President Donald Trump's return to power is a damning indictment of American society, according to a political theorist.

And his prosecution of the war in Iran is a demonstration of his bottomless unfitness for office.

Alan Elrod recently published a piece for Liberal Currents analyzing Trump's second presidency and what it means for the future of American politics, and he spoke with The New Republic's Greg Sargent about his findings.

"Donald Trump is a bad person and he didn’t hide that," Elrod said. "He was a candidate in 2016 who bragged about wanting to use force and bragged about his sexual harassment of women and really in every way laid out that he was a terrible human being, and you could write off 2016 perhaps as a blip, as an accident of people thinking Hillary [Clinton] had it in the bag and then some tiny marginal votes here and there in swing states and, you know, the electoral college is weird, okay. And then we did it again."

The 79-year-old president catastrophically mismanaged the COVID-19 pandemic during his first term and then led an insurrection to try to overthrow the election he lost, yet he narrowly won re-election to a second term.

"Yes, that is damning," Elrod said. "It’s damning of the Americans who voted for him, but it’s also more generally damning — and I’m sure you want to get into this — of just where the country is as a whole, that this kind of person has been able to dominate our politics for a decade, and that so many Americans are in a place to be, I think, persuaded and seduced by the politics he’s offering."

Trump's business and political career has been characterized by his own immoral view of deal-making, Elrod said, describing his strategy as "subterfuge and bullying and gaining usually some kind of maybe even illegal leverage over someone," but he said those tools won't work against Iran.

"Iran’s leverage in the strait isn’t short-term — geographically they’re there forever," he said. "I mean, they have it as long as they can apply military force, and it’s clear that we haven’t been able to take that capability away. Again, I guess if he wants to use just massive destruction, if he wants to nuke Iran, he can do that."

"I don’t encourage people to talk about Trump sort of TACOing on this," Elrod added. "One, it’s not settled — he’s president for another, you know, more than two and a half years, and two, he clearly is a psychopath and a narcissist and I don’t put it past him to unleash millions of deaths on Iran. He doesn’t have any understanding of the limits of raw military force and neither does his secretary of defense.

Trump has shrunk the U.S. government down to himself, Elrod said, and he lamented the conditions that led voters to grant him that power.

“We cannot pretend that we are well as a nation," Elord wrote in his essay. "No morally healthy country would put this man in power twice. We have become a morally insane, civically disordered, and self-regardingly decadent country.”

As President Donald Trump’s support continues to crater to historic lows, so too do Vice President JD Vance’s 2028 presidential ambitions — at least according to one individual “close to” the president.

“Trump is imploding, and he’s probably going to take JD down with him unless there’s a course correction,” a source “close to Trump” told Zeteo in a report Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Vance has long been seen as a potential GOP presidential candidate for 2028, but has been on something of a “losing streak” since taking the position of vice president, argued Zeteo senior political correspondent Asawin Suebsaeng.

That “losing streak,” Suebsaeng suggested, began last April when Vance “met Pope Francis, who promptly died,” and culminated on Saturday after he left negotiations with Iranian officials empty-handed, and without an agreement to end the U.S. war against Iran.

“To get the standard throat-clearing out of the way: Anything could happen between now and 2028. Nobody should count Vance out of any possible presidential contest,” Suebsaeng wrote. “But as things currently stand, it is hard to imagine things going worse for the man President Trump has called his ‘handsome son of a b----.’ And it’s almost entirely because Trump forced Vance into this position.”

Polling hasn’t been kind to Vance either, with CNN’s Harry Enten revealing recently that the vice president’s net approval rating had fallen by 21 points since January of 2025, making Vance "historically the least popular vice president at this point in their vice presidency.”

“Domestically and electorally, the outlook isn’t any rosier for the vice president,” Suebsaeng wrote.

Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei was left absolutely flabbergasted that Donald Trump harshly attacked the Pope on Sunday — and then doubled down hours later by posting a picture of himself as Jesus Christ on Truth Social.

The president later took the Trump-as-Jesus meme down, but the longtime political journalist claimed on MSNOW's "Morning Joe" that the damage was already done with the president's religious base — and even some MAGA fans who aren't religious.

According to VandeHei, Trump’s approval numbers are now set to collapse even further because the president has given some of his supporters fresh reason to abandon him.

“Whether it's a joke or not, most people who are faithful don't take their faith as a joke,” he warned. “None of this stuff happens overnight. It tends to trickle, trickle, trickle. But I think he is playing with fire with the base. And if you look at where he is standing, I think he should be worried.”

“I'm surprised his advisors didn't say, ‘Come on, man.’ Like, it's at some point you're pushing this too far. Your favorable ratings are already relatively low,” he said.

“Morning Joe’”co-host Jonathan Lemire called the two posts “madness” and remarked, “I think Trump's not used to, he's not used to sharing the stage with anyone. And Pope Leo has been a very quiet figure in his first month in the Vatican. That has now changed.”

“Watch the numbers,” Vandehei predicted. “The trajectory is not great for Donald Trump. He's losing young Americans. He's losing Hispanics. He's losing all of the MAGA podcasters with the biggest audiences. Yes, he still has his mesmerizing hold over the base. But little by little, he's starting to lose that coalition, that new coalition that brought Republicans into power. It's the reason they think they're going to lose the House, and they now think there's a 50/50 chance they lose the Senate.”

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