Long wary about publicly expressing his belief in the death penalty for drug dealers, he proposed it at a rally in Pennsylvania. "Probably you will have some people that say that's not nice," he said.

He bragged about making up an assertion in a conversation with the leader of a close ally, Canada, and called a reporter a "son of a bitch".

He barrelled ahead with a plan to meet with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, to the dismay of much of the diplomatic corps.

He vanquished the economic aides he had previously seen as having more stature than he did by announcing he would go ahead with tariffs on certain imports, alarming key allies.

And then this weekend he seemed to raise the possibility of dismissing Mueller.

"This could be the manifestation of growing confidence," said Roger Stone Jr, one of the president's oldest confidants.

For months, aides were mostly able to redirect a neophyte president with warnings about the consequences of his actions, and mostly control his public behaviour.

Those most able to influence him were John  Kelly, the retired Marine general turned chief of staff, and Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs executive and director of the National Economic Council.

And few people had more ability to blunt the president's potentially self-destructive impulses than Hope Hicks, his communications director, who has been one of his closest advisers since the earliest days of his 2016 campaign.

Some of Trump's allies have said that Trump was trapped in a West Wing cage built by Kelly, and has finally broken loose.

The reality is more complicated, his closest aides say. They say Trump now feels he doesn't need the expertise of Kelly, Cohn or Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil executive he made secretary of state. If he once suspected they were smarter or better equipped to lead the country and protect his presidency, he doesn't believe that now.

Two of those men are now on their way out. And Trump has an ambiguous relationship with the third, Kelly, whom he alternately assures that his job is secure and disparages to other people. Hicks is leaving the White House in the coming days, a departure that has caused concern among his allies about how he will cope without her in the long term.

Outside the White House, there are few friends the president will listen to. Some of them warned him to back off his tariffs plan, telling him that he would undo what he had accomplished with the tax bill. Trump said he didn't agree, and that was that.

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But Trump's moods have always been like storm clouds passing quickly over a desert island, and aides say that hasn't changed. Contrary to descriptions of a constantly fuming, beleaguered president, friends and advisers say Trump is more at ease than he's been in some time. What seems like unchecked chaos to almost everyone else is Trump feeling he is in his element.

"He seems more relaxed, believe it or not," said New York Republican Peter T King, who spent several hours with the president during two St Patrick's Day events last week.

Warnings of dire consequences from his critics have failed to materialise. When Cohn announced that he was resigning, the predictions were that the stockmarket would plummet. There was only a minor dip by the end of the next day.

And on North Korea, even the grayest of foreign policy beards have conceded that Trump might be able to accomplish something.

"The president has his own original style, and it's unlikely to be changed at this stage of his life," Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, said in an interview. "But it also is conducive to bringing forward opportunities like this Korean conversation. It is not what we traditionalists would have recommended in the first place.

"But I have to say, when I have thought it through, and how it could play out, it could restore a political initiative to us, and could compel a conversation with countries" otherwise disinclined.

Some worried aides are less sanguine. They view the weekend's attacks on Mueller and the FBI as a particularly disturbing taste of what they believe could come. They say privately that Trump does not understand the job the way he believes he does, and that they fear he will become even less inclined to take advice.

It remains to be seen whether his attacks on Mueller are anything more than an effort to define the terms of the public conversation about the investigation, and the parameters of an interview with the president that the special counsel is seeking.

But the possibility that Trump would be emboldened enough to fire Mueller was raised on Sunday by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

Such a move, Graham said on CNN, would be "the beginning of the end" of the Trump presidency.

New York Times