I get fidgety when critics insist on interpreting Trump’s behavior in terms of deliberate strategy. He’s not a historian, lord knows. He’s not even an ideologue: Insofar as he appears to be following some script, I suspect he’s simply intuiting how the “scenes” should logically proceed as one goes about trying to consolidate power. He’s a Caesar by instinct, not by tutelage.

What he really is at heart, though, is a sh-tposter.

That’s the second way to understand his first month. Forget the authoritarian playbook: Day by day we’re finding out what it would look like if we handed the federal government over to the same slimy alt-right blowhards who have colonized Twitter and let them have their run of the place.

Nick Catoggio