Like all characters in a Greek tragedy, their destruction is self destruction and the seeds of their own self destruction are sown in their personal defects of character. Donald Trump fits this formula to a tee. A lot of us thought that the American people would shut him down after January 6. That was the logical, common sense, moral way to look at the situation. Or, if not that, then certainly being convicted on 34 felonies would have sealed his fate. No. Nothing outside Trump, neither riots or criminal cases is going to do him in. Messing with MAGAs pocketbooks is what is going to seal Trump’s fate and who to know better about the economics of this thing than Robert Reich?
Now, finally, the ground is shifting.
Some congressional Republicans are turning hawkish on the budget and reject Trump’s zany notion of $2,000 “tariff dividend” checks, as well as his stated desire to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for two years.
Russian hawks dislike Trump’s love fest with Putin on Ukraine.
Nor did they appreciate his happy meeting with Zohran Mamdani.
Or his refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Some are demanding to know more about Trump’s and Hegseth’s bombing (and re-bombing) of boats in the Caribbean.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene decided to pick up her bigotry and leave Congress, I assumed it was because she had picked a fight with Trump and lost. But other Republican members are threatening to depart too — potentially leaving Trump and his puppet Speaker Mike Johnson without enough votes to stop the Democrats.
Could it be — is it really possible? — that a few congressional Republicans are now feeling their backbones?
Why now, you scream, half in exasperation, half in delight? A couple of reasons: First, Trump is a lame duck president and all signs of Democratic overperformance indicate that he’s going to be a stonewalled lame duck president when the Democrats retake the House in November. That’s one compelling reason because every legislator in either chamber of Congress has intentions of keeping their jobs whether Trump is on the scene or not. But the larger, more compelling reason is that Trump is screwing up the economy and the proportions are getting seismic.
Because the MAGA base that every congressional Republican is so afraid of and solicitous toward is falling apart.
They’re finally seeing Trump for what he is: a man without principle except getting richer and more powerful and engraving his name on buildings.
A lame-duck president who said he’d make life better for MAGA starting on “day one” but has made life worse for MAGA by month 10.
He doesn’t even believe in lowering prices. He calls the affordability crisis a “con” job.
Democrats swept last month’s off-year elections and performed better than usual in Tuesday’s House race in a bright-red Tennessee district.
If you’re taking some satisfaction from the MAGA crackup, don’t let your guard down.
It’s when Trump feels he’s in trouble that he does the biggest and craziest things to deflect attention.
And he may do so this time as well. But look at how some of those big and crazy notions fall apart. The $5,000 DOGE check was a big and crazy concept. All DOGE itself did was steal peoples’ information and waste more taxpayer money than DOGE was claiming it could and would save taxpayers. Now we’re hearing about the $2,000 tariffs checks and that’s even crazier than the DOGE checks. There is no $20 trillion in investments and Costco is suing Trump over the tariffs issue. Fantasy and reality are beginning to clash bigly.
So unless Trump literally wants to call for another riot at the Capitol, it’s likely that anything big and crazy that he will do, will be economic. And everything economic is blowing up in his face these days.
We may well have turned the corner. Certainly the Democratic overperformance at the polls and the sudden freezing up of Republican spines would tend to indicate that a sea change is happening. It always does when the economy starts to suffer. Trump may have us becoming nostalgic for Dubya before too long.
trump is a dead man walking.
food_line
I’ve been ‘nostalgic’ for Bush since the first Rump admin. I hope whatever takes him out is painful and lingering, like everything he’s done to this country and its people (and the world for that matter). That’s the karma he deserves. No sympathy for this sicko.
This FIFA (fuc*ing idiot from America) dolt has only managed to be chief MAGA (malignant arsehole grifting America) because he’s only fooled some, for some of the time. That sideshow of a beacon of toxic, entitled, fragile masculinity, is now wearing very thin on some, and it’s starting to show, in more ways than one. He’s getting closer to being unceremoniously flung, and tangled, in the web of lying ropes, that he has caused to exist at the perimeter of his own petard. There’ll be a lot of verbal diarrhoea, from him, as his self-inflicted entanglement and constriction worsens, along with well deserved collateral damage that’ll be sustained by others who are way too close to him. There’ll be others too – who didn’t really drink from the his fake gold font – that’ll finally get the chance to jump that sinking slab, as they now have courage and a chance to escape the despotic yoke of an imploding you know who.