mueller\u2019s ultimate findings could be plenty ugly and still be deemed underwhelming.<\/p>\n Our overreach is everywhere. Some of those social-media threads forecasting Mueller\u2019s pre-Christmas firing went further, envisioning street protests that would prompt a brutal response from government forces just itching for the chance. I spotted the phrase \u201cmartial law.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of the tax-overhaul pushback, which painted the whole of the legislation as an abomination, didn\u2019t acknowledge that Democrats themselves had long favored corporate-rate reductions, as The Times\u2019s Bret Stephens recently pointed out<\/a>.<\/p>\n Nor did the ferocious back-and-forth over Trump\u2019s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel\u2019s capital make clear that many politicians before him had proposed the same step. That doesn\u2019t make it prudent, but it does challenge the portrayal of his decision as some ploy beyond the pale.<\/p>\n The issue here is credibility and not giving the president ammunition to discredit opponents as overwrought, ahistoric partisans in a state of indiscriminate freak-out. When we answer melodrama with melodrama, we\u2019re playing his game, by his rules, and he wins. Better to patrol our language and pick our issues, so that crucial areas of focus \u2014 the demoralization of our diplomatic corps<\/a>, the stacking of the judiciary<\/a>, the transformation of the presidency into a marketing scheme<\/a>\u2014 aren\u2019t lost in the welter and the whirl.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t be the car alarm that always goes off,\u201d John McCain reportedly said to a friend this year<\/a>, explaining his own strategy for tempering Trump. \u201cIf I am, I\u2019m not effective.\u201d There\u2019s wisdom in that.<\/p>\n