Time is running out for Trump. People are turning on him. But the problem is only going to get bigger because Trump has the power of the presidency, and as he begins to lose control, there is no telling what a man who tried to overthrow the government because he lost an election will do. Is this the beginning of the end for MAGA?
Time will tell.
You Can Smell It Now: The Trump Presidency Is in Total Free Fall
A loyal army of followers, a huge disinformation network, and a party of soul-selling cowards can crowd out facts for a long time. But eventually, reality catches up.
The presidency of Donald Trump is now officially in collapse. His war is … not exactly a disaster, but it sure isn’t the cakewalk he envisioned when he sprang it on the American people and the world with no notice on February 28. His firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi because she
wasn’t sycophantic enough indicates a man who is utterly incapable of understanding anything about how democracy is supposed to work. His economy is a wreck and may well get worse. His proposed budget, especially the half-trillion-dollar increase to the Pentagon, is wildly out of whack with the priorities of the public.
I could go on—and on. But on top of all that, Trump’s purchase on reality, tenuous at the best of times, is slipping fast. Think about what it takes for the “leader of the free world” (a phrase we are now obliged to tuck inside irony quotes) to wake up on Easter morning—the day of the resurrection of the same Jesus Christ in whose name “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth says we are killing Iranians—and post this unhinged and inflammatory comment on social media: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
The sentence with the three expletives will catch the notice of most Western eyes, but I have a feeling it’s the next one, and its schoolyard-level sarcastic mockery, that will get the lion’s share of the attention in Iran and across the Muslim world. And that wasn’t even his low point of the past week. His speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday was an embarrassment, rife with conspiracies, self-pitying grievance riffs, tasteless “jokes,” and bile spewed at the usual targets—again, on a venerated day on the Christian calendar, Maundy Thursday, the last full day of Jesus Christs’s mortal life. Trump rendered a supposedly solemn occasion profane in the way only he can do.
A rickety house often stands longer than we imagine it will. The support structures are surprisingly sturdy. But finally one day, something comes along—a hard rain, a mighty wind—against which the beams and foundation are no match.
Trump has survived as long as he has in politics—indeed, he succeeded in the first place—because his support structures were unusually durable. The percentage of people in this country who not only were fine with nativist, authoritarian politics but openly embraced it shot Trump to the top of the GOP polls in late 2015 and has remained basically steady all these years. Millions of people still believe, with White House “spiritual adviser” (we have to put irony quotes around nearly everything these days) Paula White, that Trump is basically Jesus. The right-wing propaganda networks for whom he can do no wrong are still out there, marveling over his infallibility as fulsomely as ever. And of course the Republicans in Congress, with just a few exceptions, still praise him to the heavens.
These were and are Trump’s four pillars (there is considerable overlap between the first two groups, but they’re somewhat different). They have sustained him in and out of power for more than a decade, and they’ve proven stronger than the two things that in theory have the power to bring Trump down: the political opposition and plain reality.
But take a good, contemplative whiff of the zeitgeist right about now, and you’ll smell change in the air.
A loyal army of followers, a huge disinformation network, and a party of soul-selling cowards can crowd out facts for a long time. But eventually, reality catches up.
newrepublic.com
