Julian Zelizer is a history and public affairs professor at Princeton University and the author of "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society." He's also the co-host of the "Politics & Polls" podcast. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) President Donald Trump is running a dual-track presidency. This week ended with a collision between two major stories affecting his presidency. At the same exact time that the massive corporate tax cut reached the final vote in the Senate, successfully passing in the dead of the night by a narrow margin of 51 to 49, the nation learned that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with Sergey Kislyak, then-Russian ambassador to the United States, and that he had been told by a "top member" of the transition team—reportedly Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner—to reach out to the Russians to learn more about the UN vote regarding Israeli settlements.

The convergence of these two stories was a powerful reminder of the two-track presidency that President Trump is trying to conduct—and the risks that Republicans take each day by going along with the part that they find more appealing.

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On one track, the administration has aggressively been pursuing a pro-corporate, deregulatory agenda to free financial and business institutions from as much federal intrusion as possible, whether that means drastically slashing corporate taxes or systematically dismantling the Obama-era regulations to curb climate change and financial malfeasance.

The President is also moving fast and furiously, primarily through executive orders, to ramp up administrative efforts curbing illegal immigration and banning many refugees. Despite all the head-scratching and complaining that has come from the Republicans about the White House, this has been an agenda that much of the GOP seems to be pleased about. The truth is that for all the talk about Trump being "anti-establishment," it sits well with the direction in which the Republican Party has moved in recent years.

Then there is the second track—the Russia scandal. Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's relationship to the Trump campaign and administration, as well as the possibility that Trump obstructed justice when he fired FBI Director James Comey, is not going away. Every time that the news about the issue subsides, there is a new bombshell story about another indictment or more evidence that administration officials had not been truthful with federal authorities.

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