Tipping Point?
We're not there yet, but Trump's numbers are dropping and it gets harder and harder for him to create good news. The tipping point for him may come sooner than we think.
Malcolm Gladwell’s theory of “the tipping point” is a seductive one, a way of explaining sudden changes as a function of the interplay between environment, a “sticky” message or selling point, and key influencers with robust social networks and persuasive power to set a sudden change in motion.
Well-critiqued for its lack of rigor, over-simplification, and reliance on narrative rather than empirical evidence, Gladwell’s pop sociology still claims enough stickiness of its own that when I use the phrase “tipping point” in a headline you’ll know what I am talking about.
I’m working on an essay about economics and the basic incompatibility of democracy and capitalism in their purest forms, pegged to Zohran Mamdani’s likely victory in the NYC mayoral race on Tuesday, and while I wait to make sure that he actually wins, I thought I would take a few moments to explore the question of whether Donald Trump’s popularity and power is reaching its own “tipping point.”
Even an overwhelming victory for Mamdani won’t be it—that election is unique to a city that has no real parallel anywhere else in America. But it is starting to seem to me like the story of Trump’s power, of his unstoppable attack on democracy in the U.S., is starting to soften a bit.
It hasn’t been replaced by a new narrative yet, but the old narrative, the one that Trump and his minions created in their first three months, is giving way to a more fragmented story now. It seems possible that a new narrative may emerge soon, maybe not all at once, but quickly once it starts to take hold.
I want to explore this idea, not to argue for it, since only a fool would predict the moment at which Trump’s preternatural resilience finally comes to an end. But all of Trump’s previous escapes—whether from bankruptcy or from culpability for the January 6 insurrection—have depended on some sort of rescue, whether from Russian oligarchs or the Republican Senators who failed to impeach him.
I’m wondering whether this time the rescue team fails to show up.
*
Since Trump took office, all of his actions have had seizing absolute power to the presidency as their goal. Even the tariff program was mainly constructed so that Trump would have the personal power to fuck with the economies of other nations as he created the American godfather system of foreign policy.
Because the courts are slow and the Supreme Court has enabled Trump to get away with many of his actions, at least temporarily, Trump’s power has sometimes seemed invincible. As has been widely observed, Trump has had to act fast, in a way very different from the gradual process by which authoritarian leaders like Orban, Erdogan, even Chavez and Putin seized power.
That blitzkrieg effect was coupled with the sad realization that the U.S. Constitution’s assumption that the presidency would be held by honorable people left few actual guardrails against the willful exercise of despotic power.
Together, these created a legitimate fear that America would become a fascist state, with military law, the suspension of civil liberties, and the arbitrary arrest of anyone who opposes Trump.
That sort of sudden takeover has happened in other nations, with the Philippines in 1972 under Marcos being the closest parallel, as I discussed in a recent essay. But even in that case, Marcos had had seven years to put his own military leaders and justices in place.
There’s no example where an elected leader went from 0 to 60 in less than a year, except maybe for Hitler, who was handed the keys to the kingdom soon after his narrow 1933 victory.
Intensity coupled with the Project 2025 blueprint substituted for any nuanced planning, and it worked. It wasn’t like Trump’s first administration, when his victory seemed somewhat accidental and his actions were often stymied from the start.
This time Trump entered Washington, DC as a conquering force, with his opposition in complete defeat, and now there are federal troops patrolling the streets of DC and the DOJ is staffed by the president’s personal lawyers.
Whatever metaphor you choose—blitzkrieg, shock and awe, or Steve Bannon’s “flooding the zone with shit”—it really worked, and it is still working. There is an entire industry of commentary on Substack and elsewhere that takes seriously and literally the idea that Trump may achieve a fascist state before the 2026 elections are held, or maybe soon after, having stolen that election in some fashion.
And they’re not wrong. The federal government is entirely under Trump’s control, with abject loyalists leading the DOJ, the FBI, the DHS and ICE, the military, and foreign policy.
Trump’s executive orders and his rhetoric, echoed by his gang, have made explicit both a legal framework and an intention masquerading as a threat, and on paper right now he could try to flood New York City with military and paramilitary forces, take over the government and arrest anyone who tries to get in the way.
Legal orders at the district and probably appellate levels might seek to check Trump, and there is some evidence that Trump is hard-wired to obey the Supreme Court, so maybe those court cases would forestall Trump, as they are partly doing in Chicago and Portland right now. But maybe they wouldn’t, and maybe the justices, knowing that, will give Trump what he wants.
*
That would be a crisis, not a tipping point in Gladwell’s terms. It’s not like there is any uprising of popular support for authoritarian rule. In fact, all the places that Trump seems to want to take over are intensely hostile toward him. There would hardly be a surge of national support.
Try to imagine a federal invasion of New York, complete with the suspension of civil liberties—an authoritarian takeover and crackdown. I just can’t see it. As Rick Blaine told the Nazi Major Strasser in Casablanca, “there are certain sections of New York…that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.”
Trump is using his powers in blatantly unconstitutional ways, and the impact of ICE’s unbridled attacks has been pervasive and dismaying. Trump’s control of the DOJ puts every enemy in his crosshairs, and his NSPM-7 and executive order on “Antifa” provide a basis for the investigation of literally anyone who has ever attended an anti-Trump rally or posted something negative on Facebook.
The murders of 63 boatmen so far in ongoing attacks off the coasts Venezuela without evidence or legal justification underscore Trump’s control of the military, as a carrier group redeploys in the south Atlantic.
A threat to invade Nigeria, one of our strongest allies in Africa, only demonstrates how unhinged Trump’s power is, while his order to resume “nuclear testing” sends a bizarre signal—a reminder that the man with his finger on the button is not subject to ordinary constraints (if any at all.)
But in all of this there is still a gap between Trump’s rhetoric and performative demonstrations of power, and the actual situation on the ground, where lower courts continue to rule against him and the basic situation of American economic life continues to deteriorate.
It has been a war of attrition for a while now, and it is not the sort of war to which Trump is well-suited. His inclination is to attack whenever he can, and to use his propaganda machine to frame every action and event as a victory, even when they clearly are not, as is the case with China and likely will be in the Middle East as well.
It is possible that Trump may eventually achieve some sort of breakthrough, and the 2026 elections already are threatened by Republican redistricting and the Louisiana elections case that could end the voting rights act, though the timing of that ruling is a factor. Republican strategies to win in 2026 appear mainly to rely on legal contortions rather than popular support, and maybe Trump gets away with that.
But there is an alternative version of the story, one that seems increasingly probable to me, in which the gap between rhetoric and performative power and the reality of the situation on the ground becomes too great for the showrunner to paper over with various plot and character devices.
When that happens—and I think it will happen—it seems possible that it may happen in a rush, a tipping point event in which the Trump story changes from irresistible force and threat to democracy to aging lame-duck president scrambling to defend himself against defections within his own ranks.
Trump will never entirely lose his base, but the story will shift and start focusing on succession and the war between the claimants to the throne.
*
Part of that has already happened. Although Steve Bannon continues to claim that there is a plan for Trump to run in 2028, Trump himself sent the clearest signal yet that he understands that the 22nd amendment really means that he can’t run for a third term.
Trump has already advanced Vance and Rubio as capable successors, and there are Republicans independent of Trump’s orbit like DeSantis and Cruz who are waiting to run again. Politics is a $20-40 billion industry in the U.S., and there is no shortage of ambition among politicians.
If the Republican Party really wanted Trump to be president for life, then it might be a different story. But the only true loyalists are those so incompetent and so indebted to him that they have no real political existence apart from Trump’s favor.
There are plenty of Republican members of the Senate and House who would love to see Trump replaced by almost any other member of the party, except maybe Kennedy or Gabbard.
It would take an enormous surge of popular support behind the idea for the Republican leadership to climb on board—and it is really a crackpot idea, in any case. Only the existence of a few crackpots on the Supreme Court, men like Thomas and Alito, making it seem even the thinnest possibility.
It’s still pretty early to be talking about 2028, just ten months into Trump’s second term. But he is a second-term president with some health issues, approaching his 80th birthday, and the presidential sweepstakes have already begun on the Democrat side.
It will take a while before the idea of Trump’s lame-duck status becomes fully normalized, part of the basic framework of the Trump show, but is has already started to happen.
And that’s a real problem for Trump, for two reasons. One is that a world after Trump presents a different political calculus for those who plan to stay in office beyond his term. Trump’s power to use his base to end political careers is still real, and may be for a long time, but swing voters also have that kind of power.
It is already the case that a handful of Republicans have broken with Trump on some key issues, most with highly specific circumstances, including looming retirement in several cases. The government shutdown and extended House vacation put pressure on some other Republicans to do the same.
The problem of cracks in the Republican façade is small compared to the real problem for Trump, which is that he is only as powerful as people think he is. And however much success Trump has had in using constitutional ambiguity and broken political norms to wrest power for himself, he has not been a very successful president so far.
As I have been writing for months, there is a steadily accumulating number of areas in which the limits to Trump’s power are becoming clearer, and his actions in response seem increasingly erratic and ungrounded.
None of this has reached critical mass yet, or received the kind of catalytic event that might create a tipping point. But all the makings are there for a rapid descent.
*
Trump’s approval ratings dropped significantly last week, enough so that he fell a full point on Nate Silver’s aggregate measure after staying at the same level for weeks. Several polls had his approval under 40 percent, and the CNN aggregate puts it at 41, a point lower than Silver Bulletin.
There’s no tipping point to be claimed in the numbers, but the dip seems significant to me, because you can’t identify any event that may have caused it.
Trump’s sojourn to Asia and summit with Xi Jinping were proclaimed a success, and Trump continues to be cheerfully intransigent on the shutdown. He has ramped up the violent dimension of his power, holding the line on Venezuela and threatening Nigeria, while pushing his drive to create a federal police force.
And so on—it is all full steam ahead with Trump, and there hasn’t been any particular bad economic news, with the expected federal rate cut being a bit of a win, if anything, and the stock market still charging to new records on the strength of 10 major corporations connected to AI.
In general, the news has been too diffuse for the past couple of weeks to highlight anything in particular as being the cause of the ratings drop. It seems possible that maybe people are just getting tired of the show, tired of waiting for the good news they had been promised a year ago.
*
The numbers are already a lead story today, at least in the leftwing part of the media surround, and numbers themselves can help impel further weakness, even though they mainly are a reflection of it, and not the thing itself.
But there are a lot of areas in which Trump continues to seem weaker, and his counterattack, which is basically the Trump-created stories in the news, has seemed erratic and off-target.
The Asia story was the big Trump-created story line, but he hasn’t been able to milk it that way. For one thing, it’s business news, and it is very hard to claim what China agreed to as a win. Even if one exaggerates the claims, it still seems like small potatoes, and while some analysts stop short of declaring a victory for China, others do not. It was clear who had the upper hand.
Much of the rest of Trump-generated news last week had to do with his increasingly violent, unchecked deployment of power and threats to do even more, whether in Venezuela, Nigeria, or New York and Chicago. One need not understate how concerning this is to also say that ultimately these are not winning issues for Trump.
What the polling mainly seems to indicate is that Trump is losing the support of the swing voters who put him over the top a year ago—younger voters and Hispanic voters in particular, along with Black voters. You might see this as the Joe Rogan cohort, who liked what they thought was Trump’s strength and business savvy, but didn’t sign up for what ICE is doing (or for cancelling Jimmy Kimmel.)
Miller’s all-out ICE attacks are getting their fair share of press, and while it may be red meat to Trump’s base, it narrows the broader coalition of Trump’s support. This makes things a lot trickier for Republicans in whatever competitive districts and states still remain in the polarized nation.
The big news is the shutdown, and Trump is not the only player in that, although his control of the Senate has held and he owns Mike Johnson, so the House will stay on vacation for as long as Trump wants. But the Democrats have held out so far, and so far the polling is backing them up.
Maybe that will change, but the terrible economic news that starts this week, with SNAP benefits stopped, health insurance costs rising, and air travel nearing a critical level of delays and cancellations, seems more likely to attach to Trump and his intransigence than to the Democrats.
Trump delivered an all-caps command last night for the Republican Senate to end the filibuster, but that’s not going to happen. The pressure on both sides to come to the table this week will be enormous, and the best way to save face is for both sides to blink at the same time.
So far, Trump hasn’t permitted that. It’s not clear how much danger is involved in Trump’s refusal to negotiate, but there’s at least some, and I am not sure that he sees it. Maybe the shutdown will turn out as a win for him, but it seems as likely that it won’t.
*
In a way that makes the U.S. seem like a psychotic nation, lurking behind the possible resolution of the shutdown is the reality that the House will have to return to work someday, and when it does, it will pass a resolution over the leadership’s objections forcing the release of the Epstein files.
It’s not clear why Trump has chosen to be so adamant in refusing to release the files, apart from the fact that he was one of Epstein’s closest friends during his playboy years, when he first started taking money from the Russians, and that Trump appears numerous times in the files.
It’s really an impossible situation for him, since he has placed himself in a situation where only he can prevent or facilitate the release of the files, since the DOJ so clearly works for him. Fighting a legal House resolution in court, or refusing to honor it in some other way, pits Trump against many of his supporters, who were behind the whole idea of the Epstein scandal to begin with.
An end to the shutdown will be big news, but it will immediately be eclipsed by the swearing in of Adelita Grijalva and the House vote on the discharge petition bringing a vote on the Epstein files to the floor. None of that is good news for Trump.
*
The main problem for Trump is the economy. The only lipstick on that pig right now is the stock market, which hit a new record last week on a day when 397 stocks in the S & P 500 recorded losses. AI capital expenditure this year is nearly 10 percent of total Capex and represents about 1.5 percent of U.S. GDP. Basically, it is the only thing driving growth and affluence in America right now.
Right now, the wealthiest ten percent of Americans own more than 90 percent of all stocks, which is why that top percentile is now responsible for about half of all consumer spending. The rest of the country isn’t so much riding the AI wave as waiting for it to break on them.
For most Americans, the prices that made them angry enough to vote for Trump a year ago have continued to rise, while growth in general has slowed and new employment has been largely frozen. Now it appears, as one headline put it, that “the firing freeze has been ended,” with major companies that learned to hold on to their workers during the pandemic now projecting major lay-offs.
For the enormous investment in AI to pay off, it almost certainly has to change the nature of the workforce, including inevitable headcount reductions in entry-level work of all sorts—including those that were traditional pathways to remunerative professional careers. The likelihood that AI will create more jobs smells like hopium.
Awareness of that threat and of the gloomy prospects for job growth, along with the likely persistence of higher prices for the foreseeable future, may ultimately be what trickled down into the most recent approval ratings. Apart from cheap gas, there’s really no good news in the economy right now, and none expected.
*
None of this adds up to the tipping point for Trump, and maybe one will never come. But all the story lines continue to run downhill for Trump. Even the court system has grown tougher, as unqualified prosecutors present weak or invented evidence, undermining the “presumption of regularity” by which courts grant deference to the government’s version of things.
The more than lower courts rule against him, the harder it becomes to see Trump winning his most egregious violations of the constitution before the Supreme Court. The tariff case that the court will soon hear is a sort of bellwether for that, since on the face of it, Trump should lose the case, unraveling his entire tariff scheme.
Maybe a major shock won’t come, and Trump’s ratings will just continue to drift in the low 40s the way that they have so far. Wholesale redistricting may provide enough disenfranchisement for the Republicans to eke out a victory in the House and hold the Senate.
Maybe the whole Trump show will just stumble through its negative consequences while stabilizing itself at some new, unprecedented level of centralization of presidential power, and then Trumpism gets handed off to J.D. Vance or someone like him, and we get four years of a softer, gentler Trumpism before someone finally comes along like Bill Clinton did to end the Reagan years. Or doesn’t, and soon we’re Russia.
Maybe Trump and Miller will be able to create enough urban violence to bring some level of martial law and achieve whatever the worst case scenario might be, though when I try to put that one together on the ground it’s hard to imagine it. Maybe the most reasonable scenario is one where Trump tries to use federal troops and other measures to suppress the vote.
That’s a scary thought, but it also might make voting actually seem valuable in a way that it generally doesn’t in the U.S.
The main thing is that it is getting harder and harder for Trump to control the news, and the gap between his actions and the lies he depends on to justify them is growing more and more obvious.
The stock market will experience a correction, sooner or later. That’s like a law of physics. It could be pretty bad, and it would have all kinds of secondary effects.
Bad economic news might be a trigger, but more likely might come some harder evidence that the payback periods for the level of investment are out of whack, with revenue shortfalls destroying the business models of a lot of AI-connected enterprises. Some would argue that the evidence for that is already there.
That’s one thing to watch, and the Epstein case is another, but that story won’t break back into the news until after the shutdown war is ended, either by some sort of truce, or by the capitulation that Trump is demanding.
We’ll see how that one goes. At this point, one might expect the Democrats to be thinking “in for a penny, in for a pound.” It may not be a winning hand, but if they act like it, Trump might have trouble proving he had better cards. A negotiated ending would be a defeat for Trump, but not really for anyone else.