We've learned by now to never underestimate how little Donald Trump knows.
After he launched his improbable bid to become U.S. President in mid-2015, most of us just assumed that some of his more ignorant statements about Mexicans, immigration, Muslims, terrorism, trade, China, the Middle East, Obamacare and government in general were the hyperbolic rantings of a populist showman. They were so patently baseless and sensationalist that no reasonable person could believe that Mr. Trump, a reality TV star, wasn't just faking it all to boost his ratings. He was to be taken no more seriously than Vermin Supreme, the performance artist who had run for president on a platform advocating zombie preparedness and time travel.
It soon became clear, however, that Mr. Trump was neither acting nor feigning his ignorance. He was perhaps the most uninformed candidate to ever get within striking distance of a major U.S. party nomination. His understanding of complex domestic and foreign-policy issues was so blissfully simplistic and his personal neediness so great that he was a sitting duck for a white-nationalist Pygmalion such as Steve Bannon to manipulate all the way to the White House.
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When Mr. Trump won, however, he didn't so much go to Washington as go to school. Like any attention-challenged high schooler, he still couldn't resist playing hooky and pounding out early morning tweets that read like adolescent cries for help. But you could always tell when he had absorbed some new (to him) fact by the enthusiasm with which he shared it. "Great president. Most people don't even know he was a Republican," Mr. Trump gushed about Abraham Lincoln in March, even though the Republican Party has been known as the Party of Lincoln since, oh, forever. Most of us were just glad he had demonstrated a capacity to learn.
He's been learning a lot (again, for him) since arriving in D.C. Mr. Trump had run for office vowing to abolish former president Barack Obama's health-care law, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Obamacare protected millions of his own voters. Less than a month into his term he declared: "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated." Nobody, if you exclude every president since Harry Truman and 300 million Americans who must navigate a crazy system.
Mr. Trump seems to have had a true epiphany since banishing Mr. Bannon last month. He's realized he's not a Republican, despite last week insisting he is one "through and through." In fact, he has realized he doesn't even like Republicans. He clearly despises Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky prude. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan is just too Wisconsin-clean for a crude-talking Manhattan real estate developer to relate to. And relate-ability is just so critical to winning over someone as insecure as Mr. Trump.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer understands that. The Brooklyn-bred Democrat also has the killer instinct a fellow New Yorker can appreciate. With Republican leaders denying the President the legislative "wins" he craved, Mr. Schumer swooped in to offer a deal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling without including any of the spending cuts right-wing Republicans typically demand as ransom for increasing the federal government's borrowing authority. Mr. McConnell and Mr. Ryan could hardly reject it, lest they be blamed by voters for causing a government shutdown.
Freed from Mr. Bannon's grasp, Mr. Trump has also realized he doesn't really want to deport 800,000 young people who were brought to the United States illegally by their parents, after all. He's learned that most of these so-called DREAMers are "good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military," as he tweeted last week, after he had dinner at the White House with Mr. Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Mr. Trump had called Mr. Schumer "head clown" and Ms. Pelosi "incompetent." Now they're his teachers.
Mr. McConnell and Mr. Ryan don't want to deport the DREAMers, either. But many of their own members in Congress do, terrified as they are of being singled out for criticism on right-wing talk radio. Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell must now swallow any deal the President does with the Democrats, and risk a GOP civil war, or veto the deal and, well, risk a GOP civil war.
Conservative conspiracy theorists who argued in 2015 that Mr. Trump was a Democratic ploy to destroy the GOP may feel vindicated. But really, the low-information President is just learning.
Konrad Yakabuski