| One of the hardest things to explain about presidential influence is that it's not only about getting votes through Congress; it's about trying to persuade actors across the political system to behave in ways that will advance the president's interests and help achieve his goals. Dave Hopkins has a wonderful riff about this in a new piece on the impeachment process: At various points along the way, certain potential witnesses will be weighing whether to comply with congressional subpoenas, and whether to share or omit pertinent information. Accomplished attorneys will be weighing whether to accept offers to take Trump's case. High-ranking judges will be weighing whether to give deference to legal arguments made by White House representatives. Partisan officials will be weighing how passionately they should attack or defend the president. Political candidates will be weighing whether to run in the 2020 election. Journalists and other opinion leaders will be weighing whether to publicly endorse impeachment or removal from office. Although each of these are relatively small decisions, they add up. And they're each affected to some extent by the president's reputation, his popularity and his skill at influencing others. Even if he isn't removed from office, President Donald Trump can come out of the impeachment effort relatively stronger or weaker, and he has a lot to say about it. And yet … he isn't very good at this. Let's take just one example. Congressional allies of the president want to publicly support him, but they don't want to be undercut, made to look foolish, or made to look like liars. As I've argued, the reason Republicans finally turned on President Richard Nixon at the end of the Watergate saga, after sticking with him through two years of scandal, was that they became convinced that any White House talking points they adopted would likely turn out to be false. Now look at how Trump treated congressional Republicans on just one day, Thursday. First he awarded the upcoming Group of Seven summit to himself. Yes, he's claiming that his Miami resort will host the event at cost and won't profit, but even if that's true (and it's highly unlikely Trump will release information to support this assertion) he is still using his office to give his company a massive marketing boost. It's exactly the kind of self-dealing that is likely to draw a lot of attention from journalists, and it's almost certainly not something that Republicans in Congress will want to defend or vote on. It's also a good reminder to Trump's allies that he will never be willing to pass up money in his own pocket to make their lives easier. Next up was a fiasco of a press briefing from acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who managed to say several times that Trump had in fact insisted on a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian government — demanding that it investigate conspiracy theories about the 2016 election in return for releasing military aid — and that there was nothing wrong with doing so, only to then put out a statement asserting that he hadn't said that at all. Again, this kind of chaos makes life incredibly difficult for Trump's congressional backers, who can't be sure from one minute to the next what official line they're supposed to be supporting. Not to mention that Trump keeps chopping off most of the firm ground they could stand on. All of this came in the shadow of a worsening tragedy in Syria. It's not just that many Republicans oppose what my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Eli Lake describes as "Trump's capitulation" to Turkey as it crushes U.S. allies in the region. It's that the president isn't giving those who would defend him anything coherent at all. So he's taking strong opposition from Senator Mitt Romney and others in the party who care about foreign policy, while offering no plausible rationale to those who just want to go along with him. And to top it all off? The White House, which couldn't even muster a simple majority in the Senate for the president's border-wall emergency in a Thursday vote, is now making noises about another government shutdown if spending bills that need to be signed by Nov. 21 don't include wall funding. In reality, a shutdown is unlikely because Republicans know that they didn't have the votes to win this fight back in January and still don't have them now. But they won't like it if the president forces votes they don't want to take and uses rhetoric that will make them look like they're caving to Democrats, especially since what will actually be happening is that Trump will be caving to everyone. It's another reminder to congressional Republicans that this president is a paper tiger, which is not really something that he should be reminding them of right now. And that's just Republicans in Congress! Go back to that Hopkins paragraph: Virtually everyone else in the political system will be making calculations in the weeks ahead about whether to support the president. No one knows where the line is when things fall apart and Trump actually gets removed, and it's still quite likely we'll never get there. But he sure is tempting fate. 1. Marina E. Henke at the Monkey Cage on trust, alliances and Trump's treatment of the Kurds. 2. Chris Baylor at A House Divided on how the Democratic Party shifted on gay rights. 3. John Sides at the new Voter Study Group blog on identity politics. 4. Lee Drutman, Vanessa Williamson and Felicia Wong on the perhaps surprising popularity of liberal economic policies. 5. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Feldman has an excellent, balanced item on secrecy in the House impeachment inquiry. He's right: It's reasonable for Democrats to begin with a series of depositions behind closed doors, but there should be a public process, and it's about time for them to explain how it will work. I think that's the direction they're headed in, but if not, they'll deserve any criticism they get. 6. And Paul Kane on the late Elijah Cummings, member of the House and a hero of the republic. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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