by Michael Reagan

President Trump keeps making me look good.

Last week we repeated the sound advice we’ve frequently given him but which he regularly refuses to take – know when to shut up and listen to your staff.

This week he sabotaged himself yet again.

He totally wasted about 95 percent of the generally favorable media coverage and bipartisan huzzahs he got for his Afghanistan policy speech on Monday night.

He could have basked in the Afghan afterglow all week long and hit a few hundred balls on the practice range.

But instead by Tuesday night he was in Phoenix and up to his old dumb tricks, bashing Arizona’s Republican senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, rehashing what he said about Charlottesville and throwing old and new spitballs at the fake media.

It’s hopeless.

He just can’t stop himself.

He can’t let anything go.

He can’t quit campaigning for the job he’s already won.

And he can’t keep from bashing the Republicans in Congress he so desperately needs.

It seems he’s doing everything he can to get his base to vote Republicans out of power in 2018.

He wants to get rid of Flake. He certainly doesn’t like McCain.

He’s rough on Republican Congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan – even though 70 pieces of legislation, some with bipartisan support and some especially pleasing to conservatives, have become law in the last seven months.

Like the media he hates, President Trump says virtually nothing about those many legislative accomplishments and almost nothing positive about the Republicans who got them passed.

But if he really wants to fix the tax system, get immigration reform or replace Obamacare some day, he’s going to need those Senate Republicans he’s been picking on.

The best way to get them to be a part of his team is not to hold a personal pro-Trump rally and use them as punching bags and punch lines.

Maybe the president is just trying to be a nice guy and doesn’t want to pick on the leaderless, rudderless, just-say-no-to-Trump Democrats when they’re so hapless, pathetic and confused.

Maybe he has a long-term secret plan to blow up the two-party system, or prove that Republicans and Democrats in Washington are so much alike ideologically that it doesn’t matter what party you join.

But if he keeps it up much longer,  President Trump will have a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2018 and then we Republicans are going to be asking him not to sign legislation to help us, but to help us by vetoing it.

Meanwhile, if the president stumbles any farther down this road to Republican Party ruin we might see him change his party affiliation.

He has no ideology, no party principles to uphold. What’s it matter to him if he converts to a registered Democrat? It’s what he was most of his life anyway.

You never know with Trump. But even if he switched parties in 2020, it probably wouldn’t matter much.

The same forgotten Flyover Country people that put Hillary out to pasture and Donald into the White House would storm his huge rallies, cheer their Nascar hats off and later pull the Democrat lever for Trump with delight.

He’d easily win the Democrat nomination because they have no one to run against him. The Hate Trump media couldn’t stop him.

And he’d easily get reelected president in 2020 as a Democrat because he’d have spent four years destroying the Republican Party.

Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.