Donald Trump and maga Republicans have spent down their political capitol and now desperate to fix what is broken

"Trump and the Republican Congress have already squandered the polling advantages they enjoyed at the start of the year, rapidly bleeding the support of young people and failing to cement the gains the president had made with nonwhites."

Trump Took Office With a Lot of Political Capital. In 6 Months, He’s Squandered It, by Ross Barkan published in New York Magazine Intelligencer.

For a brief, shimmering moment in the aftermath of the 2024 election, almost everything seemed possible for Donald Trump.

Maine Writer premonition.....IMO, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde set the tone for the over inflated election euphoria. 

 "From the pulpit, Bishop Mariann Budde spoke directly to Trump, who was seated in the front row. 'I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she said, invoking gay, lesbian, and transgender children, as well as undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. Her plea for mercy caused an international firestorm; critics condemned her politicization of the church, and admirers praised her courage'." Washingtonian

Unlike 2016, Trump had won the popular vote, and Americans, against all odds, 😒 had developed a warmer view of him. 🙄

MAGA was ascendant. It was plausible to perceive Trump’s victory as a harbinger of a broader realignment: Among Black, Latino, and Asian voters, Trump had made tangible gains, and those under 30 moved decisively toward the former and future president relative to 2020. The social-justice or woke era was in eclipse, and there was no shortage of ruminations on the rightward shift of the youth and the inability of liberals to matter to this new counterculture.

Conservative intellectuals like Oren Cass and a number of right-populist politicians, including Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, heralded a new Republican Party that could, if savvy and disciplined enough, triangulate or even break the American left. 

These MAGA leaders expressed support for organized labor and offered stinging critiques of laissez-faire capitalism — it’s easy to forget that portions of Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention sounded like they were cribbed from Bernie Sanders — while maintaining a sense of cultural conservatism. They were anti-immigrant, staunchly patriotic, and skeptical of the Reaganite wing of the GOP that had, over the decades, alienated the working class. Trump appeared to intuitively grasp this, beating the Biden administration to the site of a toxic train derailment in Ohio and later, upon winning again, nominating a Labor secretary who genuinely embraced labor rights.

If Trump had rhetorically wrenched his party left on economics, his actual presidency has proved that the realignment chatter was at best premature and at worst foolhardy. Trump and the Republican Congress have already squandered the polling advantages they enjoyed at the start of the year, rapidly bleeding the support of young people and failing to cement the gains the president had made with nonwhites. Trump’s overall approval rating has plunged, and unlike even Biden’s decline — driven by his advanced age and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan — it has been almost entirely self-inflicted and within his control.

Consider the state of the nation on the day Trump took office: Inflation was beginning to cool, the economy was expanding, and even border crossings were falling. 

Americans were largely supportive of Trump’s call to tighten the borders further and were open to how he might combat inflation. 

The tariff regime of his first term was popular enough, and some of it, like the taxes slapped on China, were embraced by the Biden administration. 

Trump had promised, as a candidate, to not blast apart the social safety net, and Americans believed him. He had political capital to spend down — far more, certainly, than he did at the start of 2017.

Trump has had a consequential presidency, thrilling enough if you are a particular kind of person — one who is not actually well-represented in the American electorate. Nativists and outright racists have much to delight over, and followers of Stephen Miller are reaching their own dark nirvana. Trump has dramatically increased the reach of (evil❗) ICE, attempted to revoke birthright citizenship, and made immigration to the United States inordinately more challenging. Little of this is broadly celebrated, and the most American voters, independents especially, desired out of a second Trump term was a curtailment of mass illegal immigration. 

Legal immigration is plenty popular, and there’s enough fresh polling to suggest that Trump’s hypermilitarized ICE is not fulfilling any broader mandates. Thanks to Trump, Americans are becoming gradually more pro-immigrant again, perhaps recalling what nativist cruelty looks like in practice.

Trump’s economic agenda is another deep, lasting strike against the realignment. Tariffs, in theory, belong to the protectionist, populist cause Trump championed, but they mean little if they aren’t paired with any greater federally funded industrial policy. Unlike Biden, Trump has not attempted to directly boost domestic manufacturing or America’s withering supply chains, especially as China looms as the world’s greatest 21st-century industrial superpower. 

In April, Trump temporarily tanked the stock market, and while markets have recovered and are now at new highs, Americans are much more wary of Trump’s stewardship of the economy. Trade wars aren’t especially exciting to voters.

More crucial, though, is the One Big Beautiful Act (aka, "the big bad, ugly bill) and the enormous social safety-net cuts, particularly to Medicaid, 

 that will be felt in the coming years. Beyond tax cuts, there’s little for Republicans to easily campaign on, and the reduced funding to rural hospitals and clinics will make for great Democratic campaign fodder next year. The reconciliation package, largely, was a hodgepodge of orthodox Republican fiscal policy that never found much support from voters after the 1990s. This was Trump’s great insight, after all — he’d run against pure supply-side economics in 2016, swerving away from Mitt Romney–style conservatism. 

But, campaigning and governing are entirely different matters, and Trump has shown he’s willing to bow to the traditionalists in his party when it comes to bills that arrive on his desk for a signature.
The other populist Republicans wilted, too. 

Senator Josh Hawley "run Josh run", cowardly escape during the January 6th insurrection at the capitol 

Hawley vowed to not vote for a package that slashed Medicaid and then did it anyway. Now he meekly wants to reverse those cuts, but the damage has been done. Vance, as Trump’s vice-president, must cheerlead whatever his boss does, especially with a fight for the 2028 nomination on the horizon. The Jeffrey Epstein saga, meanwhile, threatens to overshadow the lawmaking and cause great anguish for MAGA, who are caught between obeying their beloved leader (who wants all Epstein discourse to cease) and chasing Epstein threads in perpetuity. Epstein, the late sex criminal, bedevils them because Trump is no less implicated than any Democrats, and answers will prove elusive for all time.

The more banal fallout of this all is that America remains a nation split between red and blue, with neither party gaining a decisive advantage. Republicans cannot triangulate or realign the electorate in such a manner to doom the Democrats to irrelevancy. Democrats can’t seem to excite voters enough to revive the promise of an Obama-esque landslide. Democrats have the edge to flip the House next year, while Republicans should be the favorites to retain Senate control. The 2028 race is probably going to be a closely divided slog, no matter whom the major parties nominate. This is what we are, and what we are going to be.

Evil antisemitism has infected the Republican Party

The GOP’s Surrender to the cult Anti-semites

Echo essay published in the Intellingencer , in The New York Times Magazine. By Jonathan Chait

On September 3, Cynthia Hughes, founder of the Patriot Freedom project, regaled the crowd at Donald Trump’s “Save America” rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with the plight of her nephew, Tim Hale-Cusanelli. Poor Tim, who once served in the Navy, had been convicted for his role in the January 6th insurrection. The story of his “mistreatment” drew moans from the sympathetic audience.

Hughes did not mention that Navy investigators found 34 former colleagues who reported that Hale-Cusanelli had expressed “extremist or radical views pertaining to the Jewish people, minorities, and women.” One recollected Hale-Cusanelli’s practice of asking new colleagues if they were Jewish. Another remembered him saying Jews “are ruining everything and did not belong here,” and yet another recalled him saying, “Hitler should have finished the job.” Hale-Cusanelli has been photographed wearing a distinctive Hitlerian mustache. His passion for genocidal antisemitism developed into a passion for a right-wing putsch attempt, and now he has become essentially a martyr figure championed by the Republican Party’s leader.

Trump’s (radical!) rise has reshaped the GOP, driving out some of its constituent elements while bringing in previously excluded factions, the ranks of which include virulent anti-semites. The lessons of Hitler’s Germany have been badly overapplied, so it is important to contextualize these events carefully. 

Although the GOP may not be an anti-semitic party, the right wingers have coopted salient NAZI symbols. 

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican in Missouri, gives the Nazi salute to insurrection crowds on January 6th 

Indeed, at one time in the recent past,  the GOP tried to maintain a big tent that included both Jewish ultrahawks like Miriam Adelson and their most paranoid enemies. Nevertheless, now the GOP has become a party in which antisemitism has gained a foothold. No recent development in American life has done more to throw American Jews’ safety and civic equality into doubt.

In the early-20th century, contempt for Jewish immigrants was an important tributary in the stream of reactionary politics. Antisemitism reached a peak during the Great Depression, when right-wing populists like Charles Lindbergh depicted the Roosevelt administration as beholden to the Jews. The aviator’s “America First” movement characterized Jewish support for hawkish measures against Nazi Germany as evidence of disloyalty.

The war and the Holocaust discredited antisemitism, and it largely disappeared from mainstream circulation. When Pat Buchanan ran for president in 1992, and 1996, he revived both the slogan and many of the ideas of the “America First” movement and produced an enthusiastic reception. But his anti-semitic innuendo and creepy enthusiasm for the procedural rights of elderly former Nazi camp guards made him toxic to the party Establishment. (“I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to antisemitism,” concluded William F. Buckley.) 

Subsequently, Buchanan was forced out of the party altogether. By the first decade of the 21st century, anti-semitic theories were more likely to be used against the Bush administration — whose more conspiratorial critics saw the hidden hand of international Jewry behind its bungled Iraq invasion — than on behalf of any Republican cause.

Trump resurrected Buchanan’s strain of populist nationalism. He’s always nurtured business relations and personal ties with Jewish people, but his revival of “America First” — both the slogan and the ideas surrounding it — inevitably excited antisemites. In 2016, he tweeted out an image using a Star of David to symbolize Hillary Clinton’s “corruption.” The Trump campaign tweeted an altered version after an outcry but then ran an ad in the campaign’s closing days decrying “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities” coupled with images of Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein — all of whom are financial figures who happen to be Jewish.

Trump attacked his critics as a cabal of “globalists” and fixated on the secret powers exerted by Soros, who has displaced (or in some cases joined) the Rothschilds in the imagined role of secret Jewish financier orchestrating a series of catastrophes for profit. The explosion of militant paranoia that followed Trump’s rise — from the Oath Keepers to QAnon — has appeared both online and in the real world with occasionally deadly consequences in places like Charlottesville and Pittsburgh. Although much of this activity has taken place outside the party system, the energies on the right have crept into the Republican Party.

Two years before her 2020, election to Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene shared a video claiming “an unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists, and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.” More famously, she wondered whether the Rothschilds had used space lasers to start a series of forest fires in California to clear public land for a rail network.

Christina Pushaw, a spokesperson for Ron DeSantis, linked a decision by the nation of Georgia to join several European countries in implementing COVID passes to what she viewed as a suspiciously timed visit by a Rothschild: “Immediately after that the Rothschilds show up to discuss the attractive investment environment in Georgia (lol),” she noted.

In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for governor, paid the ultraright-wing social-media site Gab to promote his candidacy, which has articulated Christian-nationalist themes. Gab’s chief executive, Andrew Torba, is an explicit anti-semite who has promoted Mastriano as a fellow enemy of the Jews. 

“We don’t want people who are Jewish,” Torba explained. 😡

After reporters questioned their relationship, Mastriano released a statement that renounced antisemitism and said Torba does not speak on his behalf but failed to call him an anti-semite or to forgo his support. And while a handful of Pennsylvania Republicans have endorsed Mastriano’s Democratic opponent, the vast majority of the party apparatus has either supported Mastriano or stayed quiet. Conservative media has ignored the issue. Meanwhile, the Wyoming Republican Party recently encouraged people to follow it on Gab, calling it “an awesome platform.”

Before Trump came along, anti-semites had little investment in American politics. His rhetoric articulates themes they recognize as compatible with their own, and he has given them a reason to marshal their energies on behalf of one side in a two-party system from which they had been excluded.

There is a simple test to measure their influence. If anti-semites were too marginal to pose any danger, it would be easy enough for the party to cut them off. (If you want to know what it looks like when Republicans decide to really throw somebody out of their party, look at their treatment of Liz Cheney.) Instead, they vacillate. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declined to comment on Gosar’s attendance at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s conference. McCarthy has likewise promised to restore Greene’s committee privileges if Republicans regain the majority.

Prosecutors have found that Trump’s January 6 rally attracted a significant number of people who share Hitler quotes, hold membership in neo-Nazi organizations, have a fixation with “white genocide,” and the like, making the party leadership’s desire to sweep the whole thing under the rug all the more dangerous. Whatever misgivings the remaining old-line Republicans may have toward the militant cadres Trump inspired, Republicans fear their political and even terroristic power. They no longer imagine they have the gatekeeping force to exclude the anti-semites, less still to steer the party away from the kind of paranoid rhetoric that invites their participation.

The GOP’s overriding goal is to win, and it has decided this means accepting the support of anybody who will provide it. For three-quarters of a century, anti-semites were locked out of major American politics or at least had to keep their bigotry quiet. Now the door is open.