Member Newsletter
There are a number of you who simply don’t agree with me about the role of public opinion in the battle against Trumpism, which I sketched out in yesterday’s Backchannel and in other posts over recent months. And that’s great. Because, among other reasons, you keep me on my toes. And TPM isn’t a community that has any one point of view, in any case. But I note this because I have to again whack this same hornets nest today. So apologies in advance, probably mostly to myself. But this time it’s not with an argument, not some proposition I want to convince you of. It’s more a personal interpretation, my perception of events.
Quite simply, I think Trump’s already lost.
Am I jinxing everything? Should I take it back? It doesn’t matter. What I am definitely not saying is that things are about to get better. I think they will get worse. On some fronts they’ll get much worse. Indeed, one of the basic dynamics of Trump’s (second) first hundred days in office is the way in which Trump and DOGE have taken numerous actions, not easily reversible, which take some time to take effect. Tariffs are only one example. We’re only now seeing the final arrivals of container ships sent to get ahead of the tariffs. Last week, the product arrivals were actually up year over year because of that. Over the course of May, according to shipping records, shipments from China basically flatline. That’s already happened. It just hasn’t hit our shores yet. It’s maybe a thousand miles out into the Pacific. And supply chains, once halted in a haphazard fashion, don’t snap back quickly. We learned that five years ago.
We just got a new executive order last night in which Trump wants to take over local police departments or even turn them against the elected officials who run them. We’ll be covering all these things, including the numerous other examples. It’s all bad.
But I see the signs all around. He’s doubling down on things people don’t like. He’s fomenting a growing political backlash. The more signs we see of the limits of Trump’s power, the more people show signs of bucking that power. All power is unitary. We see signs of it everywhere. You simply cannot impose an autocracy if a clear majority of the country opposes what you are trying to do at the outset, when you are trying to do it.
They are now reacting to initial resistance by doubling down on things that are not popular. They appear to be upset that they’ve managed to have fewer deportations during Trump’s first hundred days in office than Biden had in his last hundred. Now they’re going to crack down on local officials and are threatening more indictments of judges and other officials who get in their way.
Good luck getting 12 jurors to convict any of these people. These trials will end up like the fugitive slave trials in the North in the late 1850s.
Another caveat or “to be sure”: I don’t take this as a spur to quietism or to a sense of inevitability. Indeed, much of what I’m saying here about what I see happening is based on seeing the rising tide of opposition. I’m assuming that, factoring it into my assumptions. It’s a core part of the equation. I spent most of this weekend brainstorming how to stand up and hand off the DOJ-in-Exile. And just to throw a few more bones to you doomers, this will all leave a whole lot of things destroyed, things that countless patriotic Americans, civil servants, forward-thinking elected officials built over many lifetimes. Simply destroyed in ways that won’t pop after a new election. We can build new things in their place, with time. But the scale of the destruction is vast and it will increase.
Our path on the global scene will be very different, more restricted, more bad. This has always been my greatest fear about all this. We can’t undo things abroad in the way we have at least the possibility of doing at home. You simply cannot trust a country that is one bad election away from this kind of global tantrum. We’ll be paying the price for that for a long time.
Could I be wrong? Sure. I guess. But it doesn’t matter to me because it doesn’t affect what I’m doing. I’m not pulling my punches or assuming anything.
But again, I owe you my honest thoughts. And these are them. This is what I think at 100 days in.