Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images ALTITUDE What if Trump weren’t nuts? A disrupter with a smidgeon of self-control would be remaking American politics and coasting to reelection.

Altitude is a column by POLITICO founding editor John Harris, offering weekly perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.

A moment when the president of the United States is on the verge of being impeached and also enacting a major bipartisan trade agreement is a good time to ponder the question: What if Donald Trump were not, um, you know ... what is the phrase we are groping for?

A disrupter, say his partisans, a purposeful provocateur. C’mon, knock it off. You know that’s not what I’m getting at.

A raging narcissist, say his foes, a serial violator of decency and law. No, that’s not where I’m trying to go here, either.

Let’s dispense, for the moment, with normative judgments of psychology and law and confine this instead to a purely analytical exercise about politics: What if Trump weren’t nuts?

That word works well enough to describe a president who says things that no other president has said, who picks fights that no other president would pick, who has shattered so many norms that he has altered, perhaps permanently, Washington’s definition of normal. Even Trump, who would not agree that he is nuts, does not seem to mind and at times even jokes about the common perception among foes domestic and foreign that he is.

A Quinnipiac University poll this week found that 57 percent of voters say they are “better off” financially since Trump became president — an obvious reelection asset.

And he presumably would look with favor on the consensus conclusion of a dozen or so top political hands — in both major parties, and including some in his own orbit — I spoke with in recent days about this alternate universe governed by a president who showed discipline and discrimination about the battles he joins and the words flowing from his lips and fingers.

The likely answer is that Trump would be heading into 2020 as a colossus. With an unemployment rate at just 3.5 percent, he would have a wide and possibly leisurely path to reelection, rather than the narrow and arduous one he is facing. More than that, he likely would be basking in recognition of how many of his signature ideas have crashed through old barriers and are driving the agendas of both parties.

Trump’s ideas on trade — as reflected in this week’s deal on a new North American trade agreement — show how he has routed a free-trade orthodoxy that was once embraced by business-minded elites in both parties. Likewise, his view that the United States should recognize China as a long-term adversary on economics and projection of global power is ascendant in both parties. So, too, is his view on the need to extract the nation from “endless wars.” So, too, are his tolerant views on Big Government spending and his blithe rejection of old notions of fiscal restraint and discipline. His ideas on immigration, by contrast, are deeply polarizing, but even there he has drawn support from many working-class voters who used to be instinctual Democrats.

A Quinnipiac University poll this week found that 57 percent of voters say they are “better off” financially since Trump became president — an obvious reelection asset.

Less obvious, though, is another factor that echoes in historical appraisals. The most consequential presidents have typically been communications innovators. Trump’s mastery of Twitter, in this light, puts him in a procession that would include FDR’s mastery of radio or JFK’s and Reagan’s mastery of prime-time television.

In one sense, what if Trump weren’t nuts has an obvious answer: He is president precisely because of a defiant and norm-shattering style, and it is inconceivable to imagine him winning if he spoke or acted like a standard politician. The more precise way to frame the question is: What if he were able to modulate those elements that seem nuts to the traditional political-media axis, turning them up when it suited his purposes but avoiding the most flamboyant extremes?

Notably, two people who have served as White House chiefs of staff in the modern presidency — one Democrat and one Republican — in recent days both answered my hypothetical question with precisely the same number. Trump would have a 55 percent approval rating. The days of presidents winning the popular vote percentage in the high 50s, as Reagan did in 1984, are not possible in the modern electorate, but Trump would still be the overwhelming favorite for a second term.

Who cares about this what-if parlor game? In a way it is like asking what if nuclear weapons existed during the Civil War. Trump is who he is.

“He’s not going to modulate and he’s not going to change,” said Steve Bannon, a former White House counselor for Trump who continues to back his agenda despite episodes of sniping between the two men. “The medium is the message,” he added, channeling Marshall McLuhan’s landmark 1967 book on the media. A stylistically confrontational style, by this logic, advances a substantively disruptive agenda.

After winning in 2016 on racially charged themes, Trump had no choice but to organize his presidency around divisive messaging.

The parlor game, though, has a serious undercurrent. From the Democratic perspective, it is a reminder of some of Trump’s enduring strengths even as impeachment highlights enduring weaknesses. With more self-restraint, Trump would have heeded the strong warnings of advisers and avoided the Ukraine mess entirely. From the Republican perspective, it is a reminder that the party—just as much or arguably more than Trump — pays the price for his excesses.

Attacking the media or Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer with starkly personal insults, however unusual by conventional standards, is catnip to his supporters and arguably linked tightly with Trump’s broader appeal to his partisans. Speaking sympathetically of the Charlottesville rioters, or attacking the FBI or people in his own national security team, is likely accelerating the flight of young people and suburbanites, especially women, away from the GOP.

As it happens, Trump himself lately has been playing the what-if game. At a rally in Dallas in October, he affected a rigid body and dull monotone as he mimicked his version of a conventional politician: “Ladies and gentlemen of Texas, it is a great honor to be with you this evening.”

“It’s much easier being presidential, it’s easy,” he said, as the crowd roared approval. “All you have to do act like a stiff.”

In October, in a rare flash of self-deprecation, he told a crowd: “I do my best work off-script. I hate to say this — I also do my worst work off-script.” That recalled his quip at a Washington press dinner in 2018 when he talked about preparing to negotiate with North Korea’s erratic dictator Kim Jong Un: “As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that’s his problem, not mine.”

One of the more unusual jobs at POLITICO belongs to Matthew Choi, a young reporter who works the night shift and regularly listens to Trump rallies for newsworthy lines. Virtually every rally includes remarks that, had they been uttered by any previous president, would have grabbed headlines for weeks. Shock value diminishes rapidly, and these days it takes more — an especially vivid attack, an unusually discursive line of argument — to get his attention.

The two of us recently conducted an informal textual analysis of some of Trump’s most notable speeches of 2019, as a way of clarifying the nature of “nuts” versus simply “unconventional” or “disruptive.”

The president’s 2019 State of the Union address, for example, was a colorful and coherent case for his policy agenda, with only a small percentage of lines seeming to depart from the prepared script or using language that is hard to imagine coming from predecessors (“If I had not been elected president of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea.”).

The official announcement of his reelection campaign, in June at an Orlando rally, captured many of the same arguments, but about 20 percent of his 7,000 words were personal attacks of the sort that are without modern precedent but are no longer especially noteworthy from Trump (“Crooked Hillary,” “Crazy Bernie,” “radical Democrat opponents driven by hatred, prejudice and rage.”)

Shortly after the Ukraine matter erupted this fall, Trump gave a speech in Minneapolis, a full third of which represented new extremes of rhetoric. (“America-hating socialist” to describe Rep. Ilhan Omar; “either really stupid or she’s really lost it” to describe Pelosi; “these people are sick,” to describe his opponents generally.) It was here that he also seemed to mimic the lovemaking of former FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who lost their jobs after their affair and anti-Trump text messages were revealed.

“It’s not just that he’s nuts,” but of necessity “he’s never let up and he’s escalated. ... The risk is a catastrophic election for Republicans [at all levels] in 2020” — Stan Greenberg, Democratic pollster

Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who recently wrote “G.O.P. R.I.P.” about the long-term problems of Republicans in an era of rapid demographic change, said he has often pondered a different scenario, in which Trump after his election had done more to consolidate his gains with working-class voters and others who feel that conventional politics have failed them. He would have pushed a massive infrastructure program and potentially defined a new center in American politics. Republicans would likely not have lost the House in 2018, and Trump might well be coasting to a second term.

But the fantasy, Greenberg said, is just that. After winning in 2016 on racially charged themes, and needing to regularly reinforce his ties with his base in order to keep a skeptical conservative establishment at heel, Trump had no choice but to organize his presidency around divisive messaging.

“It’s not just that he’s nuts,” Greenberg said, but of necessity “he’s never let up and he’s escalated. ... The risk is a catastrophic election for Republicans [at all levels] in 2020.”

Bannon warned the opposition should not be so sure. Conventional political wisdom predicted the same in 2016, and even he has sometimes urged Trump to tone it down a bit. “In hindsight, he was right and I was wrong.”