All of these are tough sells or roadblocks, and, at points, appeal to no one. The populist base that helped elect Trump is fired up about the fact that the president may be going back on his word to keep Medicaid in place and provide broad, affordable health-care coverage. With the Congressional Budget Office estimating that his plan would cover 24 million fewer people in 10 years, and that the cost of care is expected to rise, that concern only increases. Moderate Republicans are worried that the plan doesn’t go far enough in walking back Obamacare, and relies too much on tax credits. Regarding the executive order, if the courts are able to successfully block it, it would be viewed as another campaign promise left unfulfilled. At least some of these need to be successful. Otherwise, it would be difficult to see how a Trump administration could recover, and how Republicans could hang onto a majority in both houses of Congress.

Wednesday’s trip, and Trump’s sit-down interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, appeared to be an attempt at grown-up politics. Trump may not have sounded presidential, but he didn’t sound raving mad, either. He suggested that he was open to all suggestions on how to make health care better. He also talked about lowering taxes for the middle class and defended his tweets in which he accused President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower. (O.K., so he wasn’t totally a grown-up.)

Either way, there was little margin for error or a lapse in discipline. But as Trump and his merry band of courtiers landed in the swamp, the president would be greeted with a number of quotidian and picayune scandals that suggest what can happen when you come to Washington in order to destroy it. First, and most prosaically, Trulia reported Thursday that Priebus, the president’s chief of staff, purchased a $1.249 million, 6,194- square-foot, newly built home in Alexandria, Virginia, set on an acre of land, complete with a cascading staircase, gourmet kitchen, formal dining room, and au pair’s quarters off the rec room.

In any past administration, a chief of staff upgrading to seven-figure new construction in a leafy suburb from a $262,900 family home in Kenosha, Wisconsin, would be headline news. It would be particularly newsworthy, considering the fact that word of him plunking down that down payment came days after the Congressional Budget Office put out a report that the White House’s health-care bill would leave 24 million people without coverage in a decade. Not to mention a White House budget proposal that would slash funding for free school lunches, public housing, and food assistance for the elderly.

Luckily for Priebus, his associates within Trumpworld are bumping the poor optics of his real-estate deal out of the spotlight. On Thursday, Buzzfeed reported that Sebastian Gorka, a top national security adviser to President Trump, refused to deny a report from The Forward that he belongs to a Nazi-allied group. Instead, he directed Buzzfeed to the White House. Later in the day, he did deny his association with the group in an interview with Tablet magazine.

Then came the report that Russian companies paid former national security adviser Mike Flynn tens of thousands of dollars just before he became a formal adviser to then-candidate Trump. Even Ivanka Trump, the president’s golden child, raised eyebrows. While her father was in Nashville defending his second travel ban shortly after it was again struck down by a federal judge, Ivanka took in a Broadway musical about a Canadian town accepting outsiders shut out of their homes after the North American airspace was closed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. She was there as the guest of winsome Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. A source close to the First Daughter told me that she found the play’s message “very powerful.”

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The hallmark of Trump’s campaign, and now his White House, is that he keeps his inner circle small. There are only a handful of people who have his ear, and an even fewer number of people who have proved their loyalty to the president. That is perhaps why Kushner, an unquestionably devoted 36-year-old with no government experience, enjoys the most security, and is tasked with securing Middle East peace, creating jobs, and solving the nation’s infrastructure problems.

Though the circle may be small, it is filled with people on the fringe (like Bannon and Miller) with questionable ties (like Flynn and Gorka) and those with their own agendas (Ivanka and Priebus). The circle, then, becomes more like a three-ring circus, whose individual sideshows threaten to take the spotlight off the main act at any moment. The problem is that Trump is not a ringleader, and his team is in desperate need of one. If it doesn’t find one fast, these constant slip-ups threaten to divert attention away from promoting his agenda. The show within the show will become the legacy, and the supporting actors the main players.