With Trump’s first official State of the Union of his second term upon us, I wanted to share a few previewing thoughts. First, who knows the particulars we’re going to see in this speech. We start with the degenerate unpredictability of Trump and added to it we have whatever mix of senescence or loosening we’ve seen so clearly in the last year. And there I am really open to either possibility. I think sometimes that in term two he has kind of maxed out on all his desires for power, for adulation. And getting everything we want has a way of undoing many people, at least putting a lot of slack in the inner chords that give us quickness and alacrity. In any case, we start with Trump and all the additional feralness and distention we have in this second term. So who the eff knows what to expect.
But this is the prism I think we should be looking at the speech through.
All of the different news stories are less relevant than the basic moment and dynamic that, as with everything Trump, is highly, highly personalized. Trump is rapidly losing public support and power, so characterologically he must escalate. There are dominators and the dominated. It’s Trump’s whole story. And so what we’re seeing is that as his power ebbs, as his ability to dominate ebbs, he is leaning into those executive powers which are untrammeled, unchecked — the prerogative powers where his declining popularity matters least.
In a way it is a kind of double-or-nothing energy. But the effect is to hasten that fall from popular support and power. For most of the last year, we’ve been in this conversation about “affordability,” sort of a rebranding version of the inflation discourse that helped sink Biden’s presidency. But if you look closely at the last four or five months, it is his expressions of violence and lawlessness that have damaged him more than anything. It’s ICE and the sphere around ICE. The grandmothers getting tackled. The masked goons showing up in random towns. The best analyses I’ve seen of poll data in the last month point to the lawlessness, for lack of a better word, as the biggest factor separating Trump from his more loosely tethered supporters. Lots of the MAGA base loves it. But the people who liked him as a businessman who could get things done don’t like it at all. The scale of the corruption is breaking through as well. And the failing escalation — which can still create almost three more years of harrowing damage — is creating more and more things for new management in Congress to uncover. The lashing out has also taken the half of the population that was already against him and turned the opposition into something more intense and aggrieved.
Almost all the headlines I’ve seen about this SOTU talk about Trump facing it at a moment of declining polls with the midterms on the way. And that’s true. But it’s not the whole or the real story. What we’re seeing is an increasingly chaotic and feral person locked into what was always his binary and even Manichean sick worldview: the dominating and the dominated. And a guy who can’t not escalate. And he is escalating. And it’s his escalation that is what is hurting him the most. So look to that, the declining public support that is really mostly of his own making, and the ways that he will certainly use this speech to escalate even more.