What Trump needs most for 2020 is an excuse, and a plausible enemy. Complaints about “Democratic obstruction” and “partisan Russia witch hunts” sound absurd when Republicans control both houses of Congress. Lose even one chamber, however, and suddenly those talking points acquire some plausibility, at least in the ears of Trump-inclined voters. And even if blaming Congress does not reflect a deliberate strategic calculation—with this president, it’s difficult to conclude that anything does—it could be regarded as working to his advantage. The Trump base is much more clearly defined by its cultural resentments than by any policy program: sacrificing the program to enflame the resentments may well appear to the embattled Trump White House as the least bad survival option.

Until Charlottesville.

Trump supporters often invoke the president’s supposed mandate from “the people.” Here’s what Kellyanne Conway told Andrea Mitchell just last weekend:

Republican consultants ... totally missed what was happening in America. That the forgotten man and forgotten woman, many of whom had voted for Democrats in the past, many of whom had never voted, or never voted in decades, came forth and made this new Trump coalition in a way that—in a way that frankly, respectfully, the last couple of Republican candidates did not.

Trump aides say such things so often that they themselves may have lost sight of how untrue they are. Trump not only lost the popular vote in 2016, but he won a smaller share than Mitt Romney in 2012, and only 0.3 percent more than John McCain in the disastrous year 2008. (The tallies stand at 45.93 percent for Trump vs. 45.6 percent for McCain.) With barely one-third of the U.S. public approving his presidency in the last pre-Charlottesville polls, Trump’s presidency has sunk to the lowest level of popularity ever recorded in a president’s first year.

The Trump team may be trying to replay Bill Clinton’s triangulation of 1995-96, when Clinton won reelection by positioning himself as a moderate centrist between the extremes of the congressional Republicans and congressional Democrats. And maybe Trump could have executed a blue-collar version of that strategy by joining cultural conservatism to a free-spending populism of infrastructure spending and the defense of Medicare and Medicaid. Instead he’s positioned himself in such a way that other political actors can triangulate against him: congressional Republicans, by rejecting Trump’s indulgence of murderous racism; congressional Democrats, by fastening Trump to the widely disliked Ryan-McConnell policy agenda.

It’s probably impossible for a man of Trump’s psychology to process how much legal jeopardy he and his family may be in—and how utterly he depends on Republicans in Congress to shield him. President Bill Clinton faced down scandal politics in his second term because his party united to support him, a decision politically vindicated by the strong Democratic showing in 1998, the best sixth-year election performance in modern history. Trump, by contrast, is doing his utmost to persuade congressional Republicans that it could well be less disastrous to face the voters in 2020 under Mike Pence than Donald Trump. Pence apparently thinks so, too. Pre-Charlottesville, that remained a tough sale. Post-Charlottesville, things look different.