Donald Trump has tried to spin this trying moment of his presidency as one that is “off script” and purposefully so by design. | Oliver Contreras-Pool/Getty Images White House Trump clings to economy as woes mount The president has suffered a series of setbacks — but his poll numbers remain surprisingly resilient.

Inside the White House, President Donald Trump is in a rut.

His administration faces a raft of investigations from House Democrats on everything from Russia to abuses of power. His summit with North Korea’s dictator went bust. His former personal attorney Michael Cohen trashed him spectacularly during a seven-hour hearing last week that offered a road map for future investigations. And the Republican Senate is gearing up to vote against his national emergency declaration.


That’s just the past seven days.

Looking ahead, Trump has a thin policy agenda beyond a hoped-for trade deal and plans to slash more regulations. The invigorating energy of the 2020 campaign trail awaits, but not for several months.

Trump has tried to spin this moment of his presidency — in which he faces perhaps more threats than at any time since his election — as one that is “off script” and purposefully so by design.

“This is how I got elected, by being off script,” he told his supporters to applause at the annual CPAC conference for conservatives on Saturday. “And if we don’t go off script, our country is in big trouble, folks. Because we have to get it back.”

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But this “off-script” moment also marks a new normal inside the Trump White House, say several Republicans close to the administration. Even as political and legal setbacks pile up, the strong economy and emerging 2020 Democratic field continue to give his allies hope for his reelection.

The U.S. economy — historically the most important factor in a president’s popularity —continues to boom. A late-2018 dive in the stock market, whose levels Trump fixates over, has nearly been reversed. Trump’s approval ratings have ticked up to 46 percent, according to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the same percentage with which he won the 2016 election. (Other recent polling has shown him at slightly lower levels.)

“Americans credit President Donald J. Trump as the economy continues to soar,” proclaimed a White House press release on Tuesday afternoon. “Public approval of President Trump’s handling of the economy has hit a new high as the soaring economy continues to lift up American workers.”

Yet simultaneously, Trump’s presidency has never before felt so under attack.

The report by special investigator Robert Mueller could arrive any day, just as House Democrats begin to zero in on Trump’s family, former top White House officials, and former campaign and transition aides.

On Tuesday, a senior House Democrat said his committee was close to breaching the ultimate red line by demanding Trump’s tax returns.

Meanwhile, current and former White House aides remain unsure how Trump will handle the ongoing fallout from the Cohen hearing, which has trained the attention of House investigators on everyone from his personal secretary to his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr. Some believe Trump’s most dramatic eruptions of anger are yet to come.

“He is pissed, but he has not gone into a full rage. I am surprised it has not been more pronounced,” said one Republican close to the White House.

Given Trump’s modest agenda, the mounting investigations — combined with his own sense of persecution — are increasingly defining his presidency. But polling shows that his base remains fiercely loyal to him.

Although it will be some time before Trump throws himself into the 2020 campaign in earnest, staging campaign rallies around the country, he is already showing his eagerness to mix it up with the growing field of Democratic candidates.

“No administration has done in its first two years what the Trump administration has done,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday during the signing of an executive order. “So what the Democrats want to do — they cannot stand the loss, they could not stand losing in 2016.”

Trump aides and advisers believe Democrats will offer an excellent foil for him — especially thanks to rising socialist sentiment on the left that he hopes to exploit as a campaign theme.

Trump can’t simply shrug off newly empowered House Democrats, and the White House is still figuring out how to respond to its bevy of inquiries both politically and logistically.

A former Trump campaign official argued that it is House Democrats who are in trouble, painting their investigative moves as an overreach — a recurring theme among White House aides. (The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.)

White House aides and Trump allies argue that, because multiple investigations into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia have yet to demonstrate collusion with the Kremlin, Democrats are casting about for new grounds for impeachment.

“Democrats are so desperate to hold on to any issue related to Russia, now that the Mueller investigation has not gone as they’ve expected,” said the former campaign official. “They had a bad hand in January and now they have a bad hand in March. They have already overplayed it.”

Many if not most White House officials feel exhausted by the now-constant headlines about the Mueller investigation and Democrats’ various requests. And many aides do not want to get involved in investigations and subpoenas, fearful of potential legal bills and focusing instead on doing their political or policy work for the administration.

Fighting back against the various investigations is the purview of the White House counsel’s office, outside political groups, and the president himself, said one Republican close to the White House.

Trump introduced many of the themes for his line of attacks in his Tuesday morning tweets and comments during a signing ceremony at the White House.

“Now that they realize the only Collusion with Russia was done by Crooked Hillary Clinton & the Democrats, Nadler, Schiff and the Dem heads of the Committees have gone stone cold CRAZY,” Trump tweeted, providing no evidence for his repeated accusation about Clinton.

He claimed that the 81 individuals and entities House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler sent letters to on Monday as part of a wide-reaching examination of possible corruption all over Trump world were all “innocent” and that Democrats were only looking “to harass them,” perhaps unintentionally lumping his estranged former lawyer Cohen in with that group.

“The witch hunt continues. The fact is that, I guess we got 81 letters. There was no collusion. It was a hoax. There was no anything. And they want to do that instead of getting legislation done. Eighty-one people or organizations got letters. It’s a disgrace, it’s a disgrace for our country,” Trump said.