President Donald Trump has long entertained a particularly absurd and illegal idea. But in recent months, it appears far less commonly in his speeches, wrote columnist Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times — and it might show he is aware of his crashing popularity and weakening hold over his own party.
For starters, Bouie wrote, Trump's second term never had to go like this. There was a path for him to be a relatively popular, or at least relatively drama-free, president, and it could have made him more dangerous.
"There is an alternate universe in which Donald Trump is the popular, successful president of his imagination," wrote Bouie. "In this world, Trump has a clear view of the political landscape. He knows he won a narrow victory, not a landslide. He knows that his key voters — the ones who put him over the top, as opposed to his core voters — elected him to lower the cost of living and turn the page back to where it was before the pandemic." This version of Trump would have been far more cautious, pursuing targeted stimulus, a more modest tariff plan centered on national security, and truly just deporting the "worst of the worst."
This, he argued, might have allowed Trump to gradually build real public support for an American autocracy. Instead, Trump went all out, pushing for absolute power and unpopular far-right fantasies, stacking his Cabinet with walking controversies, and generally making himself even less popular than he was in his first term.
This, Bouie wrote, could be why Trump no longer talks as frequently about trying to run for a third term — something that was constitutionally prohibited in the first place, but that Trump used to love toying with.
"Perhaps he still intends to," he wrote. "Or perhaps he has enough self-awareness to know that he is not the triumphant leader of his imagination. That he is, instead, a lame duck whose White House is in disarray and whose actions have plunged the world into chaos. He thought he might remake the country in his own image. Instead, he’s likely to leave it like one of his casinos: broke, broken and in desperate need of new management."
"If impeachment weren’t a dead letter, then we could remove him and end his misrule," Bouie concluded. "As it is, we have nearly three more years to live through. It’s an open question whether we survive it intact."
