I’ve been a long-term pessimist about this, saying that it’s easier to diagnose what ails the GOP than to imagine a cure. But it’s possible that maybe if the cards fall just right Donald Trump is providing one by making his autocratic pretensions the scapegoat Republicans will be looking for.

To be clear: This is in no way a prediction. Far from it. I have no idea what will happen, and far darker futures are plausible – and perhaps even more likely. But I do see, now, a plausible scenario that’s not so bad. How plausible? Dunno.

To begin with, the problem. Republican presidents have been very unpopular in office since George H.W. Bush had a recession hit (with the only real exception George W. Bush’s huge September 11 rally effect). But the electorate has short memories. Democrats win unified party government (1992, 2008, 2020), get two years to push through a fraction of their agenda, and then lose at least one chamber in the ensuing midterms. In either four (2024) or eight (2000, 2016) years, Republicans are back – and their time out of office has made them even more extreme, and even more anti-democratic. It’s unfortunately very easy to imagine a much more successful authoritarian GOP presidency than the current one the next time around.

The key point (and I promise I’ll get to the optimistic part soon) is that it’s hard for Democrats to do much about it. Parchment barriers help. But they can’t save a republic from a party dedicated to undermining it, at least not in a two-party system in which both parties will eventually have a chance to govern. Democrats should do what they can when they have the chance! But the change that’s needed to save democracy in the US is a healthy conservative party, and only Republicans can make that happen.

On to the path out of it.

The first part of this you already know. Donald Trump has become so unpopular, so quickly, that the realistic hopes for Democratic success in future elections have rapidly increased. Again: Nothing at all is guaranteed. But it’s now very plausible that Democrats may have majorities in both chambers of Congress next year – and that Democrats could have unified party government with somewhat comfortable majorities in 2029. A year ago, even reaching 50 in the 2029 Senate seemed a stretch. No more, at least if 2028 is a good enough year for the Democrats to win whatever remains of the White House by that point.1

We already know one thing: A “democracy” agenda that wasn’t even on the horizon in 1995 and 2009 has moved steadily up the priority list for Democrats. So things such as restoring the Voting Rights Act, campaign finance, DC (and if they want it Puerto Rico) statehood, judicial reform, new election rules, and other such measures are more likely to pass than they were in 2021 even if the Democrats have limited capacity. Moreover, the filibuster in the Senate has been weakened several times, most recently by Republicans, which makes further changes easier. It won’t take 60 votes in the Senate for Democrats to pass their highest priorities. It may not even take 55.2

But that’s just the first step. The real key is for the Republican Party to react by re-embracing democracy.

And I think a path is opening there, too. The key here is that parties react to loss by deciding what went wrong and then trying to do something about it.

So if the party gets clobbered in 2026 and 2028, what will they conclude? It’s of course possible that they will decide that the problem was that they were not sufficiently conservative. That’s been the best guess for a long time, with the only exception the 2020 decision to follow Trump and pretend they had actually won. That’s another possibility this time, one that Trump will certainly claim regardless of what else happens. It’s also likely that Trump will blame any losing nominee for being a loser and stupid and altogether worse than himself. Republicans might decide it’s easiest to accept that.

But the most obvious explanation – and again, this is all assuming a GOP loss in 2028 that’s by no means guaranteed right now – is that Trump failed the party. Trump will have been unpopular throughout his presidencies; if there’s a recession or inflation or both his fingerprints will be all over it; and there’s a good chance he’ll have hand-picked the nominee, as well. And he’ll be at least somewhat off the stage, making him an easier target. Or even better: Making his deviations from party orthodoxy easy targets.

And (here’s the good part): If we really get lucky, moving away from Trump’s authoritarianism will be the simplest way for them to do that.

If he’s alive and kicking, they’re not going to want to attack him personally too much, because he’ll still be an enemy they would rather not make, individually and collectively. They’re certainly not going to attack him for cutting taxes on the rich; that’s too high a party priority to abandon. They may back off “mass deportation” per se., but a full flip on immigration is probably not in the cards. Same with foreign policy; they’ll want to take potshots at the Democratic president who will be desperately attempting to save what remains of the pre-Trump world order, so returning to Ike and Reagan doesn’t work.

Yes, they can return to free trade, but that’s probably not enough.

Again, I’m not predicting anything. But there’s a very easy path available that involves moving away from the parts of Trumpism that are least tied to GOP policy preferences and group commitments. Trump’s corruption and his self-aggrandizement are not particularly Republican or movement conservative traits. They should be easy to move away from.

The rest of it is more complicated, but perhaps easier than one might think. After all, as Noah Berlatsky correctly points out, most Republicans already concede normally when they lose elections, Many (and I think this one is also a “most”) Republicans already accept that elections in the US are legitimate. Explicit anti-democracy rhetoric was rare within the party until very recently. Republicans in the 2030s won’t be able to eliminate that stuff, but they could choose to push it back into the fringes where it used to belong.

It’s true that Republicans pre-Trump weren’t great on some other democracy issues, and the roots of that go deep in the party...but for the most part it was one strain within the party, not a deep commitment. The party was split on campaign finance reform relatively recently; it’s not that long ago that Republicans voted with Democrats to renew the Voting Rights Act.

A full reversal on, say, the VRA isn’t plausible in the foreseeable future, alas. But a change in emphasis and priorities might be. After all, we know some change is virtually certain: If there’s a Democrat in the Oval Office, Republicans won’t be supporting federalization of elections and forcing the states to hand over their voter lists!

There’s another factor: The current GOP position of making voting difficult became a priority during the period when just about all the groups that contained the most regular and dedicated voters tended to be Republicans. That’s almost reversed during the last twenty years. So that part of the anti-democratic agenda may no longer be in the interest of the GOP.

Look, I know all the reasons for pessimism.3 The party-aligned media folks who are highly influential in the party may not care about winning elections; some of the huge-money donors the party relies on may actively dislike democracy. It’s very possible that even if they lose badly in 2026 and 2028, Republicans will win big in 2030 and the only lesson they’ll learn is that there’s no need to change course at all. Or, even more likely, that they just weren’t hard-nosed enough or conservative enough. Hell, those reactions are probably still the most likely ones. Plus if they lose big in 2006 and 2028, the remaining Republicans in office will almost certainly be among the most radical.

I’m just saying…as of now, I do think the pro-democratic outcome as a reaction to the Trump years seems at least plausible. And more so now than it was a year ago.

Seth Masket has an excellent item about this, and I agree with everything he says. He mostly focuses on the obstacles that Donald Trump and the vice-presidency create for Vance, but the context to all of this is important and that’s what he ends with:

I tend to think people on the left underestimate Vance’s strengths as a politician. At just 41, he’s a heartbeat from the presidency and the frontrunner for the GOP’s next nomination. Five years ago he’d never even run for office. Additionally, Vice Presidents are almost always underestimated.

It’s that last part that I want to underline.

To begin with: This is all going to be about the nomination. When it comes to general elections, anyone who is a major party nominee can win in in the right year, and candidates just don’t make much of a difference. Not none, but not all that much. So nothing about that here.

All sitting VPs look worse than they are. Every single one of them. Two of the greatest Senators of the 20th century, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, magically transformed into punch lines within weeks (at most) of “ascending” to the office. Dan Quayle, a perfectly competent and harmless Senator, managed to become a bad joke immediately upon being chosen for the job, and never shook it to this day. Sarah Palin…well, no, she actually was a joke to begin with, even if national Republicans didn’t realize it at the time. But of course she never actually became VP.

And yet? Richard Nixon won the first available presidential nomination after two very rough terms as VP. So did Humphrey. So did Walter Mondale. So did George H.W. Bush. And Al Gore. Joe Biden passed up his first chance after the death of a son, but after waiting four years he won pretty easily despite being well past his prime. It comes with all sorts of asterisks, but Kamala Harris goes on this list too, and she may still win an open regular nomination.

That’s a pretty good record from a group of politicians who probably don’t strike most of us as particularly gifted – although this, too, has to do in many cases from their time as VPs.

Let’s say that the modern era of VPs started with Nixon; before that things were pretty different. So the failures after that are a short list:

• Spiro Agnew had to resign from office to avoid prison, so he wasn’t going to be a nominee.

• Nelson Rockefeller was only briefly VP, and appointed rather than elected, and he was dumped from the ticket in 1976…but at any rate he died in 1979, so he wasn’t around for 1980.

• Quayle didn’t run in 1996 (when former VP nominee Bob Dole was the pick), but he tried and went nowhere in 2000. That’s the one clear failure.

• Dick Cheney always said he wouldn’t run, and his health troubles presumably made it ill-advised for him to go back on that. I wouldn’t count it, but one could argue otherwise.

• And Mike Pence did briefly try for the semi-open nomination in 2024, but of course he had been repudiated by the president he served with and almost killed by his party. I guess I should say thugs within his party. Yes, he wanted a nomination and didn’t get it, but it’s not much of a relevant precedent at this point.

Depending on how one counts it, there are as many as 7 of 8 (that would be what I would say) to at least 6 of 9 sitting or former VPs who have been won presidential nominations without first becoming president. Those are pretty good odds! And one can add to that Nixon’s second nomination in 1968; Humphrey didn’t quite get the 1972 nomination after losing in 1968, but he came very, very close.

It’s not surprising. Vice Presidents have a bunch of structural advantages. To begin with, even during the post-Mondale era of VPs with real responsibilities they can still spend quite a bit of time in office doing running-for-president type things, whether it’s getting to know party actors or raising money for the party’s candidates or just traveling around the nation. They also travel the world; even if things go badly, as they famously did for Nixon a couple of times and for Vance over the last week, it still adds up to the kind of foreign policy and national security credentials that Senators and Governors find a lot harder to demonstrate.

It also helped many VPs that they were chosen to ideologically balance the ticket, which tends to leave them acceptable to multiple wings of the party. We can argue I suppose about whether that applies to Vance or not (and see David on Vance’s posturing and why it may be dangerous).

Beyond that: One of the things that makes Vice Presidents look so bad — that they always have to do what the President wants — suddenly frees them on the nomination campaign trail. First of all because being identified with a same-party president is almost always a plus, but also because the well-known fact that the VP must be loyal at the times allows them to pass along the blame, subtly to be sure, for anything that went wrong.

Yes, all of those things apply to Harris ‘28 as well, although her situation is certainly unusual in modern politics. Yes, I think her chances of being nominated are underrated.

To be sure: As Masket points out and as Pence could tell us in detail, being Trump’s VP is hardly a normal situation, and we have no real idea how normal or not the GOP’s nomination will be in 2028. While none of the VPs who ran started with the explicit support of the president, none of them had to face a presidentially-endorsed opponent, and at least in public the presidents were well-disposed to them. We won’t know that about Vance until it does or doesn’t happen.

(If you’re wondering? Ike’s famous dig at Nixon – “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” – happened after Nixon had already won the nomination.)

So there are all sorts of Trump-related possibilities that could prevent Vance from getting the nomination, or even seriously contesting it. More generally, we’re talking about the Republican nomination here. The same things that (in part at least) allowed Trump to win in 2016. So it’s hard to know whether the advantages that a sitting VP would have had in 1960 or 2000 would even apply to Republicans in 2028.

And that’s why I’m going to try to be very cautious in forecasting anything about GOP WH ‘28. But anyone just assuming that Vance has no shot because he seems like an inferior politician? He’s already done the single best thing that anyone who wants to be president can do. Even if it makes him look like a loser right now.

“What seems different about his words during the first week of April 2026 is the scale of violence his language primed people to imagine. His remarks about Iran moved beyond personal attacks or chest-thumping nationalism to take on a tone of collective punishment and civilizational destruction. The style was familiar. The horizon of harm was not.”

The immediate calls for the 25^th amendment to remove the president, and the debates about the feasibility of the 25^th vs. impeachment, reminded me of the moment on and immediately after the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Across party and ideological lines, there was new agreement that an important boundary for a constitutional republic had been crossed. In 2021, it was the rejection of an election and a peaceful transition of power, complete with Confederate flags flying in the Capitol. In 2026, it was call for the destruction of a sovereign nation of 90 million people, after weeks of a war that Congress has not authorized and the president has not fully explained to the public. Both of these moments were reminders that there are certain basic values held by people with otherwise very different viewpoints.

But they have also thus far also showed that our main two Constitutional provisions for checking a president who has demonstrated unfitness for the job are inadequate. Talk of the 25^th after January 6 faded; Congress impeached and ultimately held a trial after Trump had left office. A record seven Republicans voted to convict, but most voted to acquit. Some cited a procedural loophole -that an impeachment trial after the president had left office seemed improper.

The 2021 example highlights a set of related challenges for using institutions to remove or otherwise check a president. The Constitution is vague and unclear in many places, and the impeachment power is no exception. A few Constitutional scholars argued in 2021 that impeachment is intended to remove a president and thus is out of the question when he has already left office.

The discussion about intent is even tougher with the 25^th amendment. The general conventional wisdom is that it was meant for heart attacks and comas, not deranged social media threats. As a result, applying it under the current circumstances appears to be even more of a non-starter than the sixty-seven vote threshold for conviction in the Senate. The idea that the Cabinet would turn on the president in 2026, or that two-thirds of both chambers of Congress would, seems difficult to imagine. Even when democratic values have been breached as badly as on January 6, or on April 7.

The frustrating and frustrated discourse about the barriers imposed by impeachment and the 25^th as designed push us to take a broader look at institutions. The preoccupation with “intent” as a source of these limitations – but that intent exists in a much larger context. As part of the original Constitution, impeachment is one of several ways that the executive branch is subject to legislative check. The writers of the Constitution were generally concerned that an independently elected executive might become an “elected king,” and wanted to demonstrate the limits on the office’s power. But they also saw the office as an important check on a runaway legislature. If you think that Congress might be the real source of tyranny, then the high thresholds for removing a president from office through impeachment make a lot of sense.

The 25^th amendment was drafted and adopted more recently (in the 1960s – as this piece shows, the person who wrote it is still alive, and, like me, was teaching while most of this went down last Tuesday). By this point, the power of the presidency had expanded quite a bit and taken on a very different life than that the vision in 1787. That expansion of power, combined with the Cold War, certainly informs why people thought it was important to write an amendment addressing presidential incapacity in the first place. But even then, circumstances were quite different. The modern nomination process, with less party vetting and more openness to different types of candidates, had not developed yet. And while the twentieth century presidency was significantly more powerful than earlier versions of the office, Congress still had a distinct institutional identity and will of its own. (As Jonathan points out, Congress has not come close to exhausting its non-impeachment options for checking the president) Party politics had not become so nationalized and fixated on the president. The era of hyper-partisanship was still decades away.

In other words, if we want to think about the intent and design of these institutions, we need to do so with an eye toward the larger picture of national politics. The presidential selection process no longer safeguards against candidates who display disregard for the Constitution’s limits or the people’s will. Members of Congress now organize their political lives, in large degree, around whether they support or oppose the president. So adapting, reimagining and even formally adjusting these back-end remedies for presidential excess seems entirely appropriate.

The institutional lens helps us see the problem a bit differently, too. Institutions shape choices, and they distribute power. Both impeachment and the 25^th amendment empower relatively small minorities in Congress to prevent the removal of a duly elected president. As such, they create a very specific kind of collective action problem for members of the president’s party. Supporting either kind of removal requires them to sign on to a risky position in service of an effort that’s likely to fail. Figuring out how to change this incentive structure is not easy. But seeing it clearly for what it is seems like a first step.

On the night of April 7, the world did not end in nuclear war, and the president announced a ceasefire. Early in the morning on January 7, 2021, Congress certified Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. The immediate crisis moments – the ones that brought the demands for removal – passed. But the Big Lie about the 2020 election continued, and so has the war. These are our circumstances now, and the institutions we have helped to bring us here. We can change them, reinterpret them or adapt to them – but accepting their limitations is not a long-term plan.

2. Those effects of the war, however, could certainly continue to harm Donald Trump and the Republicans. People really care about prices. They really care about shortages. It won’t matter whether they connect them to the war or not, or what they think about the war. If prices are high, or if the economy slumps, it hurts the incumbent party.

3. As the week ends, oil is still basically where it was in mid-March, and the strait remains closed. That’s…not good at all for Trump and the Republicans. Even if the war really is over for the US, it’s quite possible that the economic effects are only beginning to spread across the economy.

4. More elections this week, up and down the ballot, added to the very large pile of evidence that Republicans are in very bad shape for the midterms. Or, rather, one of three piles of evidence: Polling, including Trump breaking all sorts of records for least popular president in the first two years; large and frequent protests and demonstrations, showing intensity of opposition; and results of special and off-year elections, which have been been very good for Democrats and show that the general anti-Trump feeling translates into electoral effects.

5. Trump would surely like to steal the midterms for his party. But it’s still the case that there’s no “rig the midterms” button in the Oval Office, and those who are convinced that Republicans can easily steal elections need to explain why they haven’t stolen the off-year and special elections contested last year and this year, including this week. That said: There are real threats out there, and effects on the margins can be important.

6. And remember: Each time that Democrats win in state and local elections, for example gaining unified party government in Virginia and a large majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, it gets a little harder for Trump to rig anything.

7. Cook Political Report moved five more House seats towards the Democrats this week (and one seat in the other direction). For the first time in this cycle, Cook gives the Democrats a real edge in winning a House majority. Watch to see if more of the “Likely” and “Solid” Republican seats start to get more competitive by mid-summer to know whether a major landslide is coming.

8. Not much has changed on the Senate side since I last wrote about it in January: Democrats need to win the two Cook Lean-R seats, the four Cook toss-ups, and all the easier contests in order to get to 51, and have two other Likely R states as potential alternatives. I’ve seen a couple analysts say Democrats should now be (very mildly) favored; I think that’s a bit premature, but the chamber is certainly in play. Meanwhile, Cook moved another governor race in the Democrats’ direction this week; it’s entirely possible that Democratic governors will lead all of the (2024) swing states during 2028.

9. Is it too early to say “Called It” on this one? Back in February I said that non-incumbent Democrats don’t need to worry about the party’s poor polling numbers among Democratic voters because it’s all about being fighters and “It’s easy for them to proclaim themselves as fighters. All they have to do is say it!” And lo and behold, that’s exactly what every Democratic candidate is doing. I guess we’ll have to wait to see whether it works with Democratic voters (it will), but again: It’s a much easier problem to navigate than ideological or specific policy disagreement. And if anything, the fighter/folder distinction helps to avoid those other, harder to deal with, disagreements.

10. It’s still somewhat early. It is possible to imagine a reversal that leads to only small Democratic gains in November. I wouldn’t get too excited about stuff like the number of districts that don’t like Trump. However…damn things do look very good for the Democrats, and it’s also easy to imagine things breaking their way and matching or even surpassing midterm landslides from 2018, 2010, and 1994. The one key takeaway for Democrats right now: In every state where the filing deadline has not passed, make sure to get someone on the ballot in Every. Single. Contest.

It’s bad blogging form to have two sets of numbered lists in one post, but I’ve been thrown off schedule the last few weeks and I have links for you too. If you’re in a generous mood, perhaps just try not to notice? Thanks.

1. Dan Drezner on Trump, Thucydides, and Machiavelli. In my neck of the woods (the democratic theory area, that is) Machievelli is mainly a (complicated) champion of republican ideas, so…well, yeah, Dan is correct there too.

2. Speaking of the fifth item above: Rick Hasen on how the Supreme Court could meddle with the midterms.

3. Charles Franklin on consumer sentiment and Trump.

4. Richard Clark and Allison Carnegie at Good Authority on populists and global institutions.

5. Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan on “The Pitt” and health policy..

6. Norm Ornstein on invoking the 25th Amendment.

7. Seth Masket on the First Amendment.

8. And Lindsey Cormack on what’s wrong with US politics.

Nothing new. But in the past year, having returned to his position of power in the White House, the scope and desperation of this obsession have surpassed anything previously seen. I am hardly the first to notice, or to ascribe this to his advancing age. Trump turns 80 this June. He may or may not be suffering ailments of the mind or body as speculated by the sleuths of social media; nor can I say whether he is haunted by his father’s dementia, first diagnosed at age 86, or the deaths of others in his life. What seems obvious is that he is seeking, in every way he can imagine, to create monuments and achievements that will continue testifying to his name far into the future, and into the history books.

Hence his face coming to coinage for the nation’s 250^th anniversary, and his signature to paper currency rolling off the mint. Thus his name on the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace; the Brobdingnagian ballroom to abut the White House; and of course the massive arch, which we learned this week would be paid for in part with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The NEH is devoted to “promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans,” and clearly Trump believes in promoting his own excellence and teaching his place in history for all Washington residents and visitors for generations to come.

Trump also reportedly wishes to rename Dulles airport for himself, and to establish his birthday as a national holiday. (Legislation to fulfill both causes were introduced last year.) I strongly suspect he has other such self-gratification projects in mind, to pursue in his remaining time in office along with others that may yet occur to him.

These are all, to me, horrendously wrong-headed for America. We already, to my view, too commonly venerate and commemorate our Presidents. I’d like more Tubman and less Jackson on our currency and statuary; swap out a few of the Jeffersons and Grants we encounter for an occasional Audubon, Douglass, or Neil Armstrong. We do not anoint kings, and should not treat Presidents as such — even in memoriam, and certainly not while they still occupy the office.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I partly ascribe our country’s current misadventure in Iran to this late-age narcissistic drive as well. Trump, it seems to me, has decided that a legacy of peace, including the peace of a permanently nuclear-free Iran, will force chroniclers of our nation to rank him atop their lists of greatest Presidents in our children’s readers in perpetuity. Peace on earth is not, on its face, the worst goal to occupy a President. Indeed, I give him at least some credit for a couple of efforts— notably the Armenia-Azerbaijan agreement — that have benefitted from his newfound desire for a peace legacy. (I could have done without it being named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, but I can live with it.)

Perhaps some good will even come from another of his legacy projects, the Board of Peace. It too was in the news this week, as it tries to finally finalize a commitment from Hamas to disarm. Betcha forgot about that whole situation, huh?

However, when you combine this goal of a reputation for peace, with Trump’s limited understanding of the world, his devotion to the obtainment of peace through strength, and his bluff-like-a-madman-no-really-like-an-actual-insane-person negotiating strategy (remember how we were invading Greenland a few months ago?) — and a limited time to accomplish as much as possible on the global peace scorecard — then you’ve got a recipe for some pretty ill-conceived blunders on the world stage. And here we are.

Presumably, however this Iran debacle ends up, Trump will declare it a victory for peace; perhaps he’ll have it commemorated somewhere on that big arch. But it won’t satiate his need for a legacy of peace. It will likely take much more war-making for him to achieve that.

That’s right about one thing: It’s Republicans who could do something about what’s happening, from the ill-conceived war to the petty (and the large!) corruption this president is participating in and encouraging in others.

But let’s be clear about this: Republicans in Congress do not have to impeach and remove Donald Trump to change US policy in Iran. Or in the US.

All they have to do is exercise their formidable Article I powers.

As I’ve said repeatedly, to some extent they’re already doing it in some policy areas. Trump isn’t getting the Fed Chair he wants, at least for now. He’s not getting the Surgeon General he wants. Senate Republicans have refused to change or end the filibuster to give him his highest legislative priority, the SAVE Act. They aren’t rushing through legislation to let him built his White House boondoggle ballroom. The spending bills for the current fiscal year reflected the priorities of Congress, not the White House, and that’s apt to be the same for the next fiscal year. Even the megabill last year was at least as much the standard congressional GOP agenda as it was Trump’s.

That’s what we know about. We don’t know to what extent pressure from Republicans (in Congress and perhaps elsewhere as well) pushed Trump to dump two cabinet secretaries. We saw some pressure in public, at Congressional hearings. Beyond that? We don’t really know. Nor do we know whether Trump selected a sitting Senator for one of the subsequent vacancies because that was the easiest way to guarantee his pick would be confirmed. Last year, Senate Republicans confirmed all but one of Trump’s wildly inappropriate top-level executive branch nominees; we don’t know yet whether that would still be the case now that he’s under 40% approval. They may have already quietly vetoed one or more potential selections.

So don’t be so sure that Republicans aren’t doing more to constrain Trump than we see, since we know they’ve applied some constraints in public.1 However, there is far more they can do if it’s true that some or many of them strongly object to some of what’s happening.

Of course, a lot of Republicans allow Trump to do things because he’s doing precisely what they want. Lindsey Graham isn’t the only Republican in Congress who has been begging for a stupid war with Iran for years, after all. Indeed, it’s quite possible that when all is said and done it will turn out that this war will be seen as a case of a hawkish faction rolling Trump, rather than something that Trump did because he wanted to.

At any rate: The point here is that Congress has plenty of ways to constrain the president other than impeachment.

The most dramatic would be if a handful of Republicans in one or both chambers crossed over the aisle and caucused with the Democrats, giving that party at least temporary majorities.

Even a serious threat of doing that might be enough to make Trump blink. If they really don’t approve of the war (or anything else; there’s plenty!), they could demand change, and make sure he realized the threat – which, with Democratic control of committees, would include investigations of who-knows what – is serious.

But they don’t even need to go that far. If Republicans want to change policy, good old fashioned legislation can do it. They don’t even need to use the War Powers Act; they can always just tell the president he can’t spend money on anything they like.

Granted that may take more Republicans – enough to reach 60 in the Senate, rather than a simple majority. It’s also true that Trump could veto, but that just means that more Republicans would have to act. And there’s nothing preventing them from doing so. Just their choices.2

Or even simpler: They can just publicly criticize the unpopular war that many of them surely think has been a bad idea from the start. The mainstream media, and even to some extent Republican-aligned media, generally will amplify same-party criticisms of the president; it’s the kind of man-bites-dog story that journalists and their bosses really like.

And it very well could work to change his course of action. Trump’s bluster is that of a bully, but his actions – TACO! – have always been one of a bully who is easily defeated by anyone willing to stand and fight.

Yes, there are risks involved. Trump is unpopular overall, but most Republicans still support him and a large chunk of Republicans are strong supporters. Then again, we’re right at the stage of the electoral cycle in which filing deadlines are closing in many states and several primary elections have passed or will soon take place. In other words, the biggest threat is shifting, week by week and state by state, from nominations to the general election.

Regardless. The two points here are that Republicans are actually free to choose to fight against policies they believe are terrible for the nation and for the party, and that there’s plenty they can do even if they’re not willing to impeach and remove the president. And if they don’t do it, then it’s on them, not anyone else.

The Constitution, with its characteristic vagueness, doesn’t say much about what makes an impeachable offense. History is also a limited guide. In Backlash Presidents, I identify a sort of two-stage process in which some members of the public are consistently and vocally skeptical about the president’s fitness to hold office. In the three cases I address at length in the book – Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump – these suspicions are deeply connected to the racial politics of the moment and to the president’s actions, statements and attitudes about race.[1] These actions set the stage, but they’re insufficient. Instead, impeachment supporters wait for a set of specific offenses, which tend to bring a larger coalition together. For Trump, this was the Ukraine phone call, for Andrew Johnson it was the Tenure of Office Act. This isn’t normally how the story of Watergate is told, but I spend a chapter laying out how those dynamics were at work for the Nixon presidency as well. These specific charges were connected to the overall set of concerns, but indirectly, representing a narrow slice of what opponents found fundamentally objectionable, beyond a mere policy disagreement.

The problem with impeachment in 2026 is that it’s failed so many times. It’s not only failed to achieve conviction and removal from office. Impeachers have also failed to convey a broader public sense about what they were doing and why, and establish how impeachment plays a legitimate role in safeguarding the Constitution.

Maybe the calls I’m seeing in the usual online places will come to fruition, and Congress will respond to Trump’s latest unhinged post with swiftness and unity. But I doubt it. And so I’m sharing a few ideas about what would need to be different in 2027 if a Democratically-controlled House decides it wants to pursue impeachment.

One long-standing problem with presidential impeachment is that it operates in the shadow of an impossible standard. Politicized or partisan impeachment is sometimes offered as an example of “constitutional hardball” but the process as laid out in the US is always going to be political, and that means there will always be an element of partisan politics. The goal shouldn’t be avoiding the appearance (or reality) of politics; it should be defining what exactly those politics mean.

The first of these challenges is to explain what is at stake in presidential politics. Constraints on executive power – in war, in domestic policy, in the separation of powers – exist not for abstract Constitutional theory or elegance, but to prevent terrible outcomes that affect the American people. The distinction between “kitchen-table issues” and maintaining proper institutions and accountability is a false one. In other words, impeachers need to clarify the politics, not obscure them.

Keep the focus on presidential obligation. The process requires specific charges, and there should be no shortage of possibilities. But the debate about what qualifies as “high crimes and misdemeanors” can be endless and fruitless. Instead of trying to come up with a clear standard for that language, it may be more persuasive to focus on what the Constitution requires of the president, and how the president’s actions have undermined that standard.

Reframing in this way does two things. First, it keeps the emphasis as much as possible on presidential action and not on a larger political debate about the whole project – while leaving space for the ways that project might attack the Constitution. The impeachment sets the stage for a larger political struggle over the meaning of the Constitution, but can’t actually accommodate that entire debate.

Second, it helps move away from the long-standing fears about what impeachment, and presidential accountability in general, will do to the stability and order of the nation. Impeachment leaves a lot of unknowns, like what the president’s success would be like and how they might govern. From Ford’s pardon of Nixon to the Biden administration’s attempt to move back to normal, the American political system does not do well with uncertainty. My suspicion is that if we don’t break away from this tendency to gravitate toward order and normalcy, there won’t ever be much accountability for what has happened under this administration. The only way back to an effective Constitutional order is through.

Finally, the part of impeachment where members of Congress vote is inescapably political. And so the side that wants to impeach has to do what they can to make “no” votes politically costly for wavering members of the other side. In 2021, we saw enough Republicans vote in favor of impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate to know that – as was evident on January 6, 2021 – many Republicans were unhappy with Trump’s actions after the 2020 election. But the procedural question of whether the impeachment after leaving office was Constitutional gave many others an off-ramp to justify voting against impeachment or conviction. The strategy will depend on the specifics, but this would once again require that the party pushing impeachment acknowledges that this is political, and then tries to actually shape the politics.

Nothing is automatically an impeachable offense – it might seem like it should be, but it just doesn’t work that way. Impeachment is as much about the process as about the offense. History doesn’t offer a lot of encouraging lessons about the prospects for impeachment as a real means of accountability or a check on executive power. But it does offer some lessons about how to manage the politics of these moments, if we are willing to learn them.

[1] The Clinton impeachment is somewhat different – it doesn’t exactly follow the racial pattern. But we do see the same two-step process, with general political objections raised by political opponents, and then a long wait for concrete charges.

First point. James Downie, watching Donald Trump floundering, says “There’s no strategy. There’s no plan. There’s just a tired old man who’d rather watch Fox News and grift than do the job of being president.”

Which reminds me of one of the main things about understanding Trump, which is that he thinks the presidency is a prize he won, but he’s actually been hired to do a job – with over 300 million bosses.

Trump has never actually held down a job before this. Well, not quite – hosting the reality show was a job, but it’s not clear he realized it in that case, either. The reporting was that he just blustered around doing whatever he wanted and they cut it up to create the stories that worked. Which…well, I’m no expert, but I think that he has excellent reality television skills.

And abysmal management skills. But beyond that, as far as I can tell he’s not trying to manage. He thinks he gets to do whatever he wants. That’s really, really, not how it works, and it’s not surprising that it keeps producing catastrophes.

Second point: Jeff Lazarus notes House Republican Whip Tom Emmer talking about Trump’s Iran War and saying “Our president didn’t start this war. He’s finishing it.” Lazarus:

One of the many malign effects that Trump has had on politics is that before he came along, politicians did not often tell easily disprovable lies. They would shade, spin, and equivocate. But there used to be consequences for outright whoppers.

Yup. I used to say that Trump doesn’t lie like a politician; he lies like the proverbial used-car salesman. That is, he’ll say anything, no matter how entirely false, to try to make this sale – with no concern at all for what that does to his reputation. As opposed to, say, Bill Clinton, who was always ready with a convoluted explanation justifying why something he said was plausibly true. It has a certain unappreciated democratic functionality. It doesn’t exactly anchor the people’s representatives in the truth, but it does implicitly recognize the representative relationship, and the politicians’ responsibilities to citizens even as they are falling short.

Anyway Lazarus gets a Catch of the Day for noting that the Trump style has now spread to others.

Third point: Adam Serwer has been reading Trump and John C. Calhoun, and points out that Trump is “not saying anything more complicated than [Calhoun’s explicit white supremacy], nor is the birthright citizenship case about anything else.”

Very much the case. But it’s worth noting that as much as many in the US may be susceptible to subtle bigotry and a significant chunk of voters are all in on anything you pitch to them, overall explicit bigotry just isn’t very popular, and probably explains a fair part of why Trump has been so unpopular throughout his political career.

The big plus Trump had going for him in the overall population was never bigotry, but the presumption – based on his wealth and the character created on that TV show – of economic competence. That’s a reputation that survived his chaotic first term, with many regarding the pandemic recession as bad luck, not bad presidenting. In fact, it was never true, as the second term Trump without guardrails keeps demonstrating.

And indeed as the presumption of economic competence falls away, Trump’s approval rating has fallen. That wouldn’t be the case if his electoral strength was based on bigotry, since he’s been very consistent on that. Yes, some loved the bluster, but a lot of people believed that behind the bluster was a shrewd businessman who would therefore be good at running the economy. But it was always the case that the bluster was the real deal, and what was behind the surface bigotry, self-dealing, and apparent ignorance was just more of the same.

On to the links:

1. Dan Drezner on the US loss in Iran.

2. Anna O. Law on birthright citizenship.

3. Meredith Conroy on the women exiting Trump’s cabinet.

4. Rick Hasen on Trump’s most recent executive action on elections.

5. Perry Bacon talks with Jake Grumbach on the Democrats’ debate over “moderation.”

6. Matt Glassman on the continuing fights over the SAVE Act and DHS spending.

7. Ashley Splawinski on regulating events markets.

8. Lindsey Cormack on the parties and social media.

9. Michael Tesler at Good Authority on GOP public opinion about Iran and foreign policy.

10. Natalie Jackson on polling and AI.

11 Madeleine Dean and Norm Ornstein push for a constitutional amendment to fix the abused presidential pardon power.

12. I missed this Henry Farrell must-read from last week about how this administration governs but it’s still essential..

13. And Bonnie Honig on Vladimir (the TV show, that is).

[Updated: Fixed Tom Emmer’s name.]

To be sure, Presidential campaign books – and I’ve read quite a few – commonly include a narrative about religion in the candidate’s personal life. That includes Democrats, many of whom, successful and not, have been far from shy about their paths toward faith. And why not? For many, if not most Americans, such journeys are important to their character and beliefs. It’s natural that many voters are interested in what a candidate believes, and how he or she applies that to their world view, including political issues.

And certainly the religious right has long demanded (although not always received to their satisfaction) such tales from Republican hopefuls. Though, often most religious conservatives are satisfied with devotion to their issues rather than their version of faith. (Yes Trump, but before that John McCain and Mitt Romney.)

This cycle, however, looks to be different. The right-wing marketplace has come, during the Trump years, to heavily embrace an enthusiastic Christian nationalism that will have its first real test of influence in the 2028 Presidential cycle. Vance is not the only one eager to pander to that sentiment.

Recall, if you will, the overtly religious, tent-revival feel of the televised Charlie Kirk memorial event. As I wrote here, Kirk and his organization were not originally faith-oriented. Not at all, and not as late as the early 2020s. Always keenly attuned to the trends of the right-wing marketplace, Kirk leaped onto the growing Christian nationalism, particularly strong among younger conservatives: His final book, published posthumously, was Stop, In the name of God. In it he describes his own decision to adopt the biblical Saturday day of rest (quite a case of cultural appropriation), and prescribes it for others. But really… well, one review put it well:

“…the book is less a simple paean to a core Jewish ritual and more a tortured argument for how Christians can reconcile deep suspicion of Judaism while reaping the benefits of marking Shabbat – mixed in alongside the political grievances that Kirk is best known for: opposition to the pandemic lockdown and vaccines, exhortations to traditional gender roles and, most importantly, advocacy for a Christian nationalist vision of the U.S.”

I suspect that Vance – a close ally of Kirk’s who clearly wants to employ Turning Point to his political advantage in 2028 – will do something similar in his book.

Vance will do so in the name of Catholicism, his adopted religion. Hard-right Catholics, long a factor in Republican politics, have become hugely influential in the right-wing marketplace, led by Jack Posobiec who has become a major face of Turning Point in addition to his other outlets. Theirs is a Nationalistic Catholicism that purports to align with evangelical Protestantism, but the political case has yet to be proven. No Catholic has yet won the GOP’s Presidential nomination.

Vance, it seems to me, intends this upcoming book to begin a two-year process of bridging that gap. He’s not the only one: Likely 2028 candidate Marco Rubio is Catholic (having left that faith twice only to return). Ron DeSantis is Catholic too; his aggressive courting of evangelical Christians has tended to elide discussions of his own faith. DeSantis, in fact, has sometimes seemed to court criticism from Catholic leaders, as with his dedication to capital punishment, just as Vance has done in defending the administration’s immigration policies against critiques from Pope Leo.

Other talked-about prospective Presidential candidates are more naturally aligned with the Baptist base, and they too have been tending toward adoption of the type of Christian nationalism that would be dangerous in guiding the White House. Ted Cruz is a Southern Baptist, son of a preacher, who was recently seen quoting Scripture to Tucker Carlson in defense of a a Bible-based Evangelical Christian support for Israel. Tim Scott dates his deep Evangelical faith to his college experience. Rand Paul, who calls himself a devout Presbyterian, actually preceded Vance with his 2015 book Our Presidents & Their Prayers, published in advance of his 2016 Presidential campaign and co-written with evangelical author James Randall Robison (son of the more famous televangelist). And Josh Hawley, also speculated to be gearing up for 2028, is a Presbyterian who in 2024 began publicly describing himself as a Christian nationalist (though attempting to redefine the term).

I don’t know how this will all play out, but I advise keeping a close eye on it. Particularly with Vance. Even more than he has tried to keep cozy with the Nick Fuentes Groypers, Vance has made alliances with dangerous demagogues such as Posobiec – who I recently saw describing the Crusades as “defensive and justified” in calling for Christians to similarly defend access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. If the 2028 GOP nomination becomes, in part, a contest for the support of people like Posobiec, it will be a rough couple of years.

Yes, with everything else going on it may seem a bit early be talking about this. But no, it’s not too early for House Democrats to be thinking about it. It’s going to be an unavoidable topic, both because of what’s already happened and the inevitable additions as long as Trump is in office.

After all, consider this incomplete list of legitimately impeachable actions Trump has already put together in his fourteen-plus months in office:

• Impounding duly appropriated funding of various programs

• Spending government money that’s not been appropriated (there are arguments here, but paying the military during the fall shutdown and paying TSA agents during this shutdown seem to qualify.)

• Defying court orders, most obviously in the cases of detainees.

• Abuse of the pardon power.

• Pushing the Department of Justice to persecute his enemies.

• Pushing the Department of Justice to ignore crimes against his friends.

• Giving partisan speeches to US active-duty military and otherwise endangering the US’s proud tradition of democratic civilian-military relations.

• A series of smaller provocations - his name on currency, his face on coins, banners of his face at federal buildings, his name on the Kennedy Center.

• War crimes, from fishing votes in the Carribean to threatening (so far) civilian targets in Iran.

• Abusing his office to enrich himself and his family.

And more. That’s without including going to war without permission of Congress since there’s nothing unusual about that, but one could certainly argue it belongs high on this list.

That’s what we know about; there are surely more that have not yet surfaced. I’m not going to argue for these here (this piece is already long enough!); suffice to say that enough of these are cut-and-dried that many party actors are going to push for action and virtually everyone other than partisan Republicans is going to think a strong case can be made for at least some of them.

So it seemed like a good thing for the House to work through.

First, some broad comments.

Impeachment is not a judicial process, but a political one – and not in the sense that courts and laws are always political, true as that is, but in the sense that the Constitution gave this job to elected politicians in all their crassness and political self-interest.

And, after all, the Constitution gives members of Congress very little to go by beyond their political instincts. So while I think we all have the sense that presidents should not be impeached and removed regardless of whether they’ve done anything wrong at all, there’s no bright line definition of an impeachable offense, or even much of a hint at one.1

When I talk about it I generally refer to “legitimately impeachable” while knowing that doesn’t really solve anything. Other than to refer back to that general widespread sense that Congress should only impeach and remove for serious harm done to the republic. Which, as I said, Trump has clearly done in abundance.

Beyond that, I’d add a couple of things. I reject the idea that the House must impeach or else it undermines the rule of law. People say that, but I don’t see any reason to believe it – especially if, as seems likely the votes aren’t there in the Senate to convict and remove. It’s a political decision, and that includes the possibility that the politics aren’t good for the House majority. Blame the guy undermining the rule of law in the White House and Senators who won’t remove a president who clearly deserves it, not the House majority which must contend with that context. Obviously two impeachments without convictions neither slowed Trump down nor convinced voters that Trump was unacceptable.

And as I’ve said before: There is a potential public opinion downside in talking impeachment: It changes the conversation from whether Trump’s actions are good or bad to whether they merit removal. That may have the effect, as it probably did with Bill Clinton in 1998, of making it easy for partisans to rally around the president.

So what should the Democrats do next year, assuming again that it’s their choice? I think it really depends on the circumstances. That I’m sure of, much more than I am sure of the various scenarios I lay out here.

First of all, if Republicans retain their Senate majority, then it almost doesn’t matter whether House Democrats impeach the president or not. Republicans wouldn’t hold a serious Senate trial; indeed, I suspect they would have an even more abbreviated “trial” than what they permitted the first two times. The whole thing would be a brief, and not very spectacular, story.

Second possibility: Democrats win a landslide, Trump’s popularity continues to sink and numerous Republicans begin to publicly break with him.2 In this scenario, conviction and removal might even start to look plausible.

In that case? Democrats should do what they can to maximize the Senate vote. If that means deferring to those hypothetical allied Republicans on timing, wording, and charges covered? It’s worth it.

Yes, it’s unlikely. But we’re talking here about a (still-improbable) world in which, say, Democrats have swept all of the currently competitive Senate seats – including Texas and Iowa – and perhaps one or two more. That puts them at 54 or 55, with another two or three Republicans having survived a scare. At that point, is it all that impossible that some Republicans up in 2028 might start thinking about the advantages of removing Trump from the scene?

Perhaps. But again, House Democrats will have plenty of signals if getting to 67 in the Senate is a realistic possibility. If it is, that has to be the goal.

Which gets to the third scenario: What if Democrats do have a Senate majority, but conviction and removal seem impossible?

In that case, there’s a pretty good case for throwing the book at him, and making impeachment a major feature of the next two years. That means a set of hearings in the House laying out the case, and then a prolonged Senate trial. Take all of those things that are wildly abnormal and inappropriate and explain to everyone just how much Trump has done to earn himself removal. Lots of witnesses. Lots of displays.

Why a trial, if conviction is only a remote possibility? Because the news media absolutely love trials. That’s a sufficient reason for doing it in this case, where Democrats would have the votes to run the show in the Senate but not enough votes to actually remove the president.

This is contrary to the criminal law, where it’s considered irresponsible to bring a case without a pretty good chance of conviction. But of course this isn’t a criminal case and it certainly would not be heard before an impartial jury. The whole thing, again, is set up by the Constitution to be fully political.

To be sure: No matter how dramatic they make it, there’s pretty limited utility in the exercise. House Democrats (and two renegade Republicans) did a wonderful job of telling their story in the January 6 committee hearings…and then Trump was renominated and regained the presidency. And of course Trump won’t even be on the ballot in 2028, so it’s not clear that there is much of an electoral advantage in dramatizing his abuses.

But there’s more to politics than elections, and whether it helps them in 2028 or not the Democrats should certainly do what they can to help people understand that there’s a serious attack on democracy and the rule of law.

Whether that happens in committee hearings or in impeachment proceedings isn’t very important, at least as long as partisanship makes removal impossible. What is important is that it does take place, that it’s comprehensive, and that it’s well done.

And that’s why House Democrats should be thinking about it right now.

Their later book, Tyranny of the Minority, was a welcome extension and correction, moving away from the line of thinking that blames “polarization” for the threats to U.S. democracy and instead looks at how institutional arrangements – the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court, to name a few – intersect with pro- and anti-democratic forces in the contemporary American context. Global examples of how these principles work also inform the argument – how dominant groups behave when threatened, how institutions shape this process. The book concludes that the U.S. needs to safeguard some important democratic values, like voting rights and majority rule, and that our ability to do so has been undermined in part by Constitutional designs intended to limit the “tyranny of the majority.” And now we have, at least potentially, a scenario in which tyranny of the minority, instead, is the problem.

Tyranny of the Minority was originally published in 2023 (the paperback version came out just a few weeks before the 2024 election) and in many ways reflects that specific political moment. Some of its main ideas regard the failure of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act because of the Senate filibuster, and the refusal of most Republicans to hold Trump accountable for January 6. And it also rests on the important fact that in 2016, as surprising and seemingly meaningful as the 2016 election was, Trump did not win the popular vote, but rather lost it by a substantial margin. It was totally reasonable, until November 3, 2024, to treat the rise of Trumpism as a product of institutions that can sometimes subvert the popular will.

With the 2024 election, all this changed. Trump won the popular vote. His ability to wield a majority is still highly in doubt – he won a narrow plurality of the popular vote (not a landslide, no matter how many times people repeat that lie). His popularity slid and has since plummeted. His agenda items have never been that popular, even when he’s more “trusted” by the electorate on issue areas like immigration and the economy in the abstract.

The book points out that there are a number of issues in the United States where public policy does not reflect public sentiment: they cite a study about how many states have post-Dobbs abortion policies that don’t reflect citizens’ preferences; they point out that most Americans support at least a few modest gun control measures, but these measures are blocked because our political system overrepresents the views of a narrow and extreme segment of the population.

There’s no shortage of theories – most of which are not really possible to prove – about what drove the 2024 election result. A more complicated points suggests that majorities are both more fickle and higher-stakes in a rapidly changing and diverse society with America’s fraught racial history. One of the observations that I made early on studying periods of racial backlash is that majorities are elusive while coalitions fall apart and reconfigure. Backlash presidents tend to be ones who figure out how to gain power in this political environment. And that tends to involve figuring out how to navigate the new environment – Nixon’s 1968 maneuvering, Trump’s 2016 victory in a fragmented primary field – not commanding a massive backlash majority.

What does happen in public opinion, however, is that the backlash politics – and something like Trump’s 2024 victory – sneaks into the space between people’s preferences in the abstract and their reaction to real policies and changes. I argue in my book that the civil rights reforms of the 1960s were fueled by shifting public attitudes toward the unjust status quo, but this did not prevent discomfort once some people were faced with the reality of these changes. In 2024, some Americans may have been unhappy with Biden’s “border policy” or with whatever they considered “woke.” But it’s equally clear that Americans do not support armed agents of the state murdering citizens. They don’t support sweeping immigration raids or the deportation of people who have lived here for years. Majorities are not stable under these circumstances, and it’s not clear that if a majority coalition could be cobbled together through compromises and half-measures, that it would produce something workable at the policy level

To their credit, Levitsky and Ziblatt have since written more addressing the issues of Trump’s second term, including (with Lucan Way) a piece explaining how the cost of opposing the government is a crucial indicator for the decline of U.S. democracy. By this measure, we are doing quite poorly. While I remain free to write this blog post at the moment, the entire cultural space has shifted. Media figures have been fired, networks threatened with FCC retaliation, press access has been limited, government has stepped in to punish what academics write, teach, and say. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota represent the starkest examples of the price paid for opposition. This process has also been telling because while some have paid swift and significant costs, much of this compliance has been in advance and wrapped up in “business as usual” – financial decisions, mergers, shuttering long-criticized humanities departments. Large institutions can obscure the costs of opposition by adapting behavior to avoid paying them.

Political scientists have been especially focused, as we like to do, on the nature of institutions. American political institutions are especially winner-take-all, which does allow for the consolidation of power. The Tyranny of the Minority makes note of this and, like How Democracies Die, is especially attentive to how elected officials use power. Political institutions are a big part of that story. In this sense, the book reflects a point I try to raise whenever I talk to people focused on electoral reform: institutions don’t just create incentives. They also distribute power. The next question for the moment in American politics might be, what can reforming institutions do when there’s a political movement determined to undermine democracy and consolidate their power?

It might be the case that only a very small minority of Americans actually prefer MAGA or far-right policies. But the lesson of the 2024 election is that under the right conditions, a substantial number of Americans will join that coalition for the brief time it takes them to vote. Long after the coalition has fallen apart, the repercussions will linger.

I May Have Jumped the Gun (1) Several days ago I noted that while Donald Trump’s approval rating had slumped since his war on Iran began, his disapproval had also gone down and the whole thing could still have been just an artifact of polling. The story is a bit less muddled now: It’s more clear than it had been that Trump is losing ground. Of course whether that’s because of the war, or the effects of the war (starting with gas prices), or the mostly unrelated airport lines is impossible to know.

We also can’t tell whether the observed drop in disapproval was real or not. Whether it happened is somewhat interesting, I think, but not important at all going forward. At any rate, the things we did know at that point are still true, and devastating for Trump.

I May Have Jumped the Gun (2). Last week, I said that the stalemate over DHS funding might go on for a while. As I write this it’s still probably not over, but there’s been plenty of huffing and puffing, with Trump saying he’ll (illegally) pay TSA workers despite the funding lapse and the Senate, beyond midnight Washington time, still “in recess subject to the call of the chair” – in other words, still hoping to come back in the wee hours with a deal.

People who fly vote, and many of them have excellent “call someone to complain” skills..And their trauma may be a lot less than that of other people, but it’s extremely visible to everyone, and very obviously caused by the government making Something Go Wrong. Oh, also many media folks fly a lot. All of that makes politicians very responsive to air traffic disruptions.

Where’s the Panic? So Republicans in Congress do finally seem to have realized that ruining air travel during peak spring flight season is not a great idea for them. Still: Where’s the overall GOP panic? Not only is Trump’s approval at the lowest level at any point during the first two years of a new presidency and falling, but everything else looks bad too – including the two Republican state legislative seats that flipped to the Democrats in special elections this week. This weekend we’ll again see massive anti-Trump “No Kings” protests.

All in all, things look quite bad for the GOP. There’s still time before elections. Granted, panic is never really a good idea…but pretending everything is just fine isn’t a great response for a party in trouble, either.

Then Again… Perhaps Republicans are panicking, but just doing it away from the cameras (there have been scattered comments about the party being in trouble, but usually without names associated and without any plan to actually do anything different. Perhaps they’re just so intimidated by Trump they can’t think straight. I know what a lot of y’all are saying: They just expect to steal all the elections. Perhaps – but if it’s so easy to do so, why didn’t they steal those two Republican seats in a Republican state this week? Or the off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia?

Long-time readers know my answer: The Republican Party is dominated by its party-aligned media, and those outlets have very little incentive to win elections. Ratings and sales and clicks usually go up with Democrats are in charge. Governing means decisions that can split the party; it’s safer and easier to just attack Democratic incumbents.

I don’t think Republican Members of Congress actively want to lose. But I think many of them – far too many – would be perfectly happy to lose and start their careers in what David calls the “conservative marketplace.” Not only is that work more lucrative, but it’s also probably a better match to their skills, and probably more interesting to them as well.

No Really. Does this look like a primary challenger to a GOP incumbent who is trying to carve out a reputation for substantive skills, or one who is looking to slot in between Scott Baio and the pillow guy? (I suppose I should tag it marginally unsafe for work).

The Core Problem. Democracy depends on parties seeking office by winning elections. If the party doesn’t care about that, they won’t adjust to voter preferences, and they won’t be able to govern successfully – while at the same time, they can keep winning elections as the out-party when the incumbents stumble.

More Losing. I wrote recently about various ways Trump is losing. Missed one: He’s apparently unable to nominate anyone to be C.D.C. Director. Seriously people think that he’s an unusually powerful president, but he sure seems a lot more like Jimmy Carter Lite. Albeit with a whole lot more legitimately impeachable actions.

Trump Bills Oh, also, he’s putting his name on US currency. All of it. He’s putting his face on coins. There’s also huge banners of his face draped from government buildings in Washington, and he put his name on the Kennedy Center. Yes, this is what dictators and kings do. No, there’s no reason to think it makes him more popular or helps Republicans win elections. I can’t prove it makes him less popular. However, given that he’s breaking records for presidential unpopularity, it’s probably a good idea to just assume as a default setting that whatever he does hurts him with everyone but the 20-25% of voters who are his strongest supporters. No, it’s not always true, but you’ll get more hits than misses.

At any rate: Some of this is probably illegal, some of it certainly not. All of it is an assault on the Republic, and if there is a comprehensive impeachment resolution I hope they include it.

Information? No Thanks I started with two I didn’t really get right, so I’ll end with one that I’ve been saying throughout this presidency that’s unfortunately proven true again and again: Trump has organized his second presidency around the chief goal of preventing him from ever having to confront information that threatens his impulses. I think the NBC reporting about the videos of big explosions Trump sees every day – without a full briefing about what’s actually happening – is pretty good confirmation that it’s still going on, even in war.

You know what else is good evidence? That Trump may have chosen his war on Iran because the summer attacks there, and the raid on Venezuela, went so well. It’s appears true that they did, at the operations level. But did the US actually achieve any national goals in either of these cases? If not, did they really go well? It’s worth at least thinking about. And very little sign that anyone in the administration has.

They’re Still in recess subject to the call of the chair. Maybe it’s not about DHS funding at all; maybe it’s part of the phony “talking filibuster” that Senate Republicans have occasionally been pretending they are forcing to break the Democrats’ opposition to the SAVE Act, which they sort of sometimes seem to be doing in order to satisfy Trump and GOP-aligned media folks who think, or pretend to think, that a real talking filibuster would get the bill passed.

Hey at least baseball is back. Also we have links.

1. Michael McDonald on those Florida special elections.

2. Seth Masket on Republicans and competence.

3. Dan Drezner on things falling apart.

4. Jennifer Lind on China and technology.

5. John Sides at Good Authority on public opinion about abortion.

6. Lee Drutman on the challenge ahead for Democrats.

7. And Daniel Nichanian on the elections to watch in April.

One of Trump’s signature strategies in projecting U.S. power is stealth: he is characteristically loathe to publicly discuss plans, thinking that doing so undermines the mission. This is not uncommon for certain types of actions – typically, the ones that involve the Central Intelligence Agency or other dark operations meant to affect change without anybody (including folks back home) finding out too much about it. Bay of Pigs, Contras, overthrowing Mohammad Mosaddegh, that sort of thing.

When Presidents intend to openly use proper U.S. military forces, however, they are much more inclined to talk about it quite a bit beforehand – not operational specifics, but the general case for taking action, and the outcomes to be expected. Making the case for war. As opposed to those stealthier moves, which are typically for projecting power when a President doesn’t expect to get public or legal support for open military intervention.

There’s a relationship between political support and operational success. More of either tends to increase the other. If the operation is going well, political support is likely to improve. With greater political support, a President has more time and room to maneuver toward success.

Not to say that building political support guarantees success of an international intervention. George W. Bush painstakingly overcame skepticism and corralled Congressional authorization and popular support for invading Iraq in 2003, notably including Colin Powell’s United Nations presentation and this own State of the Union address. That allowed him to launch his war with plenty of legal and political support to execute a full-scale assault, regime removal, and occupation of the target country. That support, however, couldn’t survive the operational failures. Three years into the conflict, approval for the war was underwater; Bush used what remained of public forbearance on the 2007 “troop surge,” but soon after committed to withdrawal.

This is how the political/operational cycle works downward. Without perceived success, political support wanes, and a President’s options become limited – he can’t try temporary escalations that might turn the tide to victory.

That’s where Trump seems to find himself, and by his own refusal to generate support in the first place. He was emboldened not just by the demonstrable excellence of our military, but also by a certitude – justifiable, unfortunately – that he could do what he wants with or without political support. It’s not as if he needed to worry about Congressional approval; he has dismissed that body from the equation with their blessing.

So why would he need to persuade anyone? He could disregard them as easily as he did those few advisors who warned of a less-than-simple permanent removal of the Iran problem. Doubters, and posterity, could deal with the Iran war as a fait accompli. Like the Christopher Columbus statue on the White House lawn, or the capture of Maduro. It would be a success – even if (as with Venezuela) Trump would have to redefine that after finding out what happened.

Iran, however, has presented Trump with consequences he can’t gloss over as easily Maduro’s ally stepping in to maintain the regime. He must get the Hormuz Strait re-opened, and that will require an escalation and broadening of commitment—mission creep, if you will—that he has no political room for. It appears to me that he intends to try it anyway, beginning (but likely not ending) with the 2,000 or so (depending on who’s reporting) airborne troops on their way to the Middle East now. His stated preference is an unlikely 15-point agreement with Iran’s (possible) new leaders ceding all of Trump’s stated objectives—including the delivery of Iran’s remaining enriched uranium and centrifuges, which apparently he is now admitting survived last year’s and this year’s completely successful attacks. I suspect the whole negotiations rhetoric is just Trump buying time to calm markets, get troops in place, and replenish some armaments. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong, we shall see.

And if he does send in troops, to secure and guard the shipping lanes, and to retrieve the uranium and centrifuges, perhaps it will go well enough to reverse his downward-spiraling political/operational cycle. My fear is that to go that well would require a much bigger and longer invasion than Trump now has political room to try. So, he’ll try to do it with less risk, meaning fewer troops and a quicker, more limited operation. And that’s a recipe for further failure. And less political room to maneuver.

Just look at the Senate, right now. Trump’s pick for Surgeon General, Casey Means, is in big trouble, and it looks to me that she doesn’t have the votes to get confirmed, although the nomination isn’t dead yet. It does seem likely that Trump’s nominee for Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, will eventually get confirmed – but the nomination is stuck for now because retiring Republcian Thom Tillis has put a hold on it over the attempt to use the Justice Department against departing Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

Even the Department of Homeland Security situation, where Senator Markwayne Mullin was confirmed on Monday to replace Kristi Noem, isn’t exactly a great triumph for Trump. Part of the reason he had to replace Noem is because Hill Republicans turned against her and helped make her look bad in recent hearings. And while Mullin may have been Trump’s ideal candidate no matter what, it’s worth noting that sitting Senators are generally among the easiest of nominees to confirm.1 It’s not exactly a show of strength of select one.

On the legislative side, Trump has failed to convince at least 50 of the 53 Republican Senators to go nuclear and eliminate the filibuster so that his top priority, the SAVE Act, could pass over unified Democratic opposition. Nor could he convince Majority Leader John Thune to stage a “talking” filibuster; instead, Thune wound up just having a bit more debate than usual without putting any pressure on the Democrats at all. Granted, what Trump wanted wouldn’t have worked…but Senate Republicans certainly could have tried to do what he wanted anyway. They did not.

Nor has Trump figured out how to get anything out of the stalemate over DHS funding. Over the weekend, demanded that the Senate combine it with the voting bill, which Thune did not do. He also told Republican Senators not to negotiate a compromise…which they seem to be doing anyway, although it’s not yet clear how it will end up.

What Trump has managed to do through all of this, including sending ICE to hang out at airports on Monday with no apparent responsibilities, is to both make it clear that it’s his shutdown that has produced chaos at the airports – and also to draw even more attention to it.

Trump can’t even seem to control his own endorsements, as seen in his continuing Texas fiasco. First Trump was pushed by Thune and others concerned about losing the Texas seat to hint that he would soon endorse incumbent John Cornyn, and that challenger Ken Paxton should then drop out. Paxton and many from GOP-aligned media, however, pushed back hard enough that Trump hasn’t chosen either candidate yet. It certainly appears that Trump was rolled twice – once by Thune and allies, and once by Paxton and his supporters.

It is true, of course, that Republicans with only a couple of exceptions have supported the war in Iran, or at least they haven’t voted to end it. I’ve seen many attribute that to Congress refusing to stand up for itself. But that’s not quite right. Democrats (again with a couple of exceptions) have in fact opposed it; they don’t have the votes to do much. A good number of Republicans flat-out support attacks on Iran, and have been pushing for it for years. Indeed, that’s an important point to remember: When Members of Congress and the president agree on something, we should never automatically assume that it’s the latter driving the former. I’m pretty sure in this case that Trump isn’t convincing South Carolina Senator and long-time hawk Lindsey Graham to support war on Iran.

So it’s only a relatively small group of Republicans who probably are voting for Trump’s war despite actually opposing it. That, too, isn’t exactly a shocker: The number of wars in US history that were shut down by the president’s own party voting against them is (I believe) exactly zero.2

Indeed, it’s the fact that so many Democrats (and a couple of Republicans) have been so quick and vocal in their opposition to military action during the first few weeks of a conflict that is highly unusual. And, as with the rest of this list, a sign of Trump’s weakness.

And yet!

Despite everything, Trump had his war in Venezuela, and he has is war in Iran. He gets any number of things done that a more prudent, more norms-respecting, and more incentive-driven president would not do.

I’m not going to fully resolve this; I think Julia is correct, if I understand her correctly, that it’s two things in tension with one another rather than a puzzle for us to solve. But I do think that a big part of this is that Trump is simply willing to accept, even if it’s perhaps only through ignorance and stupidity, the penalties for acting against the normal incentives produced by the US Constitutional system.

The incentives keep working. The very real penalties for ignoring them keep coming. But a historically weak president is still president, and can still do things even if they have consequences no regular president would want.

A striking example of this is the administration’s insistence that we are at war, except when they insist that we aren’t at war. Factcheck.org reports that “politicians disagree” about whether the nation is at war, quoting House Speaker Mike Johnson (no), President Trump, Secretary of State Hegseth, and House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (yes), and also President Trump (no).

Some elements of this are familiar. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. It has not done this since World War II. Yet in some important public sense, The Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq conflicts are all considered wars. All of these were authorized by Congress in some way, but none were fully declared wars. (I usually avoid calling them wars, in a probably-absurd use of language to insist that wars are, by definition, declared by Congress). The passage of the War Powers Resolution in 1973 sought to clarify the president’s role, and achieved the opposite.

The language of the resolution emphasizes US involvement in “hostilities.” Defenders of Congressional war power argue that this allows presidents to essentially initiate wars in way that were never intended by the Constitution. The Obama administration did one better by insisting that the airstrikes in Libya in 2011 did not rise to the level of “hostilities” and thus were not subject to the War Powers Resolution. In this regard, Trump joins a proud tradition of playing with definition in order to accommodate the fact that political reality does not really match the Constitution.

Several elements of MAGA politics explain why the rhetorical strategy is nevertheless different. First is simple lack of message discipline, or any kind of discipline. This isn’t an administration that’s equipped to stick to a story about why what they’re doing isn’t war.

The second is that the cult of personality is so far removed from mainstream Constitutional thinking about war that it’s hard to understand it as anything but a rejection of Constitutional tradition. A vivid example of this is when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard insisted that only the president can determine “imminent threats” to national security. Like images of Trump in a crown, talk of “nationalizing” elections, or putting his name and face on objects of national significance, this is everything the American experiment was designed to avoid. It’s everything that the people concerned about the “fetus of monarchy” at the Constitutional convention were nervous about. Past administrations have struggled to reconcile a Constitution that exalts Congress’s war powers role and a national security order that increasingly relies on the executive branch. But they have sought to put these in institutional context, not to highlight a cult of personality around a single individual.

Finally, when I hear high-level administration officials talking about “war,” especially the way that Hegseth talks about it, it seems like another area where they are simply employing their own, somewhat post-modern, definition. We see this in some of the videos and memes shared by the administration, which depict the war in terms of movie footage and video games. In this sense, their definition of war doesn’t have much relationship with the debates surrounding the War Powers Resolution or past presidents’ use of it. They are thinking about war as cool explosions and “killing bad guys,” not geopolitical strategy. They’ve used fallen service members as political props. The emphasis on “winning” when they talk about the war suggests they see it as an extension of their domestic culture wars. In these wars, policy outcomes are not the point, opponents are two-dimensional, without their own perspectives or logic. And shows of violence – along with, of course, actual violence – are a means to establish dominance.

In other words, it’s not just that the Trump administration seems conflicted, from moment to moment, about whether the nation is at war. It’s that they are operating according to two different definitions of the word. Each definition has its own implication for whether they are working in the usual world of American politics, or in the rarefied MAGA order where the old rules don’t apply. The latter relies heavily on the administration’s ability to define away things they don’t like. But they may learn, as they did in their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, that in high-stakes situations, it isn’t that simple to alter reality through the force of your words.

Maybe.

On Wednesday, Trump dropped to new term approval lows in both the FiftyPlusOne and Nate Silver estimates: 38.1% in the former, 40.2% in the latter, although he’s rebounded a bit from there by the weekend. As of now Trump has lost about half a percentage point of approval at FiftyPlusOne compared to February 28, and about one and a half percentage points via Silver. At the same time, however, disapproval is flat for Silver and down a full percentage point at FiftyPlusOne.

You can tell a story about this, I suppose. Perhaps some Republicans who had previously soured enough on Trump to actually disapprove of him have drifted back in a mini and focused rally effect. At the same time a different set of marginal Trump supporters, perhaps reacting to soaring gas prices, have dropped their approval of his performance.

Or not. It’s also possible that these small changes are really just artifacts of polling. Pollsters differ in how many undecideds they report and all sorts of other things; the best aggregators adjust for that, but the adjustments aren’t perfect. These are estimates based on poll results that can be handled in a number of reasonable ways, not absolute truths.

What we do actually know? Quite a bit, really. Trump did not get a (overall) rally effect from his war on Iran. His approval is at or near his second-term low. He’s less popular at this point of his second term than he was in his first term – and lower than any other new polling-era president (from Ike on) has been at the fourteen point mark. Indeed, his net approval is basically as bad as any new president has been at any point during his first two years. Or, if you consider this his second term, then his net approval is worse than any polling-era president at any point in their fifth and sixth year with the exception of Richard Nixon.

All that was true a month ago; the big thing he’s added since then is that while both Joe Biden and first-term Trump had net approval about where Trump currently is at one point in their first two years, both of them dipped that low briefly and recovered a bit, while Trump has been around -19 for over a month. (Using G. Elliott Morris’s current and historical data).

Is he already sliding further this month and we just can’t see it clearly yet? We won’t really know for a while. As always with polling, I recommend patience. Even if I’m ignoring my own advice and constantly hitting refresh and squinting hard to make out patterns that may or may not be there.

The links:

1. Dan Drezner tries to make the best case for Trump in Iran. Helpful!

2. While Dalia Dassa Kaye explains why other presidents didn’t take this option.

3. Norm Ornstein on the SAVE Act.

4. Natalie Jackson on Iran, the SAVE Act, and measuring public opinion.

5. Matt Grossmann talks with Laura K. Field about intellectual support for Trumpism.

6. Maria Sobolewska on the Labour Party in the UK and Black voters.

7. Seth Masket on unrest among Democrats and how it’s playing out in nominations this year.

8. Eric Gonzalez Juenke at Good Authority on understanding elections.

9. And Lindsey Cormack on members of Congress talking about the service academies.

We begin with her assessment of whether the 2026 cycle is looking good for more women to get elected to the House. Though it’s obviously too soon to tell, Dittmar has interesting data and observations about retirements, candidates, and more.

We then digress just a bit into Democrats gunning for higher office. You can find the analysis of gubernatorial candidates she mentions—and much more—at cawp.rutgers.edu.

Returning to the U.S. House, I ask about a possible comparison between this year and 2018. That year, which was also the midterm of a Donald Trump Presidential term, a whopping 35 new women Democrats were elected to the House. Dittmar says that there are some similarities between then and now, but she also suggests some differences.

Then (around the 16-minute mark) I ask about a potential watershed achievement: the House Democratic caucus, currently comprising 44 percent women, could soon reach gender parity. What might that mean, symbolically and practically? Unsurprisingly, Dittmar has given this a lot of thought — and observed it at the state level — and I think you’ll be interested in what she has to say.

And finally, we turn to the GOP, which lags very far behind in electing women. But the party did elect a startling number of women to the U.S. House in 2020, just three cycles ago. I ask Dittmar how that happened, and why it wasn’t sustained. Her answer also stands as a caution to Democrats that women’s progress is not inherently self-sustaining.

I hope you enjoy, and please weigh in with your thoughts in the comments!

A monster war supplemental is coming, with the Pentagon wanting over $200 billion. We don’t yet know what Trump will actually ask for, let alone what can get through Congress. It is, of course, not unusual for any part of the government to max out on its first budget request.1

One factor here: Not only is the war unpopular, but as long as it consists mainly of an air campaign of various types then opponents may find it a lot easier to cut off funding than they would if there were ground troops involved.

Indeed, if Congress wanted, it could set conditions such as “no ground troops” on any funds they appropriated. I don’t think there are majorities for any particular conditions now, but it’s quite possible that there also isn’t a majority for a clean spending bill.

I will note that the entire process does place constraints on the president, even if Congress winds up going along. The Pentagon has to draw up a proposal; the White House reacts; then both chambers of Congress have a say, and they’ll no doubt hold hearings to force the administration to justify what they ask for. All of the elected people in the chain will have this year’s midterms in mind, and if they believe the war is unpopular that will set the context for all of it.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the president’s preferences will be defeated. But they certainly may be modified along the way, and at the very least presidents have to put real plans on paper instead of just babbling in press conferences and then doing whatever they want.2

Speaking of Congressional constraints: Democrats are still fighting for restrictions on ICE and the Border Patrol, with the Department of Homeland Security shut down during the fight. The White House has produced a proposal, which if I understand it correctly says that they’ll start following the law…more often, except for the times that they don’t. That’s not going to cut it.

The fall 2025 shutdown was a relatively normal one, with Democrats clearly seeking a shutdown, and eventually failing to get much out of it when it came to substantive gains. This one is different. If I had to pin the responsibility for the shutdown on one party, I’d say it’s the Republican’s fault, but it’s not really clear that either side was deliberately seeking this outcome. Democrats have acted as if they wanted to negotiate the best deal they could get; Trump and Hill Republicans have just not really engaged much.

Then again, it’s not much of a government closure. Only one department is affected, and most of that is exempt from closure anyway, although many DHS employees are working without being paid. The biggest pressure to end the shutdown so far is from unpaid TSA employees refusing to work. But that’s nothing compared to the fairly massive disruptions from the fall shutdown.

So this may continue for a while.

Less likely to continue for long is the phony “talking filibuster” that Senate Majority Leader John Thune is conducting during consideration of the SAVE Act. Matt Glassman has all the details. I agree: This is basically what the Senate normally does with a bill, except with a bit more floor debate.

The interesting part was that Thune kicked it off by claiming that the filibuster is generally good for Republicans and conservatives.

So two things about that. One is that I thought the official GOP party line is that it was Republicans who passed landmark civil rights bills in the 1960s over Democratic filibusters, with the (false) implication and sometimes explicit claim that liberals opposed the legislation. Of course the reality was that a bipartisan liberal coalition passed the bills over mostly conservative Democratic filibusters. It strikes me that Thune’s claim here is at least as bad as the one that Trent Lott was driven from the Senate over. But maybe Republicans no longer feel that taking ownership of Jim Crow is a problem.

The other thing is that plenty of liberals immediately agreed that the filibuster is mainly good for conservatives.

I’m not so sure. I think that those liberals are overestimating how much liberal legislation defeated by filibuster during years of unified Democratic government would have otherwise passed. Some of those – in both chambers – happy to vote for bills that everyone knew were doomed without 60 votes might have hesitated if simple majorities were enough.

At the same time I think they’re underestimating how many extreme measures Republicans might pass without the filibuster. Including voter suppression. Including a national abortion ban. And more.

Yes, some Republicans might be voting “yes” because it’s currently safe to do so. But it sure seems to me that the party most likely to pull back for electoral reasons has been the Democrats, and the party willing to plunge ahead regardless of consequences would be the one that’s nominated Donald Trump three times.

At any rate, whatever Thune might be saying it’s almost certainly the least conservative Republicans, not the most conservative, who are saving the filibuster right now.

My real answer here has been that whichever party gets rid of the filibuster first will “win” this particular game. That’s likely to happen the next time one party gets unified government with a mid-50s number of Senators; 53, which the Republicans have now, is really at the lower limit of where majoritarian change becomes possible. But meanwhile, we’ve had smaller Senate majorities during periods of unified government that don’t last very long, with the big exception of the 58, 59, and 60 seat Democratic majority in 2009-2010, which was actually large enough that it didn’t have a desperate need for eliminating the filibuster. Mid-50s is the sweet spot.

Otherwise? Maybe we’re just going to have a long sequence of chipping away at the filibuster until it’s no longer very effective at all. But that certainly doesn’t appear to be happening this week with the SAVE Act.

As I mentioned then, women currently comprise 44 percent of the Democratic caucus. I raised the question: could they reach the 50 percent level? Could we have, for the first time in America, majority female major-party representation in a federal legislative chamber?

The tl;dr answer is: nah, probably not this cycle. Not unless we have a replay of 2018, anyway, when women nationally rebelled against a Donald Trump Presidency and elected nearly three dozen women, representing more than 60 percent of the freshman Democratic class.

Hmmm…

The numbers this cycle, as best I have sussed it out, say that if Democrats have a really good cycle and win pretty much all the seats they can reasonably hope to, they could gain a net of about 20 seats. Those, plus filling the seats of another 20 or so not seeking re-election (nearly half of whom are departing women), would mean just over 40 new Democrats, of whom, by my calculations, 33 would need to be women, or 80 percent. That would result in a total of 234 Democrats: 118 women, 116 men.

Four out of every five newly elected Democratic Representatives? Seems awfully unlikely. Never been done, even in that 2018 cycle. As it happens, Illinois has five open Democratic districts this year, all considered safe for the blue nominee.

It appears, as of this writing, that women will be nominated in three of the five. Came close to a fourth.

Overall, 77 districts have held primaries at this early point in the process, in Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas. Women have won on the Democrats’ side in 30 and men in 42, with five still pending male-vs-female runoffs. So, not even parity. (Republicans in those districts have nominated 63 men and just 11 women, with three M/F runoffs.) But what matters most is the relatively few open blue seats, or winnable GOP-held seats.

In that 2018 cycle, women dominated those crucial Democratic primaries. Women ran in key districts, they received plenty of funding and support, and Democratic primary voters — who are majority female — seemed to seek out women to vote for.

I suspect that many high-ranking Democrats believe they can capture some of that gender lightning in a bottle again, and ride it to the House majority. That, I think, is part of what they’re trying to pattern after. In that 2018 cycle, Democratic House candidates, for the most part, were strong, authentic-seeming women, not overtly partisan, many with military or other non-political backgrounds, focusing on so-called kitchen table issues rather than the impeachable offenses of President Donald Trump.

At least, in the swing districts. In solid blue districts we got more, shall we say, forthright candidates, including the four known as The Squad. (Two of whom defeated male Democratic incumbents in urban primaries.) But it you are plotting pickups for the DCCC, you’re more interested in winnable swing districts — such as the 13 GOP-held seats currently rated Toss-Up by the Cook Political Report.

So, should Democrats be looking for the same type of relatively moderate women in this Trump Presidency midterm? I’m not so sure. Vibes are different this time. For one thing, 2018 took place in the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation. Roe v Wade was endangered, not yet moot. Women had come out in droves wearing pink pussy hats when Trump was sworn in. The gender vibe was palpable in our national politics. I think it’s a different vibe this time around.

All that aside: Democrats have made remarkable gains in nearing gender parity in the House of Representatives. But last cycle they stalled out a bit, and it looks to me like that extra step from 44 percent to 51 percent is not going to come quickly.

But, does it matter? A majority female is mostly a symbolic glass ceiling; certainly at 44 percent women have very loud voices in the caucus, that do not go unheard.

Symbols matter, though. It seems to me this would be a meaningful one. But I’d like to hear from others on the topic.

I try not to do too much media-bashing around here, but I guess it just got to me this time.1

Green’s item was the better of the two; it was about Trump rambling on about several of his obsessions Monday afternoon rather than focusing his remarks on Iran. Or anything else. Overall, a pretty good piece. But I’m still calling it out for referring, with the journalistic equivalent of a straight face, to Trump’s “weave” as a deliberate speaking style that, presumably, can be effective.

The truth is that Trump’s rambling isn’t effective at all and never has been. He’s a terrible public speaker, and virtually all of his formal speeches are disasters. We’re talking here about a presidential candidate who managed to lose his hand-picked audience at his own 2024 nominating convention, which is really quite an achievement. “The weave” is just a post-hoc attempt to make sense of it all, and people believe it’s a thing because it gives an explanation for why someone successful enough to be elected president could be so seemingly awful at public speaking.

The second one is worse. It notes that Trump is utterly incoherent and constantly contradicts himself about Iran, and then furnishes several explanations. It’s his negotiating style, says the White House (even though there’s little evidence beyond his say-so that he’s any good at negotiating). It’s how he keeps multiple party factions happy. It’s because he’s moving from foreign to domestic audiences. It usually works just fine, but Iran is proving to be an exception.

That’s all a lot of bunk. The simplest explanation for why Trump sounds as if he has no idea what he’s doing on Iran is because…he has no idea what he’s doing on Iran. And again, there’s no reason to believe that any of this “works” in other contexts. After all, as G. Elliott Morris (and others) have noted, Trump has been below water on pretty much every policy question, and has been for some time.

If we start with the safe assumption that given partisan polarization, Republicans strongly tend to like Republican presidents, then there’s just nothing (positive) to explain, at least beyond Trump’s initial success in the 2016 nomination contest.

Indeed, so far at least, Iran is more of the same – not something different that needs an explanation. Yes, it’s an unusually unpopular war, but everything Trump touches is unpopular. He can’t sell anything, at least not beyond his strongest supporters. And at least so far, the war doesn’t seem to have cost him any overall popularity (see here and here).

I should note that #CleverFallacy is a bit different from what people call “sanewashing,” although that’s in evidence here, too. Sanewashing, at least as I understanding it, consists of writing about incoherent rambling as if it made sense. It’s normal for journalists to clean up quotations, taking out “er…” and “um…” and obviously misspoken words, especially if they’re corrected. With Trump, however, so much of that is often needed that instead of helping readers see what he’s trying to say, which is a useful service, reporters can wind up adding meaning where there was none. Clever fallacy goes beyond that to attribute strategy and intent to Trump, when he’s likely just saying stuff.

Yes, analysts are hard-wired and trained to, well, analyze. It’s hard for us to admit that what a politician says is nothing more than random words, and that the President of the United States is just an ignorant guy who pops off with whatever comes to mind, not a strategic politician at all.2 But with Trump, that’s usually what’s going on.

And if we want to understand how things are going wrong, that’s a good place to start.