One of my great meta-journalistic interests is to observe the moments when more or less obvious political realities enter D.C. conventional wisdom. They’re not strongly overlapping Venn diagrams. They often diverge pretty dramatically. I noticed one of those moments Saturday when Axios published this piece entitled “Term-limited Trump mortgages GOP’s future.” The headline mostly speaks for itself. President Trump won’t face voters again. So he’s increasingly indifferent to his political standing or perhaps more specifically unwilling to shift from or limit unpopular policies. It’s true that there are big consequences for Trump in the midterm elections. But even in the biggest blowout election Democrats aren’t going to gain supermajorities that would allow them to pass veto-proof legislation or remove Trump from office. Given the scale of High Court corruption, investigations will amount to trench warfare.
For many months, the D.C. conversation was focused on Trump’s electoral challenges being ephemeral. Or how he wasn’t really so much more unpopular than he was in his first term. If all that failed, there was how unpopular Democrats are. Democrats had another go-to argument: Trump doesn’t fear the electoral consequences of his policies because he doesn’t expect to face a free and fair election, or maybe any election at all. But blow-out elections keep piling up. Voters may not like Democrats but they keep winning elections with shifts around 20 percentage points. As for election takeovers, even with a corrupt Supreme Court, the White House’s progress has been modest at best.
Taken together it all amounts to one conclusion: Trump is unpopular, rapidly getting more unpopular and shows few if any signs of ramping back the policies which are making him so unpopular. (A minor and largely superficial housecleaning of DHS/ICE in the aftermath of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are the only real, albeit mild example.) Nate Silver’s ‘Silver Bulletin’ has generally been more friendly to Trump’s standing, both statistically and numerically, than G. Elliott Morris’s 50PlusOne.com data service, which I favor. But Trump has been falling rapidly there too this month. Today the site notes that Trump is now about as unpopular as he was in the aftermath of Jan. 6, at the end of his first term. It’s worth remembering just how unpopular and discredited he was in those days. It’s a reminder of the thinness of what we might call “nothing matters” discourse.
It’s actually pretty hard to get quite as unpopular as Trump is right now. (His net approval is 8 points lower than Joe Biden’s at this point in his term, 6 points worse than where Trump himself was in his first term and fully 23 point lower than Barack Obama at this point in his first term.) So the joke here isn’t on Democrats, who feel they need to look around nervously for that additional part of the equation they somehow aren’t seeing, because how could Trump really be leaning into this nosedive? It’s the GOP, which is facing one of the most angry and disillusioned electorates in modern electoral history. Trump is not operating by any conventional electoral calculus and, as his expanding family corruption portfolio suggests, he appears focused on maximizing the gains for him and his family with little concern for the electoral consequences of his notional political party.