What did Donald Trump do today?

He retreated.

Trump is spending a rare weekend in Washington, and while his public schedule included only one brief entry, he generated a lot of news.

For a lame duck President with no particular regard for his own party, Trump is surprisingly sensitive to public opinion—and it has turned sharply against him. In some polls, he is now below the previous most unpopular president at this point in their term—himself, in 2017.

But Trump is also famously obsessed with presenting himself in the image of a "winner"—whatever that may mean at any given moment—and it makes him prone to outbursts of fear and gloom when he thinks he's failing to do that. There were visible cracks in his facade on at least four different fronts today.

The Harvard affair. Even before Trump's attempt to bring Harvard University under his direct control blew up into a major scandal, American universities had already begun to band together and fight back against Trump's mass breach of federal research contracts. But Harvard is the oldest, wealthiest, and by some measures most prestigious university in the country, and while it's not immune to political pressure, it has much more ability to fight back than most—and that resistance is now stiffening the spines of universities across the nation. It probably doesn't hurt that Trump seems bound and determined to humble colleges whether or not they comply with his demands.

Trump's initial response was fury: he ordered the IRS to begin rescinding Harvard's tax-exempt status, a penalty so severe it is only used for the most egregiously fraudulent or criminal "non-profits" (like, for example, the Trump Foundation). 

But today, his administration is retreating, floating the story that it was all a big misunderstanding, and that Harvard received a draft with inappropriately harsh terms. The "mistake" was signed off on by three different government agencies and the White House.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia. As public horror at the implications of Trump's outside-the-Constitution approach to deportation or exile grows, Trump's staff has been trying to paint Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a monster. Trump officials have called him a domestic abuser, a terrorist kingpin, and a  human trafficker—none of which are true according to any evidence or witness. (The one bit of testimony linking him to the MS-13 gang was the unsupported opinion of a disgraced police officer who was suspended just days later, after it was discovered that he was sharing police information with a sex worker he was involved with.)

High-profile smear campaigns like this usually work to Trump's advantage, but with both Abrego Garcia and his distraught wife and young child remaining in the spotlight, Trump has distanced himself from responsibility for their veracity. He emphasized in comments today that he was citing "very legitimate sources I assume" and that what he'd heard about Abrego Garcia "was supposed to be certified stuff."

Some of the "certified stuff" Trump showed off was an obviously doctored photo of Abrego Garcia's tattoos, in which "MS-13" had been digitally superimposed—thus "proving" he was a member of that gang. 

Tariffs. Trump's tariff scheme is wildly unpopular with Americans even before the effects have really started to be felt (outside of collapsed retirement portfolios). That may explain why he has reportedly decided to make Vice-President J.D. Vance the public face of it as the new "tariff czar." According to administration sources, Vance would be now be responsible for handling the "negotiations" that Trump, who views himself as a deal-maker par excellence, was bragging about until recently. 

That would also make Vance the obvious scapegoat.

Vance faces two challenges if he can't escape this assignment. First, China's government has taken direct offense at comments he made recently about Chinese "peasants" and has made Vance the face of their own domestic political campaign against the Trump tariffs.

Second, when Vance was free to speak his own mind before becoming yoked to Trump as his running mate, he made it clear he does not actually think protectionist tariffs are a good idea, and certainly not at this scale—and he said so publicly many times.

Ukraine-Russia "negotiations." Trump has once again staked his belief that he is a master diplomatic strategist to the task of achieving a resolution to the Russia-Ukraine war. In order to accomplish this—and to put a thumb on the scale for the side he personally favors—Trump has effectively forced the United States to switch sides in the middle of the war, American public opinion be damned. He continues to claim, against all reason, that Ukraine somehow started the war that began with a massive Russian invasion, and publicly berated Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a White House visit. 

But in ranting remarks today, Trump made clear his frustrations that ending the war would not be as simple as he'd imagined when he was campaigning on making it happen in "one day."

Trump huffed that unless things somehow turned around, "We're just going to say, 'You're foolish, you're fools, you're horrible people,' and we're going to just take a pass."

Neither Russia nor Ukraine were looking for a negotiated end to the war, nor for Trump to be involved in brokering one.

Why does this matter?

• Passing the buck to underlings doesn't mean presidents aren't responsible for their administration's failures.

• People who find themselves in jobs they're just not very good at should think about quitting.