We are getting immediate feedback that Trump's policies are unpopular and not productive. The stock market, consumer confidence...lots of leading indicators are blinking red. Simple macroeconomics suggests that removing billions of dollars in federal spending, while raising prices through tariffs that are unpredictable and self-defeating is, like, really bad. And we are about to have a government shutdown.
If all this transpires the way I think it will, Democrats will - at worst - gain control of the House. I think, if you find the right candidates, you could pick up Senate seats in Maine, North Carolina, and any number of farm belt states like Iowa, Kansas or Nebraska. As for Texas and Florida, I think you have to worry about widescale disenfranchisement and fraud, but theoretically they could flip in truly terrible economic circumstances.
Democratic control of even one House of Congress gives them subpoena power and allows for a closer look at what is certain to be the orgy of corruption over the next four years. All of which, ideally, leads the 2028 Democratic ticket (hopefully a pugilistic Dem governor like Pritzker) to victory.
Yay!
However, as we saw in 2016 and 2024, anyone running as a Republican has a 50-50 shot at becoming president. It therefore matters what the Republican Party believes. In 2012, they believed some pretty shitty things, as Krugman lays out. Yes, Mitt Romney has a shred of human decency and integrity, but he also believed that much of the welfare state was wrong and had Paul Ryan as his running mate who wanted to kill the same Social Security that benefitted him as a child.
The simple fact of right wing politics is that it is essentially hierarchical. What the top believes, the bottom believes. Lots of this happens on the left, too, in that I really didn't prioritize trans rights until I felt the need to defend them as part of coalitional politics. I do think that right wing politics is way more susceptible to this sort of dynamic. Republicans always play "follow the leader."
Of course, right now, their leader is among the worst Americans who ever lived.
This is not to say that Trump did not draw energy from the Deplorables. They were always there and they remain his base. They are the 27%. They are racist, though perhaps not Klansmen. They are sexist, though perhaps not trads.
In his piece, Krugman notes that Republicans are predictably responding to bad feedback by stopping their ears and going lalalalalalalala at the top of their lungs. GOP House members are canceling townhalls, because the optics of getting shouted out by a 67 year old veteran who can't reach anyone at Social Security or the VA is really, really bad. The result, however, is that they are sealing themselves off from exactly the sort of democratic (not Democratic) feedback from the electorate that is essential to self-government.
Trump is going to die, most likely within the next ten years, likely sooner. Seeing obsequious lickspittles like JD Vance burrow into Trump's fat folds like some sort of parasite is instructive of where the GOP is. I still don't think Trump's gonzo "charisma" is transferable to someone else.
The intellectual bankruptcy of the GOP, their increasing fealty to Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, their militant know-nothingness, all point to a party that is going to fall further and further from democracy.
That's why the fate of American democracy kind of hinges of Trump foisting a depression on us. In 1928, Herbert Hoover (a man of infinitely superior qualities to Trump) won 58% of the vote and 444 electoral votes. Four years later he didn't 40%. From 1932 until 1968, Republicans only won the White House by running the most popular man in America in Dwight Eisenhower. From 1930-1994, Democrats almost always controlled the House.
That's the only way forward (a way maybe?) to get out from behind the GOP's authoritarian turn.
Trump 2.0 was always going to be a catastrophe for America. We can only hope the catastrophe is productive.
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