After Trump
Because this too is passing
Let’s imagine that somewhere towards the end of the Cretaceous a tiny marsupial called Didelphodon, noticing that the great booming sound of giant feet has disappeared, pokes its furry snout out of the hole where it has hidden from the Velociraptors, sees that the age of dinosaurs is coming to an end and wonders what will take their place. I know how it feels.
With 35 months left of the Trump presidency, Americans are seriously daring to think about what comes next.
Peak Trump
The televised draw for next summer’s FIFA World Cup on 5 December seemed to represent Peak Trump. In front of a televised audience of tens of millions, the shameless, smiling egg that is FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, presented the president with the first and last ever FIFA Peace Prize – a gigantic gold affair with hands feverishly reaching up towards a globe, whose Americas were carefully turned to the camera.
The presentation followed a film, carried live across the world – including on the BBC (where are you, Michael Prescott, when we need you?) – which propagandised on behalf of Trump the Peacemaker in a way that recalled those late-40s Soviet films about the superhuman qualities of Uncle Joe. Finally, after what seemed an eternity of self-abasement, Infantino produced a special gold medal for Trump, which the president, Napoleon-like, placed around his own neck.
So there he was, awarded a big, golden peace prize in front of the world by the leader of a sport in which he has never taken any interest; his big golden ballroom being erected in DC; a huge Qatari jet awaiting placement in his presidential library; his family raking in tens of billions from deals linked to his presidency; the tech moguls on speed dial; his cabinet of indebted oddbods forced to recite their deathless loyalty at each meeting; the US government launching the “Trump Gold Card”, which allows plutocrats to buy US citizenship; cowed media companies paying him millions in settlement of cases they would never lose; the world trade system turned topsy-turvy by his tariffs; foreign leaders forced to take the rhetorical knee for fear of his displeasure; his masked operatives lifting undesirables from the streets of US cities; his navy blasting suspected drug boats out of international waters in the eastern Caribbean; his face never off the screens and publications of America and the world; supported by majorities in the unchecking, unbalancing Houses of Congress and unhindered by the conservative 6–3 majority on the US Supreme Court. Has ever a victory been more complete and a revolution as uncontested?
And at this precise moment the edifice creaks. With 35 months left of the Trump presidency, Americans are seriously daring to think about what comes next.
The election of 2024 was not a landslide. Trump’s winning popular vote margin (1.5%) was less than Hillary Clinton’s losing one, but greater than Kennedy’s v. Nixon or George W. Bush’s v. Al Gore. In the Electoral College, a quarter of a million votes across three states made the difference, and in the lower House there were less than 4,000 votes in it.
It was a remarkable victory not because it was large, but because it happened at all. Trump took office (having deemed this particular election to have been unrigged) with a positive approval rating of just plus six.
On the back of this narrowish triumph Trump allowed himself to become the vehicle for an administrative revolution that he didn’t care much about and that nobody ever really voted for. The blueprint was – as had been alleged and denied before the election – the Project 2025 manifesto, largely created by the Heritage Foundation. I have yet to hear from someone who seriously believes that Trump even read it (unlike his chief ideologues J.D. Vance and the architect of his ICE policy, Stephen Miller). Parts of the federal government have been gutted, US soft power has been more or less destroyed, and departments such as Health have been handed over to pro-Trump influencers to do with as they will as long as they don’t interfere with Trump’s own preoccupations: tariffs, self-enrichment, retribution, gilded gee-gaws, parades and peace prizes.
Right now the president’s approval runs at between minus 11 and minus 16 points, which is close to a record low. On almost all issues – and in particular on the economy – he is (to use that favourite US pollster’s expression) “underwater”. Six weeks ago, in a slew of elections for large and small local positions, the Democrats performed well above their 2024 levels. In the New York mayoral and the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial contests, the campaigns were run on the issue of “affordability”, and the margins were unexpectedly high.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” of tax cuts and welfare cuts, which he whipped through Congress, has had the effect of significantly increasing the cost of healthcare to many ordinary Americans, while the tariffs have been inflationary. Though the economy is healthy and the stock market (boosted in the main by tech shares) is high, the experience of ordinary Americans, including many traditional Republicans, has been negative. Trump, as ever, although advised by his strategists to speak to the affordability question, has done so by calling it a “hoax”. Which wasn’t quite what they meant.
Tech gazillionaires, gold cards, tax cuts for the wealthy and then, to cap it all, the realisation that Trump was one of the multi-millionaire abuser Jeffrey Epstein’s bosom buddies, are combining to create an image of a president who doesn’t, after all, speak for the working man. And for the Latino working man and woman, the sight of ICE agents lifting people who look like them off the streets and parking lots of America is hardly reassuring. And if Trump has brought peace to Gaza (and has he?), then what is that to Hecuba Gonzalez of Troy, Arizona?
The fracturing coalition 1: is it worth it?
Last week the chair of the Republican National Committee, father of three and Instagram follower of 60 OnlyFans models, Joe Gruters (thank you, Mail Online), was being interviewed on Donald Trump Jr’s new media platform, Salem News Channel. His subject was the 2026 midterms, now 11 months away and in which all House seats and a third of Senate seats are to be contested, as well as 39 gubernatorial posts.
“Expectation management” is always a feature of such conversations, but usually the balance is struck more towards modest pessimism than prophesying doom. Gruters confounded this orthodoxy. “No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms,” he told his interviewer, but then added: “This is an absolute disaster. The chances are Republicans will go down and will go down hard.”
This kind of prediction may have had some bearing on the rebellion of 20-plus Republican Indiana state senators against a Trump-backed attempt to gerrymander away the state’s last two Democrat-held congressional seats. Despite overt threats of federal subsidy withdrawal should this be called pork unbarrelling?), the senators stood firm.
This could have been good ol’ Hoosier cussedness. But one problem with the kind of gerrymanders that the Republicans – most notably in Texas – have been employing to try and reduce the chances of a defeat next year is that they can have the effect of making safe Republican seats a bit less safe. In a really bad year, it might even flip them. Which means that a platoon of comfortable congressmen and women, whose money-raising and campaigning could previously end with the party primaries, must now get out there a second time – and might even lose.
Another way of putting this is that Trump’s writ runs big with whatever is left of mainstream Republicanism as long as the only real threat to their existence is the party faithful. But if the voters are pissed with Trump – and at the moment they are – close association with him becomes much less compelling. Also, being bullied takes its toll. There are mirrors to be looked at in the morning, and the DC scuttlebutt is that quite a few Republican congressmen and women are about to announce their rediscovery of the joys of family life.
The fracturing coalition 2: I don’t love you any more
There has always been a contradiction at the heart of Trumpism. It has, in essence, been a rich man’s project (aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera) masquerading as a working man’s movement. But some of its adherents took the populist economic bit seriously. In fact, they seem to be taking it increasingly seriously.
