What’s a stymied autocrat to do?
Donald Trump just helped elect a Canadian prime minister who ran on an anti-Trump platform. Mark Carney in March told the American autocrat who thinks he runs the world where he could stick his tariffs and his 51st state threats. (Trump backed the other guy.) Trump’s week is not going well. He’s making wild claims about 200 trade deals for which there is no evidence. The rest of his first 100 days have been chaos, controversy and destruction with large doses of cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
“Protests, polling, and pushback”: These are the three things The New Abnormal pcodast host Jesse Cannon believes show the “Trump dam is breaking.”
Cannon believes small wins like the lowest 100-day approval rating in 70 years are “super important” because they chip away at the “Achilles’ heel” of the president.
“The pushback and protests against all of this do have some wins,” he said.
Death by a 1,000 cuts can work both ways, Cannon suggests.
The podcast co-host Danielle Moodie pointed out polling for President Joe Biden “was in the mid-50s” for the same timeframe and George W. Bush “was in the low-50s.” Trump is at 41%.
She claimed Trump is “circling the drain” with his poll numbers.
NPR (also under attack by Trump) reports on more bad polling:
Twice as many people said President Trump deserves a grade of F rather than an A for how he’s handled his first 100 days in office, according to a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.
Forty-five percent said Trump deserves the failing mark, compared to 23% who would pass him with flying colors. It’s understandable that partisans would have strongly polarized views of the president, but it’s also notable that half of independents said he deserves an F, and only a slim majority of Republicans would give him an A.
Thomas Edsall considers the psychic impact the flood of negative numbers might have on the size-conscious Trump.
“Public opinion has turned against him, the economy is faltering, the Supreme Court has ordered him to stand down, his tariffs have backfired and such conservative mainstays as National Review and The Wall Street Journal are questioning his judgment,” Edsall begins.
The “stymied autocrat” will of course claim down is up and losses are victories. He will double down on distractions. But what else? Edsall’s sources suggest that the more Trump fails, the more he flails.
“A less constrained Trump may be a more violent Trump,” write Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, political scientists at Dartmouth and Harvard who wrote on the politics of chaos.
“Mr. Trump’s second term is proving far rockier,” the Economist explained in a recent article.
“As Trump’s armor begins to crack, you have to wonder: Who is more dangerous — a triumphant Trump or a wounded Trump?” asks Edsall.
Tali Mendelberg, a political scientist at Princeton, tells Edsall that predicting how Trump will react is a fraught prospect, but his behavior follows a pattern:
He is now aggressively pushing the limits of the law in nearly every conceivable way. It is difficult to see why he would slink into humility or go quietly into defeat. He has never done so before. He fights with every means at his disposal. If he should feel that he is losing power and respect, there is no reason to expect he will self-restrain.
Restraint is not exactly Trump’s strong suit.
Michael Bang Petersen, another political scientist, this time from Denmark, says Trump bears “every single hallmark of a dominance-oriented leader. He seems aggressive, self-centered, norm-violating and strategically uses fear to force people to defer.”
You don’t need a political scientist to know which way Trump’s moods blow.
But will he try to provoke violence as pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act? It’s clear Stephen Miller is itching for it.
Edsall’s other sources tell us what after a decade we non-academics already know about the man-child in the Oval Office.
The danger, says Herbert Kitschelt, a Duke professor of international relations, is that an economic crisis will convince Trump et al. to “realize that they cannot win a free and fair election, and actually might face a defeat in the midterms severe enough to precipitate the impeachment of both president and vice president.”
The question then becomes, in Kitschelt’s view,
Will evangelical-nationalist clero-fascism — with other MAGA and Tea Party currents in tow — be capable of converting America into an electoral autocracy faster than U.S. civil society and large parts of the business sector will be able to mobilize a defense of American democracy and to stiffen the spine of the U.S. judiciary to preserve American institutions?
That’s what keeps me up at night.
Michigan Congressman Shri Thanedar (MI-13) on Monday introduced articles of impeachment against Trump. These are, of course, more political performance art at this stage, but validation for Trump that if Democrats win back the House majority in 2026, they could impeach him yet again, impeach “your favorite president” like nobody’s ever been impeached before.
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