Where Things Stand
Coming back after a month away, I see Trump's invasion has reached its boundaries. The new season of our reality TV show will be exposition, as opposition mounts and Trump's failures become clear.
Back home in Cabo Frio again after a 24-hour journey from Venice by way of Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, then an afternoon lazing on the beach and about 14 hours of sleep, I have slipped effortlessly back into my usual Sunday routine, sipping espresso on the balcony and scrolling through my inbox of newsletters and the daily papers.
Brazil in mid-autumn is cool and misty, and the beach is nearly empty. It’s nice to be back in a place that prizes reckless liberty, after a month in the judicious order of Europe. A good day to catch up on things.
Maybe because my daily intake of current events was all summary, no depth, for the past four weeks, I’m thinking today that the chaos of the Trump story is starting to resolve itself into some sort of order. At least it seems that way to me.
I have written of Trump as an invading geopolitical army, more or less along the lines of the Nazi attack that began on September 1, 1939, and if that’s true it seems like late 1942 now, with the initial blitzkrieg and string of successes now spent, and the opposition arranging itself into some sort of order.
It’s not stalemate yet, and further Trump advances are still possible, but the smoke and fire of the initial assault have settled and the battle lines are clear.
All along, the central theme in this metaphorical invasion has been around the extent of presidential power itself. That’s pretty much what all of Trump’s gambits roll back to, from his power to start a trade war or decimate the federal government, to toying with the suspension of habeas corpus and his attempt to erase women and people of color from history and from any positions of power.
If I draw out the parallel, I will note that by the time the German army stalled at Stalingrad, Hitler had invaded or conquered 12 nations, and I suppose one could make a list of about as many discrete areas that Trump has conquered or invaded, depending on how one counts.
Or maybe a lot more. When it comes to Trump, it’s a really long list—everything from relations with China, Russia, and Europe to the fear and stress experienced by more than 10 million unauthorized immigrants subject to arrest and deportation by masked men carrying automatic weapons.
Because the question of gender identit is so politicized, we haven’t yet adequately noticed that about 1.6 million people who identify as transgendered have been told they have no right to exist. One can understand reasons that Democrats try to avoid the issue without accepting this malignant attack on human rights and dignity.
The national economy hasn’t been destroyed yet, but America’s standing in the world has been irreparably damaged and there may be some very bad times ahead. It’s not clear yet how badly government services will be hurt by the inefficiencies and loss of capacity created by DOGE, but there won’t be any good news on that score, either.
America’s national security is weaker than at any time since at least 2001, and perhaps since the 1930s, with the leadership decimated, buffoons and sycophants in key positions, and a president who has attended only 12 national security briefings in his first 100 days.
The defense secretary, whose department is in chaos, is focused on imaginary wars at the southern border and in the libraries of the military’s educational institutions, while China’s preparations to invade Taiwan proceed apace and Israel threatens to provoke all-out war in the Middle East.
The U.S. military itself is well-prepared to wage high-intensity warfare for a few weeks, but woefully ill-prepared to sustain operations over time. It has been missing recruitment goals by as much as 25 percent, with only about 23 percent of the available population meeting basic recruitment standards, according to Department of Defense analysis.
(Eligibility problems like obesity, mental health challenges, drug use, criminal records, and educational underachievement present a dark picture of national wellbeing, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Present analysis indicates significant shortcomings in training and preparedness for fighting on the kind of modern, drone-dominated modern battlefield that Russia’s war on Ukraine has demonstrated, while supply chains in terms of armaments are not adequate to supply a sustained conflict, and also are heavily reliant on components and raw materials exported from other nations, including China.
The nation’s military preparedness should be a major focus for the current administration, but under Peter Hegseth strategic priorities have been entirely misplaced, while Trump continues to bray about his ability to settle complex, long-standing conflicts through jawboning and personal relationships.
Trump’s obsequious efforts to court Russia’s second man of steel have proven abjectly unsuccessful. Putin has made it clear that he won’t stop short of total victory in Ukraine, while China affirmed a unified stance against the West at Russia’s recent celebration of the 80th anniversary over Germany, a parade in which 100 Chinese soldiers marched.
Trump claimed success in forging a tenuous ceasefire between India and Pakistan, even though India said the U.S. had nothing to do with it. Under Trump, there is an open question of whether the U.S. has any kind of persuasive power anymore when it comes to geopolitical conflict. The world knows him for the blustering fool and liar that he is.
It was always clear that if Trump was elected the main battles would be on the legal front, and right now a rough estimate would have the Department of Justice battling more than 100 cases and maybe as many more than 200, depending on how they are tracked. The ranks of competent government lawyers have been thinned, and the government has met initial defeat in most of these cases, apart from some procedural victories.
The Supreme Court has already agreed to review about 50 cases, and it will decide several significant cases by the end of its term in June, while others may have to wait until the fall. So far, the Supreme Court has acted in ways that suggest that it will uphold basic constitutional principles, and the question of an all-out constitutional crisis has been deferred, though one may be upon us by June.
Trump’s administration continues to pursue its war against due process and personal liberty, with recent arrests of a Wisconsin judge and the mayor of Newark, NJ presaging escalating misuse of federal police and legal powers against opponents. These attacks seem as likely to embolden opposition as to curtail it.
The downturn in Trump’s approval ratings regarding immigration seem to be the result of publicity regarding the extreme measures ICE has taken, and some of the wrenching personal stories that have filtered into public discourse where low information voters live.
A recent Wall Street Journal report suggests that now that his initial days of heady, King-like power to issue edicts are coming to an end, Trump is finding the actual work of being president frustrating. That makes sense, really, given that being president is the hardest job in America, leaving those who hold the office visibly aged at the end of their terms.
Trump is 78 years old, and he tries to treat it like a part-time job, spending every weekend playing golf and far more time on social media than he does in reading policy briefings. But he is learning that a tweet on Truth Social doesn’t have much impact on Putin or Xi, and that while tariffs are a kind of magic wand that he can wave to make the markets move, managing the economy is not a game of poker.
In a recent Washington Post analysis, Aaron Blake provided a list of significant issues and decisions in which Trump, when questioned, said he was not directly involved. These included everything from the appointment of Casey Means to be surgeon general and Senator Thom Tillis’s opposition to Ed Martin’s nomination to be U.S. attorney for DC, to his knowledge that four U.S. soldiers had died in Lithuania and the controversial proclamation of the Aliens Enemy Act, which Trump initially said someone else had signed.
It is unclear whether this is a matter of blame-shifting, or actual disengagement from what is going on. Maybe it is both.
Amidst all of this, Trump’s approval ratings have dropped precipitously with a speed only matched in his first presidency. While his overall approval rating as measured by Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin is still above 40 percent, the gap between the percentage of those who strongly approve and those who strongly disapprove is striking, with the latter under 25 percent and the former above 40 percent.
Trump is under water in some key areas, like the economy, that have generally been strengths for him, and he has lost ground even in the area of immigration, which has been one of his strongest areas.
It’s difficult to see anything on the horizon to interrupt this downward trend, and it may turn out that Trump’s floor for approval is below 30 percent by the end of the summer, especially if supply-chain and import interruptions because of tariffs have their expected effect.
The picture that emerges is one of a presidency still intent on signaling absolute power while being, in reality, in serious trouble. There are already signs that Trump is aware of this, perhaps particularly in how his rhetoric on tariffs has softened while the main actor behind the psychotic “Liberation Day,” Peter Navarro, has been sidelined in favor of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, one of the few adults in the room.
The trade war Trump initiated with China has finally resulted in the start of what are likely to be, at best, long drawn-out negotiations, and Trump has already blinked, by sending a conciliatory message on Truth Social offering to lower tariffs to 80 percent.
Xi, for his part, is not blinking, and he certainly is not subject to the same kind of disapproval ratings that Trump will be as America’s reliance on Chinese imports becomes visible in empty shelves in the coming weeks.
The war in Ukraine will continue, proving Trump impotent to have any influence on Putin. The question of whether and how much the U.S. continues to support Ukraine is of vital concern, but either way the war won’t end. Putin may find ways to continue to play Trump, but he may decide total intransigence is the best strategy. Trump is basically an NPC in this drama.
Israel will occupy Gaza and continue its expansionism in the Middle East. Efforts to achieve a nuclear accord with Iran will be difficult at best, and it is hard to see any sort of real diplomatic win for the U.S. in the region as long as Netanyahu is in power.
Perhaps most important, Trump’s ability to keep the American economy from turning sour will prove as limited as those of any president have been. In the best-case scenario, we are due for continued inflationary pressures even as investment is curtailed and the economy contracts. The potential for a sharper downturn and the return of 1970s-type stagflation is clear, though perhaps it may be avoided.
It seems nearly impossible that the Republican Congress can come up with a “big beautiful bill” that meets Trump’s promises without adding to the federal deficit or making huge cuts in Medicaid, and in any case it has to do so soon in order to avoid defaulting on America’s debt, an event that would carry dire consequences.
Even if Congress is able to come up with a patchwork bill that achieves full Republican support in the House, it is unlikely to have much positive effect on the economy as a whole. The potential for outright stalemate and paralysis should not be understated. Inability to enact the most basic budget resolution would significantly deepen current economic woes.
Trump himself has shown almost no interest in legislation since becoming president, and his marginalization of Congress has been in many ways a keystone of his imperial presidency. However, the president can’t ignore the role of the House and Senate in passing a federal budget the way he has with tariffs and diplomacy, and Trump’s diffidence coupled with his random messages regarding what he wants have created a virtually impossible situation for the Republican leadership.
Trump has shown no reluctance to use the power of the presidency to get House Republicans to fall in line, but the current situation is one in which even coming up with some kind of agreement where Trump can pick up the phone to twist arms may be impossible.
It’s not enough of a mess yet to be the lead story, because the deadline is still a couple of months away, but it will be soon. As the problem comes to the fore, the extent of Trump’s power to force Republican consensus, in a context where mid-term elections and Trump’s approval ratings will be important factors, will be sorely tested.
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So that’s more or less where things stand, as it seems to me after a month away from thinking too much about politics in the age of Trump. I’ve created this sort of summary for my own purposes, as I start to re-engage with the regular process of producing this newsletter—I wanted to bring myself up to speed.
It seems to me that we’ve reached the point that I was expecting, where Trump’s initial assault has reached its full extent, and he is forced to move from setting things into motion to managing the consequences of his actions. The prediction that he would be poorly prepared for this moment and will manage it badly seems obvious to me.
Making predictions beyond that is tough, since Trump is impulsive and erratic, clearly disengaged and poorly informed, yet far from oblivious to how the situation he has created is being reported and received in the press and approval polls.
All of Trump’s initial plan of attack, extraordinary as it turned out to be, was more or less predictable, particularly if one took the man seriously and literally on the campaign trail and also assumed that Project 2025 and the people who produced it would guide his first 100 days.
What happens now, with the agenda in place and the returns rolling in, is really anybody’s guess. Apart from his deeply ingrained racism and misogyny, his xenophobia and analysis of international relations as a zero-sum game, and a perverse belief in tariffs and in his own powers of negotiations, Trump doesn’t really seem to believe in anything or have any deeply held values or principles. Beyond rage, vengeance and an instinct for self-preservation, it is difficult to know what motives will drive Trump’s behavior and actions in the coming months.
It has always been a mistake to disregard Trump’s actual genius because of his obvious lack of subject knowledge or intellectual curiosity, coupled with his boorishess and nouveau-riche sensibility, and therefore miss the fact that he is brilliantly gifted in certain areas. Predictions based solely on his stupidity may fail to account for his deep insight in certain areas, particularly when one is wearing the lenses of the elite educated class. .
Trump is basically the producer, director, and actor of his own reality show. A failed businessman buoyed only by his father’s fortune and a gift at self-promotion, Trump’s great success came in playing himself on television, first as an actor portraying himself as a businessman, and then as an actor portraying himself as a presidential candidate.
In these roles, he proved to have deep, intuitive instincts about what would resonate with a certain part of the American public, along with cut-throat instincts about what it takes to win. He rode these to his first presidency, where his acting career began to falter, and he should have disappeared from public life with his electoral loss in 2020 and his full impeachment and conviction by Congress.
That didn’t happen because of the deep stupidity and self-destructive impulses of the Republican Senate and particularly Mitch McConnell, so Trump was able to bring his show back for new seasons, with a stronger supporting cast and better production values. The factors behind his victory over Kamala Harris are overdetermined, but certainly one was how brilliantly Trump read the tenor of the current voting populace and nurtured and catered to it.
That reality—that Trump’s brilliance lies in his mastery of the media of politics—is probably the best way to think of how the coming months will go. Over the years, this central dimension of Trump’s personality has been reported and analyzed extensively, so it is curious that it has not received that much play in recent analysis.
It has been reported that Trump approaches each day as a sort of “episode” in a long-running drama, planning out events and actions in a fashion explicitly intended to control the daily narrative, and staging events to that purpose as well. His use of Truth Social is part of that, though sometimes his late-night tweets show more impulsivity than planning. From day to day, there’s no question that everything Trump does is intended to shape the news.
It is an increasingly recursive practice as time goes on, since the plotlines that Trump sets in motion, like diplomacy with Russia or ICE’s hardline tactics, begin to take on a life of their own as other players enter the game and make their own moves.
Here is where Trump makes his adjustments and demonstrates that his political beliefs are almost entirely flexible within a certain range, and that he will modulate them according to his reading of the current situation and how various options might be received.
Approval ratings and how Trump is covered in the press are the key elements, and here the span of the story Trump has set in motion is so broad that it seems the president may be having trouble following all of it, and even whether he is receiving all of it or being accurately informed by his staff, who have their own agendas.
Within that sort of chaos, Hegseth can suspend key arms delivery to Ukraine without the president knowing about it, and Trump can blindside Mike Johnson and John Thune with a tweet about taxing the rich before hastily withdrawing it. And Trump can believe that he actually won a Supreme Court decision when the justices voted 9-0 against him.
If it is predictable that Trump’s decisions in the next months will be based on his reading of the press and polls, it is entirely unpredictable how that reading will be shaped, or the degree to which what takes place is really Trump’s idea or that of someone like Kennedy or Rubio to whom he seems to have delegated decision-making power to a large degree.
That is as much as one really can say, apart from the obvious point that Trump will try to manage things in a way that presents stability, progress, and the achievement of goals, with him firmly in control and “winning” the various battles in which he is engaged, while lashing out at his losses.
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The latter point is where the fear comes in, since while Trump has said that he will abide by court decisions, it’s not entirely clear that he means it, while it is equally clear that some key figures around him, particularly Scott Miller, don’t think that he should have to.
The questions of personal freedoms, freedom of the press and independence of universities and law firms, habeas corpus and the rights of anyone within the U.S. to the due process of law, are the ones where the force of opposition—essentially, the Supreme Court--has the thinnest and ostensibly deepest powers, final arbiters who lack a military to impose it.
Leaving aside essentially unpredictable decisions at the local levels of economic moves or diplomacy and geopolitical strategy, it seems like there are two basic directions that the Trump presidency may go from here.
One is the worst-case scenario in which Trump, in the face of opposition victories and a worsening domestic situation, defies the Supreme Court and moves further to bring legal, police and perhaps even military power to bear against the forces that oppose him. Invocation of national crisis and the suspension of civil liberties would enter unprecedented territory and rip the nation apart. Who can know what the outcome would be?
The second is what I still see as by far the likelier scenario, in which Trump continues to get away with as much as he can, especially in the area of personal corruption, which has been hugely beneficial to him, while adjusting to opposition by giving ground in strategic ways that avoid the appearance of failure.
He’s already showing signs of doing that with tariffs, and the pursuit of diplomacy with both China and Iran, along with trade negotiations with other nations, all send signals that “Liberation Day” and the China tariffs were the extreme opening hand, and now he is ready to deal.
Trump also seems clear when he recognizes it is time to step away from people who bring his ratings down, and that is showing up in his new tone on Putin and on Musk’s marginalization from power.
It’s still not clear how much damage has been done, because the effects have not yet reached their full extent, but it would be unsurprising if in the next phase of Trump’s management of the federal government the focus will be on damage control efforts designed to cool public anger. Responsibility for what goes right or wrong will shift to the cabinet secretary, with lies about how bad things already were under Biden there as a back-up.
The problem of the “big beautiful bill” is one where Trump is likely to stay above the fray as much as he can. There is the potential for disaster there—particularly a default on national debt—but Trump will do his best to stay clear and position himself as the voice of reason. Trump doesn’t care about the Republican Party, except as a power base.
It will be interesting to see whether the Republicans are so broken that they can’t get to a majority vote, in which case it is imaginable that Trump might push to bring the Democrats in. Given the competing factions and pressures, all kinds of scenarios are imaginable, but in all of them one can predict Trump will look for a stable win.
It is really in the area of legality that the most unpredictability lies. Part of that is because Trump’s narcissistic wounds and rage are all bound up in the legal system, so that it is a world with good judges and bad judges, and one in which the idea of independence from Trump’s power is a source of constant resentment.
It is also in this area where some of Trump’s worst appointments lie, from Bondi, Patel and Bongino in justice, to Homan and Noem in immigration and homeland security. It is also where Stephen Miller’s malign influence is most deeply felt.
The question here is whether Trump will step back from constitutional crisis and follow the dictates of the court, or whether he will construct some sort of legal rationale to operate outside the court’s rulings. There are no adults in the room in this area.
If the latter, then we are in the worst-case scenario, but I don’t think will get there. In many ways, the stakes just are not high enough for Trump to risk it. Trump has already succeeded in closing the southern border, and certainly the message the U.S. is sending is that now is not a good time to try to enter the nation without authorization.
Trump really doesn’t need illegal powers to manage immigration effectively. Declaring victory and scaling back efforts while abandoning the desire to operate without due process would be politically viable steps, while the alternative would serve Stephen Miller’s extreme interests but have little benefit and much risk for Trump.
Likewise with most other lawsuits. The ones with law firms and universities are hardly essential, and most of the damage there has already been done. So, too, with the press, though here is an area where importunate lawsuits based on vengeance may still proceed.
Suits in other areas, mainly having to do with funding and personnel cuts executed by DOGE, all represent cases where provoking a constitutional crisis would not be worth it, and really isn’t necessary. The damage, again, has already been done.
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Coming back to my desk after a month away, I did not start out with the intention to write at this length and try to be so comprehensive. But it makes sense to me that I did. I have been frustrated, as all of us must be, by how much Trump has occupied the center of life since taking office, and I have written before of how I never intended this newsletter to focus entirely on American politics.
Barring any genuinely unpredicted event that forces attention, I’m going to leave the Trump presidency here for a while and take on other subjects. It’s a failing presidency run by a consummate media strategists driven by deep grievances and narcissistic rage. The plotlines have all been established, along with most of the characters, and now we’re into exposition.
I may be wrong, but I think we are in for a period of relative stability, a sort of firming up of the new normal Trump created in his first 14 weeks, at least until the first real crisis strikes.
In doing the research for this piece, the thing that struck me the most was the simple Department of Defense analysis that less than 25 percent of military-age individuals meet the eligibility criteria to join the military without some form of waiver. That seemed interesting to me, like a real problem.
Part of what the forced, immediate focus on electoral politics and the Trump presidency does it make it harder to talk about the deeper sociocultural questions that in the end will be the more salient part of our history, when we reach the period when Trump’s years in office will be seen as merely a part of what was happening more generally over a longer span of time.
I was thinking about this, and about that DoD statistic, and I found myself suddenly remembering the time my college girlfriend and I hitchhiked up the West Coast from San Francisco to Vancouver. It made me wonder whether that was the kind of thing college kids still did. I had just ran across a statistic about the percentage of people who pick up hitchhikers, and it turns out that only about a quarter of younger adults have ever done so, while about half of those in their sixties or older have done so.
Understanding that statistic along with the one about military eligibility, and maybe the rate of mental health diagnoses among children and young adults, might be a way to understand better the nature of the United States right now and why Trump is president. I’ll talk about that in my next piece.