If Watergate became, for Richard Nixon, a cancer on his presidency, then Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal is shaping up as something different: It’s an alligator in his White House.

The alligator, for readers who missed its recent moment in the news cycle, is the predatory beast that the president reportedly wanted to swim hungrily in a moat along our southern border, sharing the waters with poisonous snakes, shadowed by spiked-tipped walls above.

But alligator mississippiensis is also a useful condensed symbol of how the Trump administration has survived Trump’s own deeply unpresidential conduct: Because most of the time, when the president asks for an alligator, the people around him figure out a way to make sure the sharp-toothed reptile doesn’t actually show up.

Their strategies have been various. Sometimes the president says “alligator!” and you just ignore him, which is how you get the spectacle of the man notionally in charge of the executive branch shouting “treason!” at his enemies with no discernible result.

The other day my colleague James Poniewozik wondered at the way that some of the president’s defenders “seem to feel he should be treated like any person who watches TV news, gets worked up & blows off steam, not like a president making statements backed by the power of the U.S. government.” But this isn’t just how his apologists regard him; it’s how his subordinates often manage him, signaling through their actions that his statements really are just rage-tweets, that the power of the government is not in fact behind them.

Of course that approach doesn’t always work; sometimes the president asks you something directly instead of just yelling into the social-media void. Then you need delaying strategies, a promise to look into it, an “alligator cost estimate” proposal that will unfortunately never make its way through the bureaucracy.

Or you can give him some other lizard — ideally a gecko or a bearded dragon, but a Cuvier’s dwarf caiman if you must — and tell him, Here’s the alligator you wanted, sir!

If the president thinks that voter fraud cost him the popular vote, you create a voter fraud commission that will subsequently dissolve. If the president wants a “Muslim ban,” you settle on a dumb but modest travel ban that leaves most of the world’s Muslim countries untouched. If the president wants a bargain with North Korea no matter the strategic cost, let him have a handshake in the DMZ. If the president wants to leave NAFTA, you come up with a way to keep the deal but tweak it and rename it.

And if all else fails — well, sometimes you’ll write up the alligator requisition orders and steal them off his desk.

The two biggest disasters in Trump’s presidency have both been cases where these guardrails collapsed, and the president actually got his way in full. He actually fired James Comey, setting in motion the probe whose workings dominated his first term, and his Homeland Security apparatus actually separated thousands of migrant children from their families, creating the biggest moral scandal of his presidency.

But in other cases, he has been protected by the “don’t-give-him-the-alligator” operations all around him. Indeed, the ultimate fizzle of the Mueller report was possible because that report ended up documenting a president whose staff let him rant about obstructing justice, but then — in Mueller’s own words — mostly “declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

Article continues below

With the Ukraine scandal, though, this protection has broken down again. (Not least because in Rudy Giuliani, Trump found an adviser even more enthusiastic about alligators than his boss.) The quest to get Ukraine’s government to reopen an investigation that would touch the Biden family wasn’t just a wish that Trump expressed; it was a policy objective that, however reluctantly and haphazardly, the U.S. government seems to have pursued. Trump’s now-publicized conversation with the Ukrainian prime minister was itself an act of foreign policy, not just a spitballing conversation, and, whatever its intentions, so was the delay of military aid. We can’t see the full body of the alligator, but you can see it moving in the water; it’s right there.

Now clearly people around Trump still believed that they weren’t going all the way to Alligatortown with Rudy, and maybe when we see the full shape of things, it will be clear that the president’s men did actually prevent the most explicitly Biden-focused quid pro quo from taking shape. In which case there will be defenses of Trump that say, in effect: Look, he wanted an alligator, and we let one thrash around in the water for a while, but we always kept it on a leash.

I expect that will be the defense offered, eventually, by pained Republican senators voting to acquit — that this was bad behavior but happily the president’s diplomats kept things from reaching the level of an impeachable offense.

The only difficulty will be that Trumpland will probably spend the next few months making a different argument: Actually, alligators are great.

Ross Douthat | The New York Times (CREDIT: Josh Haner/The New York Times)