'Bills come due': Analyst says Trump is about to enter his 'consequence phase'

President Donald Trump's beating in the elections this week is just the beginning of a long string of problems he's about to face, David Rothkopf argued in an analysis for The Daily Beast published on Thursday.

Trump, he wrote, "has managed through the greatest of all his cons, his election to the presidency, to amass power that allows him to bury the truth and to relentlessly attack and even persecute its advocates" — and so far it's worked for him. But "sooner or later in life, bills come due. And for Donald Trump, the year ahead promises to be one that is going to test all his skills as America’s dissembler-in-chief."

"After a first year of his second term in which he has accumulated and exercised more power than any U.S. president in history — implementing a sweeping, radical remake of U.S. economic, immigration, environmental, legal, national security and foreign policy — we are now going from the bombastic claims part of Trump’s standard operating procedure to the always less pleasant consequences phase," Rothkopf wrote. "These consequences are ghastly, manifold and highly visible. Tariffs are likely to turn into higher prices for American consumers and businesses. Healthcare costs are also going to rise for tens of millions of Americans. Some may not be able to afford care at all — or to access it, given that rural hospitals will be hard hit and many will close."

Until this point, he noted, Trump has blamed any hiccups in the economy on either Democrats not working with him, or the residual effects of the Biden administration — but it's getting harder and harder to buy those excuses.

And that's not even factoring in what will happen if, as polling suggests, Republicans take a walloping in next year's midterms.

"Even the loss of one House will be a nightmare for Trump’s remaining two years in office — very little likely to get done and serious, difficult investigations into him and his cabinet, their corruption and their failings," wrote Rothkophf. "Yes, the Supreme Court has given Trump immunity, so he has less to worry about in terms of consequences than he might have in the past. But even that court in its hearings on tariffs on Wednesday seemed skeptical of some of Trump’s power grabs. If they clip his wings at all, it could make a bad year even worse for him."

The upshot, he concluded, is that "Trump will not disappear ... But all the prevailing trends suggest that [coming] years will present a series of hard truths that none of his lies can undo, obscure or deflect from. While he will start feeling the consequences of his actions and words well after many of his victims, there is no doubt that he will, at long last and after much f---ery, find out."