You’ve seen the kind of stunning, kind of not stunning news that President Donald Trump has endorsed Ken Paxton for the GOP Senate primary runoff in Texas. Two months ago, Trump was on the cusp of endorsing Sen. John Cornyn, apparently already had the statement written out. Paxton rolled Trump and rolled him hard. The most obvious explanation for this is that the polling is showing that Cornyn is going to lose and Trump absolutely never wants to back a loser. It may be that. But I see something a little different. Trump has been taking out a lot of not-100% MAGA members of Congress. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy is the latest example of that. There were those state senate holdouts in Indiana. It’s happened again and again. On that front, he feels like he’s on a roll. But it’s not just that either.
Look at that other big bit of Trump news: the stock trades. It hasn’t been totally clear in the news accounts, which understandably focus on the zany, absurd levels of corruption. But the trades are really, really recent. They’re very limited, relative to now, through 2025 and then they explode at the beginning of 2026. At least through the end of the first quarter, they just kept rocketing up. And that’s happened just as the bottom started to really fall out of his popularity.
Note that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were both killed in January of this year. His semi-decapitating raid in Venezuela came on January 3. He launched his Iran war on February 28.
There’s another thing. Some of these trades are quite large, in the millions of dollars and seemingly right in the face of big, market-making moves that Trump controlled. So the potential profits are really, really large, by the terms of ordinary mortals. But they still pale in comparison to the orders of magnitude more money that Trump is making with payola payments to his sham crypto, AI and media companies. Since retaking office, he’s made billions on those scams. These trades seem driven by something beyond mere accumulation. They’re instinctive, reactive, carnivorous, gobbling up cash on the table even when it’s neither needed nor even the most efficient way to grab dollars. He can is becoming the only permission structure on the path to he will.
To me they seem of a piece with his decisions in Venezuela and now Iran. I mentioned a few months ago that Trump seemed to be leaning into his all-but-unfettered war powers as a kind of unitary executive self-soothing to compensate for his ebbing popularity and thus power at home. The hyper-aggressive stock trading overlaps in time and seems to be of a piece with it. Trump seems to be in a kind of bust-out phase, realizing that his power is ebbing and you need to grab every dollar on the table, cross every line while it’s still possible. In the mobster bust-out mode, you sell off every piece of movable property until there’s nothing left and you just burn the place down. Look at the MAGA slush fund Trump has now set up to give cash bounties to his most loyal and violent supporters.
This may seem like I’m marrying together two very unlike things: Trump crashing out in terms of his popularity and political power but also on an electoral winning streak. But they’re two sides of the same coin. He is distilling the GOP congressional caucuses into ever-purer versions of MAGA, the uncut cocaine of MAGA. And that is happening as basically everyone else who is not a strongly identified MAGA Republican pulls away. So he’s tightening his grip on a dwindling base of support.
Everything we are seeing suggests Trump no longer cares about winning elections. If he were focused on that he wouldn’t keep doubling down on the most unpopular aspects of his presidency as the 2026 midterms near. But he does. Again and again.