Seven months into his second presidency, Donald Trump is bulldozing through American institutions with a focused drive towards achieving his agenda.
But he's making gambles that are "huge and risky," and are threatening to leave him and his MAGA movement in extremely "perilous" territory, a CNN analyst warned Monday.
The twice-impeached ex-president has unleashed a torrent of extreme policies that experts warn could devastate the economy and shatter America's global standing. His obsessive tariff war — dismissed by many experts as economically illiterate — has already cost manufacturing jobs, with the sector hemorrhaging 14,000 positions in May and June alone.
"We're taking in trillions of dollars," Trump boasted to CNBC about his tariffs while economists warned American families will foot the bill through sky-high prices on everyday goods.
And CNN's Stephen Collinson wrote that Trump's deportation machine has transformed into a fascistic nightmare, with masked federal agents conducting neighborhood sweeps while the administration constructs what critics call "armed camps" for migrants. Border-state Democrat Mark Kelly is sounding alarms about Trump's extreme overreach.
"We have now swung drastically in another direction. And I don't think this is what the American people want either," Kelly warned on CBS.
"There’s a common thread running through most of Trump’s actions — whether it’s browbeating political enemies and weaponizing the legal system or forcing trade concessions out of small and vulnerable nations," Collinson wrote.
"He’s always assessing his leverage over an adversary and seeking to impose his personal will."
The numbers prove Kelly right — 55% of Americans now say Trump has gone too far on deportations, a 10-point jump since February, Collinson wrote. His legislative "triumph"—a massive giveaway to the wealthy—is opposed by 6 in 10 Americans who expect it will crater the economy.
"A perilous national moment could arrive if public opinion turns sharply against Trump and Republicans seem about to pay the price in next year’s midterm elections," wrote the CNN columnist. "This, after all, is a president who believes he has almost unlimited power and tried to steal an election he lost in 2020."
Perhaps most terrifyingly, Trump is preparing to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska, potentially abandoning Ukraine to Moscow's imperial ambitions, Collinson wrote.
Meanwhile, his handpicked Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. is sabotaging public health by slashing vaccination funding, setting the stage for preventable disease outbreaks that could kill thousands.
All of this together poses a real threat to his administration, Collinson warned.
"Trump is a singular politician, and he’s been helped by a Republican Party that marches to his tune and a Democratic Party that doesn’t have one," he wrote.
"But unless Trump shattered political logic while he was breaking the mold of the presidency, a reckoning could be looming."
