Things are not going terribly well for President Donald Trump and his band of merry men. The campaign promises of instantaneous world peace haven’t quite panned out; the administration’s marquee trade policy shakeup has run aground on court challenges and market disruption; the economy is looking shaky. The most compelling defense that anyone can seriously mount for the Big, Beautiful Bill is that something better probably isn’t politically viable. The Republican-controlled Senate can’t be bothered to work a full week to get the growing backlog of presidential appointments confirmed. Immigration enforcement remains Trump’s strong point in polling, but he continues to fall well short of promises.
A competent opposition would be having a field day. Instead, the Democrats and the allied press persistently do their best to make it seem like the president is reasonable, moderate, and competent. There’s a particular dance exemplified by the media response to Trump’s sole memorable statement from his debate with Kamala Harris: “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.” This strangely mesmerizing tricolon launched a thousand indignant fact-checks. These concluded that, while perhaps the Haitian arrivals at Springfield were not actually engaged in cynophagia, they had been enormously disruptive to the life of the little town in other ways. This was not the moral victory Trump’s opponents thought it was; in debunking the florid Trumpism, they in fact disclosed a great deal more supporting the substance of the immigration-hawk critique.
This keeps happening. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national erroneously deported to one of El Salvador’s megaprisons, became a cause celebre for a season, allegedly laying bare the injustice and inhumanity of the administration’s immigration enforcement program. Even after conceding its error, the administration slow-walked bringing Garcia back to the U.S., apparently betting that the longer he stayed in the news, the more morally vindicated the administration would seem. That bet appears to be paying out; Garcia is back in the U.S., true, but now faces credible charges of human trafficking. The correction of the administration’s mistake has just emphasized that Garcia and his ilk are not the sort of people you necessarily want to be letting into your country in large numbers—in fact, may be the sort of people you want to get out of your country.
The same two-step appears to be under way with the anti-ICE rioting in Los Angeles. Trump ordered in the National Guard, and California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA’s Mayor Karen Bass are both standing on their rights against federal interference. Here at the office, we’re pretty big on the 10th Amendment and all that jazz, and to that degree have some sympathy for Newsom & co. That said, it is quite a thing to see one of the Democrats’ 2028 frontrunners maneuvered into saying the scenes of men in balaclavas waving Mexican flags over burning cars show nothing but a “manufactured crisis.”
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I’m not exactly sure how to account for this compulsive rake-stomping behavior; insisting that the broad left-of-center coalition is beholden to “the groups” at its fringe gets you only so far. At any rate, it has become consistent enough that the White House can organize PR around the assumption that its enemies will dig in on stupid stuff.
Complacency is dangerous, though. I tend to think the market for political platforms does actually more or less work in the long run; no party likes losing forever, and nothing succeeds like success. The GOP more or less tolerated the Trump takeover in the end because it opened enough new voter pools that Republicans could win elections. The “abundance” liberals, incoherent and disempowered as they are now, are correct in identifying an unserved but significant political tendency in the U.S., one that prefers civil libertarianism, technocratic competence, and what is broadly called neoliberalism. True Andrew Yangism has never been tried, but, when it is, it will be an electoral force to be reckoned with.
When the Democrats decide to try to win again—when they stop defending various sorts of indefensible people and positions in highly embarrassing ways—the right will have to fall back on actual substantive propositions and, after four years in power, on a substantive record. Economic deregulation—especially in the energy sector—and foreign policy offer the most obvious achievable wins. Yet it is not clear that Trump’s coalition of discontent has much of a coherent platform; it is even less clear that the administration is going to check the boxes on its campaign promises. That’s dangerous. Whether the Republicans can plausibly claim to be the party of doing things will determine its staying power, especially once the Democrats decide to return from the desert.
