A short time ago I got email from a TPM reader with a version of this question: Josh, are you sure there’s going to be a November election? Because everything I’m seeing tells me they don’t think there are any consequences, even political consequences, coming from any of this. It wasn’t a challenge so much as a question: are you sure? I have no way to predict the future. But yes, I am as confident there’s going to be a November election as I’ve ever been. I’m not trying to get in an argument about that. This is my opinion. You might have another.
A couple months ago, I said that we were starting to see a pattern. As Trump grew less popular and less powerful at home, he would need to compensate to maintain his psychic equilibrium. He’d lean more and more into the presidency’s prerogative powers that are untrammeled and unrestrained regardless of what’s going on at home or how much support he has. He’ll be increasingly aggressive and violent in those realms of power as he becomes more constrained and limited in others. In Trump’s world, there is dominating and there is being dominated. For him, the latter is a psychic death. So leaning hard into these prerogative powers where a president is, in effect, all powerful amounts to a kind of grand and bloody self-care.