But you are correct.

Their goal with Trump is to get him through the day without shitting his pants in public.

a bitter old bigot. trump is too stupid and consumed by hatred to think in strategic terms.

without caring about the consequences plan.

can focus on that.

In a game of three demensional chess...

Plus he's never been held accountable for anything he says or does, & he lacks the self-control to censor himself now.

however, I think he's so weak and easily manipulated that some of the people around him do have a plan and know how to point Trump at what they want and get him to sign whatever is put in front of him

He's a highly convenient tool.

why Lindsey Graham and a few others now suddenly love Trump

The tool even Reagan (sp?) was.
Sad. (Sorry, couldn't resist the tweet mocking).

for decades. In a nutshell, it's to subvert labor, eliminate "unnecessary" taxes, expand markets, produce wealth and obtain, preserve and perpetuate control for the "deserving" class and corporations to the maximum extent possible. Everything they do ultimately serves those purposes. Social and environmental consequences are an afterthought if relevant at all.

We should not minimize the potential consequences or the possibility of far-reaching damage to our nation's democracy and our people's well-being via optimism that the monster in the White House has no "master plan". As a poster mentioned up-thread, it's not a plan, it's an MO; that MO has served his needs throughout his life, is backed by enormous wealth/resources, is persistent and is obscenely pernicious.

He doesn't calculate anything. He's just batshit crazy.

And they took that anger to the polls. Then, Russian influence helped convince swing voters that Clinton was corrupt and that they should vote for Trump, or at the very least, not vote at all.

in a restaurant.
And we have to have him at every dinner for 4 fucking years unless we can get the manager to kick him out.

And the entire world is watching, too.

I hate when people try to attach anything that requires thought to this turd.

and the more himself he is the more popular he is among his base.

These same people would implore us not to pay any attention to that. If bribing a porn star with hush money isn't newsworthy, nothing is.

He intends to act on his bigotry, his racial hatreds, and his misogyny. He intends to hold and increase his power.
His diseased mind makes him unpredictable and distracting but he isn't one of a kind. There are lots of Trump-a-likes who have run governments, including his puppeteer in Moscow.

He’s as bad as it seems. We wish it were something different, but it’s actually exactly what it seems. Which makes all this worse then some realize even still.

You're 100% correct.