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It’s just become trickier for President Trump to fire Robert Mueller anytime soon. Doing so during the Supreme Court confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh — which is likely to last for at least two months — would create a set of problems for Trump that didn’t exist before.

I count three main reasons:

One, Trump clearly loves making Supreme Court nominations. They allow him to look presidential and to be bathed in praise by other Republicans. If he were to fire Mueller — the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election — anytime in the coming weeks, the confirmation process would immediately lose its normalcy. It would be dominated by discussion of Mueller’s Russia investigation, which Trump loathes and makes him look like the opposite of a normal president.

Two, firing Mueller could damage the Republicans’ chances of holding Congress in this year’s midterms. It’s true that most voters aren’t currently paying much attention to the Russia investigation. But if Trump tried to end that investigation, it would immediately create the kind of chaos that typically hurts the party in the White House.