Congressional Democrats have seemingly figured out how to exploit the one, deep-seated fixation of President Donald Trump, so obvious that it's surprising it's taken anyone – including Republicans – this long: The listed author of "The Art of the Deal" loves to seal a deal. That is, in his parlance, "winning," as long as it feels like he's getting the thing he really wants and feels like his opponent has been backed into a corner.

That the ideological underpinnings of the president's political leanings (who more than once summed up his philosophy as "I want to be greedy for our country") are, to say the least, reasonably fluid compared to congressional and establishment Republicans has been widely understood for some time, but until the last couple of weeks, his liberal opponents' hopes for a less-terrible America have generally been pinned on some idea that the better angels of Trump's nature might win out over some of the more mean-spirited proposals he championed on the campaign trail.

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More often than not, though, they were disappointed: If there are better angels of the president's nature, they seemed more often drowned out by the cacophonous cheering from the crowds at his ongoing political rallies.

But in the fight to save the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (known as DACA) from the administration's dustbin, congressional Democrats seem to have hit on a dual-pronged strategy that feeds the president's desire to make deals: One, let congressional Republicans stymie his plans for just about everything because they can't reconcile their own varying hidebound ideological stances with the realities of governing and having to be re-elected; and two, find a trade that makes the president feel like he both won in a negotiation and is a benevolent boss-man. (Perhaps they caught a few torrents of "The Apprentice"?)

The strategy not only serves to benefit Democrats' policy positions but also their political positioning: The deal on raising the debt ceiling probably screws congressional Republicans in an election year, and the deal on DACA serves to alienate portions of the president's rabid anti-immigrant base – the same base which is propping up his already-moribund approval ratings. The president isn't going to get any more popular with Democrats by sparing DACA, but he'll certainly get less popular with congressional Republicans and his own base, and that's the support Democrats need to chip off to make any headway in Congress or in the 2018 elections.

Consider what might have happened to President Obama in 2012 had he tried much harder to find common ground with Republicans at the expense of Democratic policy positions – if he, for instance, took a page from the previous Democratic tenant of the White House and tried to pass some sort of welfare reform in order to get a win on health care. Democratic voters, disillusioned, might well have abandoned him in droves in 2012, and either stayed home or turned to Mitt Romney; 2010 might well have been even more of a bloodbath, too. (Though that's hard to imagine it having been worse for Democrats, it's surely possible).

President Trump doesn't necessarily think that far ahead: Peeved by congressional Republicans' unwillingness to kiss his ring, upset at his broad unpopularity and unable to force the members of his own party to pass the legislation he desires, he leaned on the one action that clearly gives him a dopamine fix. The man can't resist a good deal, even if it costs him more later than he'd really be willing to pay.