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On the menu: Partisan divide on NATO; Funky foliage; Dems clash over youth movement; McConnell replacement primary ugly already; Nobody comes out clean

The late, great Charles Krauthammer famously told us that “bungled collusion is still collusion.” But bungling does count for something.

Dr. K was talking about the reversal by the Trump family after six months of abject denials that anything improper had happened between it and Russians peddling dirt on then-rival Hillary Clinton. When the emails eventually came out, it was revealed that Donald Trump Jr. was a knowing and enthusiastic participant.

“It is not merely stupid,” Krauthammer wrote. “It is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.”

Fair enough, but the stupidity did matter. The doofiness of the effort — the goofball, "Spy vs. Spy" nature of it all — was perhaps comforting to voters in its own way. If these were not serious people, maybe it confirmed their amateur status. The Trumps were show business folks unfamiliar with the ways of politics and government: ambitious outsiders who got tangled up in Washington’s game of power and deceit.

That revelation was an essential ingredient in the formation of what President Trump calls “Russia, Russia, Russia,” his name for the long-running investigation into the Kremlin’s effort to meddle in the 2016 election. Trump blames the probe for everything from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to his son’s divorce.

But while one couldn’t say that the probe “cleared” the Trumps, it did explode the ideas put forward by Democrats that the family and its political team were part of some sophisticated, long-running "Manchurian Candidate" plot to take down the U.S. government from within. After years of “bombshell” reports and promises that the “walls were closing in” on the Trumps, the conclusion was, again, that these were unsophisticated amateurs who couldn’t run a White House effectively, let alone orchestrate an elaborate scheme to dismantle the world’s oldest democracy.

It was much the same with President Trump’s effort to steal a second term and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that tried to disrupt the certification of his successor. One did not look at Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and John Eastman and think that the new Whiz Kids had come to town. The evidence confirmed that while the then and future president had certainly tried a soft coup to remain in power, the effort was often preposterously, hilariously incompetent. And while there is lots to prove that right-wing agitators planned to turn Trump’s mob at the Capitol into a riot, there was no case to be made that the president or his team planned the violence that occurred. Trump encouraged what happened that day by a combination of reckless incitement and willful neglect, but no one could say it was a master plan.

That was certainly the message Republicans carried forward into Trump’s second impeachment and 2024 campaign. The bungling of the effort was essential to the defense against the Democrats’ charge of insurrection. The story of an unsophisticated amateur and his team of misfits who sincerely believed in pandemic-fueled election fraud and ended up crashing into the sturdy barricades of the constitutional order turned out to be pretty easy to swallow. Trump acted on his bad impulses, but, ultimately, the system held.

Trump’s bungling has been an essential ingredient to his success. If one believes, as most Americans do, that our system is broken, then having a bungling disruptor might be even better than having a ruthlessly effective one. Sending someone to shake up the bipartisan establishment and provide a credible — but not too credible — threat to the way Washington operates could be a good thing. Trump may act like a toddler, but maybe he is keeping everyone on their toes, right?

Both the president’s supporters and opponents told us that this time would be different, though. Trump, steeled by the failures of his first term, was prepared to be not just a disruptor, but to build a new order with an experienced team, an effective transition and a well-thought-out playbook ready to go. Sharpened in purpose by his criminal prosecutions and near death at the hands of a would-be assassin, Trump 47 would not be lost in a welter of self-defeating distractions the way Trump 45 had been.

The idea of the ruthlessly effective Trump has had a very unhappy April.

Current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his affection for insecure communications stand out as very Trump 1.0 stuff. Is Hegseth systematically dismantling the Western alliance from within, or is he an overconfident........

© The Hill