If the Democratic candidate's very narrow victory in yesterday's special congressional election in Pennsylvania holds up after all the absentee ballots are counted, then to the extent that any vote for a House seat this year is a referendum on the President, Donald Trump may have only himself to blame for the verdict. With the margin so close -- less than 1,000 votes -- you have a right to wonder whether Trump's removal of Secretary of State Tillerson yesterday morning influenced any last-minute deciders. While I've seen some Trump apologists defend the seemingly constant White House upheaval as simply the sort of decisive management Trump was elected to practice, how many more people saw it as one proof too many, for that particular day, of presidential instability and a dangerously erratic foreign policy? By no means do I claim that Tillerson's dismissal was a "jump the shark" moment that seals Trump's fate for 2020 or the GOP majority's fate this November. People's attention spans are too short and too much can happen over the next months or years to make any such claim a safe one. All I'm suggesting is that if Trump sacked Tillerson today, or last weekend, or at any time when it wouldn't be the top news story as Pennsylvanians went to the polls, he might have one less opponent in Congress this spring. If I'm right about this, however, this election really should worry Republicans, since it appears to show that Donald Trump lacks that attribute his admirers would most likely ascribe to him: common sense.
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