Triangulation disgusted Democratic liberals, but it did the job: Clinton decisively won re-election in 1996, beat back impeachment in 1998-99, and left office a popular, if not always respected, president. Could President Trump perform an analogous maneuver?

Much comment on the administration seems to assume Trump has nowhere to go but further down. He’s wounded, yes—but still dangerous, maybe more dangerous than ever. He’s at least as capable of destroying the independence and integrity of the U.S. intelligence community as that community’s revelations are to destroy him.

Trump may not be as self-critical or as well-informed as Bill Clinton, but the survivor of multiple brushes with bankruptcy has certainly proven himself a canny survivor with a shrewd awareness of his opponents’ weaknesses. How much information is needed to notice that stripping Medicaid from upwards of 10 million people will prove politically challenging? Candidate Trump ceaselessly promised to protect existing health-care guarantees. Surely President Trump remembers why Candidate Trump did it?

Candidate Trump positioned himself as a different kind of Republican, far removed from party’s former identity and policies. He denigrated previous party leaders in Congress and the executive branch. He bent even Fox News to his will. He beat them all. He owed them little or nothing. Then, in office—he capitulated. He accepted Paul Ryan’s benefits-stripping healthcare plan as his own first priority—and promptly suffered a worse beating than he ever inflicted. Isn’t there a lesson here?

Today’s wisdom is that Trump can’t change. “The president is also a 70-year-old billionaire who has been far too rich — for far too long — to know how to adjust his habits to other people’s needs,” writes New York’s Eric Levitz. And it’s surely true that he lacks many of the resources to execute Clinton-style triangulation. His White House lacks policy expertise, to put it mildly. His communications operation has been thrust onto the seemingly permanent defensive. His standing in the polls has fallen to the high 30s: Watergate-levels.

But in politics as in war, “nothing is ever as good or as bad as the first reports of excited men would have it,” in the memorable words of Field Marshall Slim. Clinton was rescued in 1996 as much by the shifty gimmicks invented by his campaign guru Dick Morris as by the substantive policy agenda of the New Democrats.

I challenge all our schools to teach character education, to teach good values and good citizenship. And if it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms.

Trump’s goal is not to be a “successful president” in the usual sense of that term. It’s obvious by now that he doesn’t have much of a policy agenda. He has a personal agenda, and that agenda is going rather well. The Trump brand is thriving. His family is planning a second hotel in Washington, D.C. He is busily promoting his properties. He has paid little political price for violating his promises not to bring his children into government. And while the Kushner family’s hopes for a big payday deal with a Chinese bank have been balked for the time being, Trump still enjoys almost total ethical leeway within Congress, as my colleague McKay Coppins has nicely detailed.