The farcical charges against James Comey are the latest attempt by the Trump GOP to create a climate of fear and intimidation amongst their "enemies." As Josh Marshall and Heather Cox Richardson point out, these actions - and so many others - need to be understood not as expressions of Trump's strength, but as weakness. Trump is losing bigly. His approval ratings are cratering, and as they sink further, more of his base start to question whether they made the right choice. His policies are, of course, terrible. The Iran War and the tariffs are stoking inflation, and when you add in deportations and the general chaos of his rule, you get slowing growth.
I never really thought that Trump's wholesale assault on American freedoms was going to resonate with the sort of swing voters who voted for him in 2024 because of nominal prices. They are pretty linear in how they think of politics, and abstractions like "freedom" were never going to move them, or they would have been moved in 2024. That's not to say that they can't see the absurdity of him focusing on his ballroom when people are losing their health insurance and the cost of gas is high and going to get higher.
We are six months from the midterms. Farm bankruptcies are skyrocketing. Interest rates are more likely to go up than down. The chaos will only intensify. Democrats' lead on the generic ballot is not as big as Trump's negative approval ratings. That typically changes as we approach a midterm election. What's more, this is where candidate quality matters. Mary Peltola and Sherrod Brown have already won their states before. People should trust them more than "Generic Democrat."
Expect the crashing out by Trump to continue.
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