The Bipartisan President

“He likes us. He likes me, anyway.”

Thus Chuck Schumer, speaking about his new best friend, Donald Trump. Schumer does indeed have some natural affinity with the president. The former was born in Brooklyn, the latter in Queens. They are both sons of the outer boroughs of New York City, men who will always know that Manhattan looks down on them.

Last week a live microphone picked up Senator Schumer’s account of his most recent conversation with the president. “I said, ‘Mr. President, you’re much better off if you can sometimes step right and sometimes step left. If you have to step just to one direction, you’re boxed.’ He gets that. . . . It’s going to work out, and it’ll make us more productive, too.”

It seems like the craziest idea in modern American political history. A Republican president, whose party controls both houses of Congress and who enjoys enduring popularity among Republican voters, is playing footsie with the Democrats. The ghastly possibility is dawning on Trump’s most ardent supporters on the right that he might be contemplating outright defection, to become the first bipartisan president in American history.