Everyone except the die-hard faithful now realizes that Donald Trump’s second presidency is a colossal failure. The president is doing his best to gin up symbolic, minor controversies in order to activate negative polarization and distract from his spectacular failures on inflation, the Iran War, corruption, racial harmony, and so on. These include demanding that artificial intelligence be renamed “artificial superintelligence”, bellowing that he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and conducting an execution on live TV. The goal is to get Republicans fighting Democrats over these controversies, in order to trick everyone into focusing on how much they hate the other team instead of how much they hate Trump.
The trick will probably fail, just as Trump’s promise to give every American $5000 for voting Republican backfired. All of these little tempests-in-teapots simply reinforce what a cruel, selfish, petty buffoon Trump is. And Trump’s approval rating just drifts lower and lower:
Trump will probably lose the midterms, and become a lame duck president, spamming increasingly grandiose, unworkable executive orders while battling a stream of Congressional investigations.
That means the window is closing on my ability to force Democrats to reckon with their failures during the Biden years. If and when Trump loses a national election, there will be far less pressure for soul-searching on the left. And once the GOP is no longer in control of all three branches of government, the Democrats will be able to influence actual policy instead of sitting around rebuilding their brand.
So before that happens, I want to summon the last fading scraps of the self-reflection that Democrats and progressives were briefly forced into after Trump thumped Kamala Harris two years ago. When Trump won, I wrote four blog posts trying to explain where the Democrats had gone wrong:
