The Trials Of An Unpopular PopulistSlowly, we can at least hope, political gravity is returning to America.
You very rarely see President Trump address the nation the way presidents used to. You know the drill: seated at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, talking candidly and intimately to the American people. Trump tried it with Covid in 2020 and it didn’t quite work. Stiff, awkward, rote, interspersed with sniffs, it’s a bit sad in retrospect. He just can’t do intimacy. He can’t do reassurance. His fireside manner has always been gasoline. This is a real weakness for a president, who may, from time to time, be required to comfort — as Clinton did after the Oklahoma bombing, Bush after 9/11, and Obama after the church mass shooting in Charleston. It’s also a serious flaw if you need to rally people in tough or challenging times. But Trump just can’t do that. He can do other things. But not that. Then there’s another Trump weakness in a situation like this, i.e. normal economic anxiety. Because he cannot acknowledge any fault on his own part, if the economy drags or disappoints or worsens, he’s got nothing. Except to insist it’s not dragging. In his first term, this never came up because there was only a huge boom (fueled by his tax giveaway) and then a pandemic for which he could not be blamed — both (just) within Trump’s skillset. But now, when discontent is due increasingly to his own policies? That’s a whole different story. On Wednesday night, we saw someone drowning, not waving. Underwater by 18 percent on the economy and 28 percent on inflation, he barked at us for 18 rushed minutes behind a podium, telling Americans that any economic anxiety is entirely because of Joe Biden, and that a new Golden Age is at hand. He then did a breathless Greatest Hits weave. I imagine the core base loved it, but browsing the web afterward, the reaction of this MAGA-friendly reader of Erick Erickson captured a more common response, even among the faithful:
It was a whiff when he really needed to avoid a whiff. No, the wheels aren’t falling off the Trump clown car quite yet. His approval rating nudged up a bit in the last couple of weeks; Gallup had him this unpopular in his first term. But for an ideologically fissiparous and cantankerous movement that is only held together by the cult of one man’s economic infallibility, evidence of fallibility is a real problem. The Midas-touch cult was ingrained by “The Apprentice” and cemented by the pre-Covid boom, and a whole lot of swing voters backed him last year because of it. Take that sense of infallibility away — and a lot can unravel. And so political gravity is returning a little. The Republican Indiana legislature boldly rebuked his gerrymandering project; special elections portend a Democrat wave next year; SCOTUS could well strike down his tariffs soon (inshallah); the House recently rebelled against him on the Epstein files; MAGA diehard Marjorie Taylor Greene split with him and accused him of “gaslighting;” yesterday’s Turning Point USA confab was a pillow fight among the Israel fanatics, the old-school antisemites, the Epstein maniacs, and the Groypers. With Trump term-limited, the factions are going to get even more restless and the incoherence of the coalition increasingly exposed. And then we have Trump’s chief-of-staff, Susie Wiles, blabbing damning takes on this year’s chaos on the record — as if to signal that she, at least, is not bonkers. Trump himself gets loopier: renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the DoD, and now the Kennedy Center; appending embossed deranged rants against previous presidents in the White House; making his own birthday the equivalent of a federal holiday in the National Parks, all while enriching himself and his family in a Putin-style orgy of oligarchic corruption. But it’s the latter that could bite him in the ass. When Plato dissected the appeal of a successful strongman in late-stage democracy, he homed in on the kind of figure who might emerge: a member of the upper class who becomes a traitor to it. And that was indeed part of Trump’s appeal. But all year, the visuals and the substance have broadcast the direct opposite. He’s gone native with the billionaire class. Out goes the McDonalds campaign schtick. In comes jetting around the world to receive luxurious gifts, including a 747, from kleptocrats and tyrants; turning the White House into a classless White Lotus where he can dine with crypto-kings and AI machers; throwing a Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago; appointing the world’s richest man to consign thousands of the very poorest children to agonizing deaths; brazenly ratcheting up healthcare costs by ending the Obamacare subsidies, even as he implausibly tries to pivot on “affordability”: this is Gilded Age shit. It’s more John D Rockefeller than William Jennings Bryan; more Louis XVI than Henry VIII. At some point, more in the persuadable faction of American public opinion will notice. Trump still, of course, has one thing going for him: the Democrats. Their bench is weak for 2028; they are unable and unwilling to drop their most toxic policies — from open borders to transing children to race and sex discrimination against whites, men, Jews, Asians. The woke still run the joint. Don’t delude yourself. But they may not matter much. It’s the soft-Republicans and Independents who are now beginning to sour on Trump: the ones who want immigration control but not masked men abducting people on the streets; who despise the left elite but didn’t luxuriate in Rob Reiner’s murder; who want fewer overseas wars (not a new one against Venezuela) and don’t want to surrender Ukraine to Putin. My main fear right now is how Trump could react to this drift downward if it continues, as it well might, absent an economic miracle. He may go completely nuts. His greater and greater grandiosity requires ever greater claims, and when those claims fall flat with the crowd, Trump’s psyche melts down. Recall him after the election in 2020. Since defeat was intolerable for his self-image, he nearly brought down the entire system to preserve it. God knows what he might do if he sees the economy sliding or the Congress moving decisively against him next November. But to be honest, after a decade of this, I’m tired of despairing, aren’t you? So fuck it. It’s Christmas and perhaps we need to believe in the return of sanity before it can arrive again. So here goes one more time. Know hope. Home News
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Dissent Of The WeekA reader writes:
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Those sailors could use a dram, or:
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The Trials Of An Unpopular Populist
December 19, 2025
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