Donald Trump claimed a mandate that never existed – he didn’t even get a majority of the votes cast in the 2024 election, and that’s not considering the tens of millions of people who didn’t vote – but anyway, he claimed a mandate.
And then set about governing as if he’d had a Nixon-beats-McGovern majority.
That hubris is at the heart of why he’s already basically a lame duck, and will be a shell of a POTUS for the final two years of his second term.
Two disastrous decisions were his undoing: cutting ties with Elon Musk, and following through on his promise to use onerous tariffs to try to bend the rest of the industrialized world to his will.
First, to Musk
This was dumb from the get-go, but probably a necessary evil, from the Team Trump perspective, because the Trump campaign wasn’t getting money from its usual sources, and needed Musk’s $300 million in campaign cash to just stay afloat.
It was always going to end the way it did – that is, ugly – but Team Trump tried to delay the inevitable by giving Musk a job with a dorky-sounding name of his own choosing, DOGE.
Public approval for Trump tanked quickly as Musk and his minions with names like Big Balls started plundering our data, leading the bossman to send the Twitter troll packing.
Musk’s gift for Trump on his way out the door:
Wanna know why we’re talking today about the Epstein files?
Yeah.
Ketamine guy got his panties in a wad over being dumped by Trump, and because Team Trump let him ransack trillions of government files, he knew, as the saying goes, were the bodies were buried, and being Elon Musk, couldn’t contain himself from telling the world.
Next, the tariffs
Tariffs were always going to do what they’ve done – raise prices on everyday goods and services, lead other countries to respond in kind, hitting key U.S. industries – notably, agriculture – where it hurts.
I’m not going to spend hours analyzing data to vet this point that I’m about to make, but common logic would suggest that the two main stories we’re telling right now about the economy – that inflation is still where it was the past couple of years, which is what doomed Democrats in 2024, and that unemployment is now at a post-pandemic high – wouldn’t be on the radar without the tariffs.
I submit here that even the continued fallout from the Epstein files wouldn’t be the issue that it is right now if the economy wasn’t having to carry the weight of high inflation and job losses resulting from the dumb tariffs on its back.
My evidence there, such as it is – Bill Clinton left office in 2001 with his highest approval ratings ever, after years of Republicans trying to make the hummer that he got in the Oval Office into impeachment, solely because the economy was riding high.
Final analysis
Trump isn’t president today without Elon Musk, and I’m not even intimating, like many have, that Musk somehow led an effort to manipulate the vote in the seven swing states to throw the election.
Playing this straight up, Trump needed Musk’s money to be able to wage a campaign last summer and fall.
Billionaires don’t bankroll political campaigns because they’re altruists; they want something, and Musk got his – I don’t know what he’s going to do with the data that he plundered, but he has something in mind, and it’s not going to be good.
The tariffs, that’s just plain dumb, because literally everybody told Trump, when he first floated his, in his mind, brilliant idea, to tariff us past China economically, that it wasn’t going to work.
He could snap his fingers this instant, and the result – lower inflationary pressure, reversals of job losses – would insulate him from the Epstein files.
This is where hubris, again, enters the chat.
Trump has yet in his life, 79 years in, to admit that he has ever been wrong, about even a single thing.
He’s going to ride these tariffs out as far as he can – which is to say, until congressional Republicans, who already know that Trump is a millstone around their necks with respect to the midterms, take that power away from him, which they could have done all along.
The only question on that, to me, is, how soon do they take that action, because the timing will determine the economic mood next fall when voters head to the polls.
We’re seeing high-profile defections – well, one high-profile defection, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
They’re not going to get to critical mass in time.
It’s over – Trump 2.0 – and the death blow was self-inflicted.
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Chris Graham
