The Guardian view on Donald Trump in 2019: the year of reckoning

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/27/the-guardian-view-on-donald-trump-in-2019-the-year-of-reckoning

The Guardian view on Donald Trump in 2019: the year of reckoning

Thu 27 Dec 2018 17.30 GMT Last modified on Thu 27 Dec 2018 20.53 GMT

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Those who always despised Mr Trump are entitled to point out that this is what they said all along. But this is not just another Trump shock moment. The significant thing happening in America right now is that the undecideds are beginning to come off the fence. Even some generally cautious observers of the American scene now seem to accept that the Trump problem keeps on growing and that the “work-around” options no longer have credibility. “Last week was a watershed moment for me,” says one of these observers, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He wrote on Monday, amid the attacks on Mr Powell: “People wanted disruption, but too often Trump has given us destruction, distraction, debasement and sheer ignorance.”
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This is not just the disruptive Trump presidency that many voted for and some at first decided to put up with. It is a different phase in the Trump era, in which the stakes are higher. Mr Trump now faces both the climax of the Mueller investigation and, from next week, the Democrat takeover in the House of Representatives. Both have the potential to put the president under legal and political pressures that, until now, he has not had to cope with. Mr Trump’s increasingly erratic belligerency is not simply a display of his own continuing unsuitability for the presidency. It is the behaviour of a president who sees the threats facing him and whose instability is such that he may try to pull the temple down with him.