Three reverses landed in quick succession. Two of them matter enormously to him personally. The third could decide how the next two years go for him and for his party.
A botched attempt to fix a Washington landmark, trouble confirming his choice to run the justice department, and a war in Iran that keeps refusing to end. Most of these problems he built himself.
His method for dealing with them has not changed since the first term, when the phrase “alternative facts” entered the language. Trump decides what is true and holds the position regardless of what turns up to contradict it.
What is different this time is who he is arguing with. In the first term his loudest fights were with internal dissenters. Now he is at odds with people who have proved their loyalty over and over.
The prosecutor who read the file
On Friday, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro moved to drop felony destruction of property charges against former Olympian David Hearn, whom federal prosecutors had accused of deliberately damaging the Reflecting Pool near the Washington Monument.
Pirro is a former Fox News host and about as reliable a Trump ally as Washington offers. In a 20-page court filing she wrote that the damage came from a botched installation rather than vandalism, and put the original decision to charge Hearn down to misleading information from the Department of the Interior.
The president can operate on alternative facts. A prosecutor standing in front of a judge and a possibly unimpressed jury cannot. Pirro looked at what she would have had to prove and walked away from it.
Trump had backed the vandalism version publicly and he was not about to abandon it. He attacked her decision in a Truth Social post on Saturday and repeated the criticism from the Oval Office on Monday, saying she “folded like an umbrella”.
The senators who wanted it in writing
The Reflecting Pool was Trump colliding with legal reality. On Capitol Hill the reality was political.
Todd Blanche, his former criminal defence lawyer and one of his closest allies, ran into trouble in his bid to become attorney general permanently. Republican senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina sided with Democrats to block the nomination.
Their condition was specific: a letter from Blanche formally disavowing any effort to revive a proposed $1.8bn (£1.34bn) fund to compensate people who said they had been targeted by politicised prosecution. Tillis called it a “payout pot for punks”, with concern that money could end up going to people charged over the 2021 Capitol riot.
Trump’s answer, in another Saturday post, was that Blanche would stay on as acting attorney general while he pushed Congress to authorise the fund by legislation. He said it would be back on the table immediately and that he would get it done, which suggests he has no intention of dropping the idea whatever happens to the nomination.
The vote count in the Senate was not negotiable, though. By Sunday, Blanche had given the senators what they asked for, releasing two letters that Cornyn and Tillis accepted.
Blanche avoided the treatment Pirro got. At the White House on Monday, Trump said he had not looked at the documents. He understood something had been signed off, he said, but did not know what had been agreed.
The war voters actually care about
The Reflecting Pool and the anti-weaponisation fund absorb the president. They barely register with the public. Iran is a different matter.
Trump is again accusing Tehran of bad faith, in the middle of another cycle of talks starting, stopping and being followed by threats of overwhelming American force.
On Sunday he said he had called off an attack that would have been the largest since the Second World War, at the request of Iranian officials and Arab intermediaries. On Monday, after Iran denied that any new direct negotiations were happening, he posted that the Iranians had asked for a meeting, begged for one in some accounts, started talks with more already scheduled, and then announced publicly that no discussions were taking place.
Tehran may well be misrepresenting where things stand. It would not be the first time. It also would not be the first time Trump accepted Iranian assurances at face value and declared a breakthrough.
US officials told CBS News, the BBC’s partner, on Monday that no new negotiations were planned. An Iranian official said the only talks under way were with Oman, over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
This has become the shape of the war: a lot of movement, very little progress. Polling shows Americans disapprove of the conflict and doubt Trump is getting what he wanted from it.
The number that should worry him
The war appears to be dragging down his standing generally. A recent Associated Press poll put his approval at 33%, in line with figures from CNN, Quinnipiac and YouGov. That matches or undercuts where he stood after the Capitol riot. Among modern second-term presidents, only Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace, has done worse.
Trump rejects all of it. His real numbers, he posted on Monday, as opposed to those invented by the media, are the best they have ever been.
Voters go to the polls for the midterms in three months. He has outperformed grim polling before, more than once.
He can argue with a prosecutor’s filing and dismiss a survey. An election result is harder to talk past, and if Republicans have a bad night in November, that will be one more reality waiting for him.
