Trump's Been Losing A Lot Lately
There's been at least a bit of a disturbance in the force. It may be due to some Rs recognizing this Trump guy is a problem for them and their party.
Who’s sleepy now?!
In a brief respite from the usual econ analysis on this page, let us count the recent losses for our benighted president:
—With a 215-208 vote, the House passed a measure instructing the president to either withdraw U.S. forces from Iran forthwith or win Congressional approval to continue the conflict.
—Enough Republicans came out publicly against his $1.8 billion slush fund for J6 rioters that the measure appears to be dead.
—His ballroom funding appears to be in trouble.
—His preferred candidate in Iowa’s R primary lost.
—He’s got to take his name off of the Kennedy Center.1
—Senate Rs appear to be balking at his nominating “little Trump”—Bill Pulte—to be his Director of National Intelligence as the man has zero experience in such intelligence. Or any other kind of intelligence. His sole qualification is that he’s been Trump’s bulldog; this is the guy that cooked up the attack strategy on former Fed chair Powell, which, ftr, totally backfired on the administration.
I’m sure this is a partial list—it’s just off the top of my head (and I didn’t even mention all the artists who dropped out of his July 4th concert). Head over to the Contrarian for a much deeper dive. What I’d like to do here is noodle a bit on what it all means.
First, let’s recognize that something has changed. I just noted that Senate Rs are balking at a terrible nominee. But they’ve confirmed dozens of terrible nominees. Has Trump become some kind of lame duck? Has the Republican party found its spine?!
No, on the spine thing. Part of what we’re seeing is truly pathetic opposition to some of Trump’s agenda from Rs who lost their primaries due to Trump’s endorsement of their opponent. I give zero spine points for standing up to Trump’s grift, lawlessness, and incompetence only now that it is costless to you.
But there’s perhaps something to the lame-duck condition. The root of Rs’ fealty to Trump is their belief that he can primary them, and that still clearly holds in more than a few districts (his Iowa endorsement loss is an exception). But revealed behavior being what it is, a few Rs—and to be clear, there are just a few of them—calculate that they’ve got more to lose by aligning with Trump on everything than by showing some independence. Sen. Thom Tillis put it this way: “I feel like there are people advising the president as if there is no election in November.”
Trump has said he doesn’t care about the midterms, but he’s never seen a vote he didn’t want to rig, and his gerrymanders and proposed voting-rule changes suggest he cares plenty about that outcome. For what it’s worth, which is probably not much at this point, Polymarket has the Ds at 82% to win the House and 47% to win the Senate.
Let’s say those odds hold, what can we learn about this recent spate of Trump losses and defections that’s relevant to the back half of his 2nd term wherein Ds control the House? I’m already too far out of my political economy lane, but I’ll briefly offer the following.
I’d argue that when you add a D-controlled House to these dynamics, and likely even a narrower R lead in the Senate, to the at least meager evidence of Rs recognizing that maybe this Trump guy isn’t great for them and their party’s future, you get an even more insulated Trump for the rest of his term.
Outside of extending his first-term tax cuts, he never had any use for Congress in the first place and views them as a largely irrelevant buzzing in his ears as he and his cabinet pursue their unitary goals whims. That wouldn’t necessarily be a political problem for Trump if his whims weren’t so economically destructive. Yes, he’ll always have the always-Trumpers and never have the never-Trumpers, but the decisive group in the middle that determines election outcomes has realized that, when it comes to their living standards, they bet on the wrong pony. And R politicians can only ignore that reality for so long.
So, under the scenario I’m describing, Congress gets nothing done while the D-controlled House holds endless hearings prosecuting the misdeeds of the admin. That won’t be pretty, but I’ve long argued that if we want to begin tacking back towards good governance, Trump’s enablers must be relentlessly prosecuted.
Trump himself doubles down on his personal grift, focusing even more on kickbacks and crypto, and becomes increasingly irrelevant. With greater D control and less unchecked power, he is less able to disrupt on the scale of his first two years in office.
I admit this may be wishful thinking and it is too soon to tell if I’m correct that some Rs are recognizing they need some distance from Trump—as the NYT put it: “The president’s unilateral and retributive style of governing is starting to hit a wall in both chambers of Congress.” And, especially with SCOTUS mostly behind him, there’s no telling what greater damage he can do. We must especially worry about his attack on the electoral infrastructure.
But it is also important not to let one’s doomerism preclude one from seeing these cracks. A bad day for Trump is a good day for America and the rest of the world. A bad week, quarter, year or two are even better.
If somebody can find out when that removal is taking place, I promise to show up with a pack of revelers. I assume it will be in the dead of night, but what a great night for a party, am I right?? Sing it with me: nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah. Hey hey hey, goodbye!
As I said in another thread, this is like a dam. By the time you start to see the cracks they've been forming under the surface for a long time. Then the dam breaks. Suddenly.
The biggest, most comprehensive reform period in U. S. history came in the wake of three hard-right Republican administrations. Those included the most corrupt and scandal-ridden up to that time, Warren Harding's, and three disastrous years of relying on the free market to right itself automatically in the face of 25 percent of the labor force being jobless, with virtually no hope of getting a job, in a time when there was no social safety net, Herbert Hoover's.
It took all that to break a majority of American voters of their bad habit of voting GOP. What followed was four terms straight of one the best national leaders any country ever had, Franklin Roosevelt's. And, it kept hard-right Republicans out of the White House for 20 years.
Twenty years of vital reforms and spectacular economic growth and stability, resulting in the world's biggest and best-off middle class.
That deserved GOP losing streak was only broken because Dwight Eisenhower, a brilliant military leader with national name recognition and unmatchable leadership credentials, plus no political baggage of any kind, decided to run for president as a Republican. Ironically, Eisenhower proved to be just progressive enough in some ways to go against the grain with the John Birchers and congressional Republicans. Although he did a decent job as president, Ike was too moderate and pragmatic -- as when Democrats offered, and he accepted, their help in getting the National Defense Highway Act passed -- to earn real adoration from GOP politicians and a lot of their voters. As with Republicans no longer billing theirs as The Party of Lincoln, you don't hear them honoring the honest and decent moderate who broke their epic losing streak.
That bad habit of voting Republican reasserted itself to give us the scandal-ridden Nixon-Agnew debacle, capped by Agnew's imprisonment and Nixon being the first president in U.S. history to resign in disgrace, thus avoiding likely imprisonment.
True GOP adoration didn't bloom until Ronald Reagan won two scandal-ridden terms, ushering in a new era of GOP dominance powered by former Dixiecrats. Reagan, his monied backers and many Americans' bad voting habits, set the country on a leadership course that brought us to the hard-right, Robinhood-in-reverse nirvana of not one, but two terms of scandals-on-steroids misleadership by Donald Trump -- the worst U.S. president ever.
Let's hope and pray for lessons learned and a dangerously bad habit by a majority of voters broken for decades to come. As in 1932, our country is desperately overdue for comprehensive reforms.