Even Fox News Admits It: Trump’s Presidency Is in Free Fall
Meanwhile, Trump’s mass deportations (which in the Trumpist program are consciously designed as an ethno-nationalist purging of the nation) have driven him deep underwater on his “best” issue of immigration. Stephen Miller, once drunk with hubris, was certain he could awaken the American majority’s latent racial nationalism. Now, having reminded many Americans why they like immigrants, his influence has withered.
Add to all this the sudden GOP willingness to buck Trump on his ballroom and his January 6 slush fund. Trump’s glorious monuments to himself, his self-enrichment, and his dispensing of the spoils of corruption to the MAGA paramilitary wing are supposed to be untouchable for Republicans—manifestations of his mystical bond with Trumpist America. But now, even among some GOP lawmakers, Trump’s aura as a tribune of the Real People—another core MAGA myth—is breaking down.
It’s far too optimistic to conclude that Trumpism is dying. But its principal tenets and mythologies appear to be getting badly discredited, putting the whole project in considerable jeopardy. By demanding absolute fealty to his Nero-like obsessions, his bottomless self-dealing, his floundering economic nationalism, and his world-historical delusions about U.S. military might, Trump is shrinking MAGA down to its molten core. Yet there’s a whole universe of American voters outside of it—and in a truly startling revelation, it turns out that they matter too.
