As Applebaum observes, among Trump's many obsessions is that with victory. He lost a preliminary but decisive round on the NG deployments and voila, they're not much of a thing anymore. He lost the Epstein thing. He's lost the Comey and James indictments, although he can try to distance himself from those. I think he senses he's on the verge of some more public losses on things, from Congress or the courts and is maybe backing off a bit into issues where he can't actually win or lose, just declare a win.
I had him for Antitrust, he was very amusing. And, you pretty much had to give every prof what they wanted to hear. Kind of took me a while to figure that out, or really to submit to it. Credit due, Gary Peller, a CLS commie, gave me my highest first year grade on an exam that was almost all back sass. I think Graglia would hate Trump.