ELI LAKE DOESN'T UNDERSTAND HOW RANK-AND-FILE RIGHT-WINGERS THINK

This Eli Lake argument is clever, but it's wrong.

Trump’s Best Defense on Impeachment Undermines His Case for Re-Election

Insubordinate bureaucrats may save him from being removed from office, but they also show him to be a weak president.

Lake writes:

The best defense of President Donald Trump on the first day of the House’s public impeachment hearings came from Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican. She cited “the two most important facts” for Americans trying to understand the inquiry into the president withholding military assistance to Ukraine unless it investigated former Vice President Joe Biden: “No. 1, Ukraine received the aid,” she said. “No. 2, there was in fact no investigation into Biden.”

Stefanik’s defense is ... dangerous because it reveals Trump’s weakness as a leader.

... Donald Trump has been saved from himself time and again by the insubordination of his own government.

Just look at the second part of Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections, where he documents how Trump ordered subordinates to fire him, only to have his orders ignored. Or see Bob Woodward’s 2018 book, where he reports how Gary Cohn, then Trump’s economic adviser, literally snatched papers off the president’s desk to prevent him from pulling out of trade deals.

... Even when Trump gets his way on policies opposed by his advisers, they often find a way to mitigate his initial decisions. A few weeks after Trump made the sudden decision in October to remove remaining U.S. forces from northern Syria, he ordered many of them back to secure oil fields once controlled by Islamic State.

... Stefanik’s defense is an effective rebuttal in the context of impeachment. In the context of a re-election campaign, it’s damning.

Lake really doesn't understand how Trump fans view their hero -- or, for that matter, what these voters have believed about American politics for decades.

To his fans, President Trump is both powerful and besieged. Sure, they believe he smites his enemies on a daily basis, but they also believe that his enemies are extraordinarily powerful supervillains who never relent in their campaign to sabotage his presidency (and to sabotage all the good things in America, like the Second Amendment and the Wall). Trump's fans don't regard him as too weak to deal with a few subversive aides, or a handful of Foreign Service officers reluctant to do his bidding. What they see is Trump fighting everyone in the "Deep State," everyone in the media, everyone in academia, George Soros, the European Union, the Clintons, the Bidens, the gays, the climate-change hoaxsters (i.e., the people who believe climate change exists) -- he's fighting "the swamp" in all its bubbling, oozing horror. He's up against the most powerful league of evildoers in human history, worse than any cartel of malefactors in any comic-book universe, and his ability to defeat any of them at any time is a feat of superhuman strength.

Right-wing voters have been this way for decades. Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, George W. Bush -- no matter how much power they had, there was always a sinister cabal of establishmentarians threatening to bring them down. Nixon was simultaneously a tough law-and-order man and an incessant whiner about the forces arrayed against him, and his base didn't see a contradiction.

That's even more true of Trump. His wins are a sign of his strength, and his failures are also a sign of his strength, because we see how fiendishly powerful his enemies are. As long as he's still president, he's still a superhero.