It May Not Be an Unraveling, but Trump Is Wobbling

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Various pundits and political opponents of Donald Trump have often predicted his demise, as when he admitted to sexually assaulting women on the infamous Access Hollywood tape; when he lost the 2020 election and attempted a coup; after January 6, when he was convicted of a felony; when his bizarre behavior related to the Epstein files led any reasonable person to believe that he had something to hide; and many times in between when he said or did things that would have ended the careers of any other politician. All the predictions of his fall were wrong.

Therefore, we are not going to suggest that Trump is finished.

That would be foolish, based not only on precedent, but on how, in the worst ways possible, he is the most powerful president in recent memory: the ways he disregards the Constitution and the rule of law while the GOP-led Congress enthusiastically abets him, and the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court seems willing to underwrite most of these abuses.

What we will say, however, is that the wheels of the Trumpmobile appear to be coming loose.

To those paying attention, that might be cause for celebration because that particular vehicle is a clown car headed toward an abyss; if it loses its wheels it might mean the president won’t get to drive it — and us — off a cliff.

The thing is, many Americans aren’t paying attention to most of the bad things happening in the country or recognizing them as the threat they are. For example, voters should be bothered by his authoritarian ambitions or the off-the-charts corruption; but maybe they just like clowns.

That indifference (or ignorance) worked wonders for Trump when he was president and Americans thought things were going well, and then again when he was running against an incumbent and voters were experiencing economic hardships firsthand.  

Those are the situations in which he excels.

In the early years of his first term, he could pretend that Americans were experiencing unprecedented prosperity — and it was all because of him.

However, that no longer worked once COVID-19 emerged because everybody was affected by the pandemic, and it was impossible to ignore that the Trump administration badly managed most aspects of the federal response. (Ironically, the president chose not to embrace his role in what was arguably the bright spot in an otherwise abysmal response: the quick development of the coronavirus vaccines that saved millions of lives and more than $1 trillion.)

Then, when the global economy was struggling in the aftermath of the pandemic, he could claim that it all would have been better if he had remained in charge and that he would fix it right away once he got back into the Oval Office.

That was always nonsense, but Americans battling high prices wanted to believe him (in the same way that it would be nice if the barrister of a Nigerian prince wanted to send us $2 million).

However, they quickly found out that he couldn’t… no matter how much Trump and his cronies claim that the country is on the verge (or in the middle) of a new “golden age.”

Because here is the thing about these types of cons: They only work if the mark fails to realize he is being scammed before the perpetrator can slip away with the loot. But the problems facing the nation now are not the kind that Americans tend to ignore.

Why? Because they are personally experiencing those problems, like the high cost of living. Not even a seasoned con artist like Trump can tell people that their grocery bill is decreasing when it isn’t — and he isn’t even trying to do that. Instead, he is dismissing affordability as a “hoax,” whatever that might mean.

Another reason is that Americans are (rightfully) concerned about their future. High prices are one thing, but the instability of employment is another. And, on some level, people understand that a bunch of techbro billionaires want to yank job security out from under their feet by transforming the economy and giving their jobs to robots and computers.

Perhaps more than any other economic indicator, the unemployment rate is one that Americans pay attention to and understand.

And even though it is still low right now, the fact is that the Trump administration hasn’t created a net job since “Liberation Day.”

Friday’s unemployment report was a disaster. Almost 100,000 jobs were lost, with downward revisions for December (from a net gain to a net loss) and January. And that news came on the heels of a jobs report that the Trump administration had touted as a sign that its policies were working — even though the gains in January paled in comparison to those that were routine during the Biden years.

So what is the explanation for these troubling numbers? Where are these jobs going? Those are valid questions that more and more Americans are asking themselves.

A third reason why people don’t ignore certain problems is when they are really big — for example, yet another war in the Middle East, which is costing more than $890 million per day and is the reason Americans have to pay so much more at the pump right now.

Once again, the president doesn’t seem worried about the plight of regular people.

“I don’t have any concern about it,” Trump told Reuters this week. “They’ll drop very rapidly when this is over, and if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.”

The “this” he is talking about is starting a war without really explaining to Americans why it was necessary, apart from claiming that Iran was a couple of weeks away from getting a nuclear weapon after Trump had previously said, and the White House website still claims, that Tehran’s nuclear capabilities were “obliterated” last summer.

Of course, it’s also not really a war even though submarines torpedo ships to smithereens, the US bombed a school and killed dozens of girls, and everybody in the administration keeps slipping up and calling it that.

The justifications don’t add up, and once you realize that the emperor isn’t wearing clothes, it’s hard to unsee it.

That’s the way it is with all of Trump’s lies. Many of the non-hardcore MAGA voters who supported him have finally caught on to the fact that neither the president nor the people working for him are telling the truth.

Which brings us to the final category of problems people tend not to ignore: really bad stuff.

Here are some things Americans do not like:

• Folks like them getting shot to death in broad daylight by masked federal agents while exercising their constitutional rights. This is especially true when those killings were caught on camera and clearly unjustified.
• The victims being falsely labeled “domestic terrorists” or “assassins.”
• Unaccountable federal goons who look as though they’re ready to patrol Fallujah pulling guns on people including children, assaulting them, destroying their property, etc.
• The government arresting little kids.
• Child molesters.
• The government protecting child molesters.
• The president acting realllllly weird when it comes to his relationship with child molesters.  
• Wars in the Middle East.

In one way or another, Americans were reminded of all of the above this week — when they filled up their cars, when soon-to-be-former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem fumbled through her congressional testimony, when the Department of Justice published the summaries of FBI interviews with a woman who said she was sexually assaulted by Trump when she was a teenager (these documents were miraculously omitted from the Epstein files), or simply when they turned on their TVs and there was no good news to be found.

But not only that. They were also reminded that the guy who promised to fix everything is at the heart of all of these big problems.

And while that realization won’t mean the imminent demise of Trump, it certainly spells a lot of trouble for him and the Trump-intoxicated GOP.