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Why Is Trump Causing His Own Downfall?
The White House seems to do everything possible to help the Republicans to lose their majorities in the midterm elections.
Trump’s tariff policies have guaranteed that prices for $3 Trillion in U.S. imports will rise by at least 10%. His energy policies have caused 6% price rises for electricity and gas.
His move against allies to grab Greenland is unpopular. Bombing Iran and abducting the President of Venezuela was not welcome.
Sending heavily armed Brownshirts into U.S. neighborhoods to apprehend or assassinate random people is likewise disliked.
Trump’s approval rating is sinking.
biggerOne would assume that Trump would notice the upcoming ballot disaster and change course. But instead of calming the waves he is pouring oil onto fire:
President Donald Trump and his top lieutenants are doubling down on their hardline immigration policies and rhetoric following the shooting of a US citizen by a federal officer in Minneapolis — even as the incident has revealed cracks in the president’s coalition.
A phalanx of top Trump administration officials fanned out across Sunday morning news shows and social media to publicly defend the officer’s actions and the administration’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement tactics, all shifting blame to Democratic state and local officials.
Why is he insisting that his immigration police Brownshirts are in the right when everyone who sees the videos of their actions recognizes that their behavior is simply abhorrent?
His party is worried:
As midterms approach, GOP lawmakers, candidates, strategists and people close to the White House are warning that the administration’s mass deportations policy — and the wall-to-wall coverage of enforcement operations, arrests of U.S. citizens and clashes between protesters and federal officials — could cost them their razor-thin House majority.
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A new POLITICO poll underscores those worries: Nearly half of all Americans — 49 percent — say Trump’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive, including 1 in 5 voters who backed the president in 2024. In a sign of growing discomfort among the president’s base, more than 1 in 3 Trump voters say that while they support the goals of his mass deportation campaign, they disapprove of the way he is implementing it.
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“ICE should focus on the bad hombres. The bad hombres, that’s it, not the cleaning ladies,” said Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.). “One thing is the gardeners, another thing is the gangsters. One thing is the cooks, the other thing is the coyotes.”
During his first administration President Obama deported more people per day than Trump. But he did so without generating a huge public backlash.
Are Trump’s policies really more controversial than those of other presidents or is the amateurish implementation of policies by his administration the real problem?
Whatever it is – he will need to change it. Otherwise he will lose much of his power at the end of this year.
Trump will not lose much of his power.* The Republicans back when Clinton was re-elected were convinced they could impeach him and basically nullify the election. Didn’t happen. Trump learned the lesson, hence his fixation on executive orders. The US is not a parliamentary system. Further, neither the Republican nor the Democratic Parties are programmatic parties, with a basic set of policies advancing the goals of a more or less identifiable class or interest. They are basically franchise operations, brands, and the politicians are each entrepreneurs, selling specialized constituent services for their local rich, bringing spending to their district and occasionally influencing jobs etc. for select friends and allies. Both parties rely on big money donors, that’s their only competition, not in policy. That’s just Ins vs. Outs. The rivalry can be bitter but it does not change the game of musical chairs: It is the game.
And all this is why even if the Republican Party does lose the House in the midterms, even if they also lost the Senate (not impossible, but unlikely) it won’t matter. The Democrats are not genuinely opposed to Trump. The conservative Democrats are close to Trump politically. They’re like Biden, they will copy lots of Trumpery, a disservice to the nation but SOP. The theory that there is some woke conspiracy, much less Marxist etc., is just classic fascist BS. When it comes to fundamental money issues, the bulk of the Democrats and the Republicans both are solidly committed to servicing capitalism at home and defending empire abroad. Division over cultural issues, which are not even genuinely political, is for fools. Rich people are more class conscious and as long as they have their property protected, they don’t fear cultural change. Even the reactionaries will never ally themselves with, for examples, poor Latinos by supporting social spending just because so many are still well-trained ignorant bigots and/or anti-Communist emigre scum.
As to why Trump is insisting on violently assaulting Minneapolis, that is basically civil war, except this is the federal government attacking the cities. This is true even if nobody is fighting back. Trumpery, reaction in general, are not massively popular. Historically when the masses do move they move left, often quite rapidly as issues are clarified. The little rich, the so-called solid middle class under constant pressure in the insanely stratified US social system, are not small groups, unlike the truly wealthy, who are the 0.01% or the merely wealthy, the 0.99%. You can say middle class but the real distribution of income, and much more even, wealth, is never like those silly pyramids. The real distribution is much more like a huge radio antenna bizarrely resting on a wide, low base. Picking out a so-called middle on this is worse than useless, it is positively misleading. Trumpery, a species of fascism suitable to American conditions like its weakening empire, is a movement aware in some parts of its leadership that history, meaning social change, is not on its side. Therefore on some level it relies on force. Judging from the fascists at MoA, the violence is conceived as a sort of purification that will break the spell the weak and contemptible but all powerful subversives have cast on the latent majority that is whatever the particular fascist imagines is the true self of the nation. The reason Obama could get more deportations done is simple: His goal was deportation. Trump’s goal is to intimidate the whole society. The terror is the point. It is not genuine bungling when you deliberately trash the experienced people of government and put in ideological hacks. You need them to do the dirty. And the suggestion it’s maybe a media conspiracy to made Trump look bad is I think unworthy. Rather undercuts the claim to find the murders abhorrent, doesn’t it?
*I still think Trump though not as sharp because of his age is more likely displaying decompensation, an intensification of the neurotic behaviors (pathological lying etc.) that have worked for him in the past. His electoral repudiation in 2020, the failure of his coup attempt, the brush with death at Butler have sharpened the stresses on him. But if his mind is becoming physically impaired, the incapacity to work will leave him personally powerless. Ordinarily that would mean the wife would become the de facto president. (See precedents with Edith Wilson and Nancy Reagan.) I suppose that with Melania it will only matter if somebody bribes the stooges in his cabinet to 25th Trump. Melania would still have the legal rights of a spouse and could under color of law keep Trump incommunicado so he couldn’t contest the 25th. Otherwise, there’s no way there will be a 2/3 majority to confirm the removal. My guess is that Melania is only the wife in name, so who would run the White House is a mystery. And of course, there is always the possibility that simple death could occur. The real problem with the 25th is, no one trusts, or even likes, J.D. Vance so far as I can tell.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Jan 26 2026 16:45 utc | 46
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