• The second trajectory is that his inclinations, or rather his sole inclination, toward self-aggrandizement and power will translate into a governing style that relentlessly neutralizes opposition and cements loyalty to him personally through the historically effective combination of quasi-legal and quasi-ethical threats and rewards. This may look like an effective and desirable governing style until one day you look up and realize there is no viable political opposition left, anywhere, and your democracy has gone the way of the arctic ice and polar bears. It is somewhat difficult to see the way out of this particular path that we have voted ourselves onto. But there may still be hope in Door No. 3.

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• Door No. 3 is: The administration will bollix it up. There is more than a slender hope for this outcome.

Much of what Trump and his mostly prostrate Republican Party have promised you is simply impossible. Keeping all the popular parts of Obamacare and making the costs vanish is only the most obvious example, and they are already fumbling their action and messaging on this. Enacting their stealth program of whopping tax cuts for the rich (i.e. themselves) without an absolute and shameless about-face on deficits will also be a double bank-shot.

Running an administration with this collection of nuts, ideologues and aggrieved grudge-holders would be hard enough in simple times and ordinary circumstances. But running the U.S. executive branch at this particular moment is neither of those. Trying to implement an agenda that defies the laws of logic and/or physics with a wayward group of characters collected from the far side of the looking-glass implies one thing. That they will bollix it up. And bollixing tends to feed on itself.