President Donald Trump has been a highly resilient figure in U.S. politics, and that could be partly due to one of his most ridiculed traits.
In 2024, Trump was facing four criminal indictments, one of which found him being convicted on 34 felony counts by a Manhattan jury. And countless Democrats blamed him for the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building.
Yet Trump not only won the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — he also narrowly defeated Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the general election.
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In an opinion column published on May 30, the New York Times' Ross Douthat argues that Trump's "ideological shamelessness" plays a key role in his "resilience."
Trump deeply resents the "TACO" meme that has been circulating among Wall Street investors. TACO stands for "Trump always chickens out" — a reference to the way he threatens U.S. trading partners with steep new tariffs but later backs down.
"The willingness to swerve and backpedal and contradict himself is a big part of what keeps the president viable, and the promise of chickening out is part of Trump’s implicit pitch to swing voters — reassuring them that anything extreme is also provisional, that he’s always testing limits (on policy, on power) but also, generally willing to pull back," Douthat explains. "A case study: Just six weeks ago, I wrote a column describing the second Trump presidency as headed for political failure, while noting that a course correction was still possible. That caveat was debatable, since Trump’s post-Liberation Day polling was starting to look like (former President) Joe Biden’s polling numbers after the botched Afghanistan withdrawal."
The Times columnist continues, "Once Biden hit the low 40s in the RealClearPolitics average, he never again reached 45 percent approval: Some presidents just lose their mandate early and never get it back."
But Trump, Douthat adds, has a way of recovering from "setbacks."
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"I think Trump's foreign policy, especially, is fundamentally improvisational in a way that’s better suited than some of the more consistent alternatives to the difficult world we now inhabit," Douthat argues. "Even the seeming shamelessness of his swings can be defensible adaptations to complicated circumstance…. One reason that Biden's poll numbers never recovered from their early swoon is that he — or, well, the team actually running things — couldn't find a way to reverse course, on immigration policy especially; a little Trumpian ideological shamelessness would have served his White House well."
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Ross Douthat's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).
