What unites both of these blunders, apart from simple political stupidity, is that neither has much to do with actual policymaking. There is little chance that John Roberts, having declined to do away with Obamacare when the law faced a reasonable constitutional challenge, will rule in favor of a more implausible attack. There is zero chance that the Special Olympics will be defunded; the budget that imagined doing so was a symbolic statement that gets ignored by Congress every year.

So why revive the Obamacare debate? Why set yourself up for “Trump Defunds Special Olympics” headlines? The answer is that there are effectively two Trump presidencies. One offers something like what the president promised on the campaign trail — a break with Paul Ryan’s green-eyeshade approach to entitlement reform, a more moderate tack on health care, an indifference to Obama-era conservative orthodoxies on fiscal and monetary policy.

The other offers a continuation of the Tea Party’s insistence on spending cuts and Obamacare repeal, and appropriately its present leader is a former Tea Party congressman — Mick Mulvaney, the Zelig of the administration, whose zeal is apparently the main reason that the Obamacare lawsuit now has administration support.

The first presidency is mostly real; the second presidency has been mostly imaginary ever since the failure of Obamacare repeal left Ryanism neutered. Trump hasn’t done some of the biggest heterodox things he promised (an infrastructure bill, most notably). But he has ended austerity budgeting, ignored entitlement reform, reformed Obamacare around the edges while leaving its coverage guarantee intact, embraced protectionism and jawboned the Federal Reserve to be more inflationary.

At the same time, though, he has relied on personnel who are associated with 2010-era G.O.P. orthodoxy, rather than elevating the kind of conservatives who have actively theorized for a more populist right. Trump's choice of Steve Moore to the Federal Reserve is a recent case study: Instead of elevating a principled inflation dove (National Review editor and Bloomberg columnist Ramesh Ponnuru would have been my outside-the-box choice), Trump picked a hack who was obsessed with imaginary inflation under Obama, and only flipped to back a looser monetary policy because, well, it was the Trumpy thing to do.