TRUMP ISN'T FIRING MUELLER, KELLY, OR NATO -- WHY?

President Trump is doing a tremendous amount of damage to U.S. alliances, but as New York magazine's Heather Hurlburt notes, he's not doing as much damage as he could:

... NATO was still able to put out a unanimous communique calling on Russia to demonstrate “compliance with international law and its international obligations and responsibilities.” And it started a training program for post-ISIS Iraq. So, no, Trump didn’t destroy the Atlantic Alliance at the summit. He is not going to come home and attempt to withdraw from the treaty that commits the U.S. to the defense of its European allies, and vice versa. With all due respect to pre-trip headlines, that was never the plan.

Let’s look at the pattern here: Trump announced that the U.S. was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord — but that doesn’t take effect until 2020. He said he would pull out of NAFTA — and we’re still waiting on that one. He described the Group of Seven major industrial powers as useless without Russia — and yet he is still happy to show up at the summit and throw Starbursts at Merkel. He threatened to quit the World Trade Organization — but really he’s just complaining other countries don’t live by its rules.

Hurlburt's theory is that Trump doesn't want to risk open opposition from Republicans in Congress:

The two pacts he has bothered to walk away from are the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and the seven-party “Iran deal” formerly blocking Tehran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon. What did those two agreements have in common? They were brand-spanking-new Obama projects, not ensconced in years of policy-making tradition. His base was already against them, and both deals could be voided without doing much of anything, or asking congressional Republicans to do much of anything.

Trump is not going to do his opponents within the GOP the favor of giving them an issue on which they have a fighting chance to prevail.

This is the same argument often made for why Trump hasn't given us a full-blown Saturday Night Massacre -- Republicans in Congress have accommodated Trump's every whim until now, but if he fires Bob Mueller they're really gonna get mad!

I don't know what congressional Republicans would do if Trump tried to withdraw from NATO (though I'm quite certain they'd let him can Mueller) -- but in both cases, Trump may believe he's at risk.

In the foreign policy realm, Trump's handler, Vladimir Putin, might be encouraging him to destroy the West in a stepwise manner -- go this far for now, but no further.

Or maybe, in both foreign and domestic affairs, Trump would rather fight than win. When he holds his regular campaign rallies, he clearly delights in having enemies who still seem powerful -- Mueller, NATO, the G-7. He likes telling the crowds that he's thriving even though he's under siege. They eat that up.

Or maybe he can't bring himself to fire NATO any more than he can bring himself to fire John Kelly. (A source recently told Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman that Trump wants Kelly gone but is "too chickenshit" to fire him.)

It's widely known that Trump likes bullying people but doesn't like firing them. Is that what he's doing to NATO?