What did Donald Trump do today?

What TV told him to do.

With incandescent public anger over his terror campaign in Minnesota spilling over even into his Republican base, Trump found himself this morning in a political fix, although whether or not he knew it is another matter. The publicity-focused shock-and-awe paramilitary campaigns by ICE and Border Patrol forces against the Americans that Trump believes are his enemies—essentially, anyone who lives in cities or states that oppose him politically—have been led by his political aide Stephen Miller and his Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, and Trump has shown little inclination or ability to rein them in.

But with Republican support crumbling out from underneath him, conservatives were beginning to worry that Trump needed an exit strategy that Noem and Miller wouldn't give him. This morning, they found a way to get one to him. This is CNN reporter Brian Stelter's summary:

Around 6:15 a.m. on Monday, “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade pitched a solution to President Trump’s growing political problem in Minnesota. “What I would do is just bring Tom Homan in,” he said.

Kilmeade, a Trump booster who knows the president often watches the morning show, volunteered the idea again at 7:15 and once more at 8:10. Homan, the border czar and a former Fox commentator, would “settle things down” and help Trump, Kilmeade said.

Maybe Trump was watching, maybe he wasn’t — but either way, he said, “I am sending Tom Homan to Minnesota tonight,” 20 minutes after Kilmeade suggested it a third time.  

By the end of the day, the mocking and combative public face of the occupation, Border Patrol "commander at large" Greg Bovino, had been forcibly demoted and put out to pasture, and tonight Noem and Miller are on shaky ground. Homan, who was caught on tape accepting a $50,000 cash bribe from undercover FBI agents last year, is not exactly a paragon of virtue, but neither is he politically invested in the current ICE terror campaign, and it's likely he'll be able to provide political cover for Trump.

This is not the first time that Trump has simply done whatever Fox News just told him to. Trump, whose only real success outside of the political realm has been as a reality show performer, is famously obsessed with television and extremely susceptible to its influence. He's so easily manipulated by it, and his TV habits are so voracious and so predictable, that he's been targeted personally by lobbyists and critics who have taken out advertisements on shows they know he'll be watching.

Why does this matter?

• It shouldn't be this easy to manipulate the President of the United States. 

• Presidents who don't know or care which of their staff is pulling their strings aren't fit to serve.
   
• The time to moderate your policy is before you are having federal agents shoot Americans dead in the street.