Trump: Still Losing
And why being such a loser makes him so dangerous.
I seem to keep writing about Donald Trump as a loser, but every time I turn around there’s more – and I don’t think it sinks in nearly as well as it should.
This comes up after political scientist Adam Bonica posted some figures on Trump’s record in district courts during his second term. It turns out that Trump has lost in district courts at a startling 96% rate in May. Perhaps even more striking: So far, January through May, Trump has lost 72% of the time with district court judges nominated by Republicans (and 80% with those chosen by Democrats). Bonica points out that Trump is doing better at the Supreme Court, but even there he’s suffered quite a few defeats.
And that’s not all! Trump’s tariffs are a story of losing and losing again, most recently in postponing higher tariffs that he threatened Europe with. Trump does appear to have won a few bribes, but so far at least he has pretty much nothing else to show for all his threats.
His attempts to conquer Greenland, Canada, and portions of Panama are pathetic jokes. His dream of ethnic cleansing in Gaza followed by US occupation is a sick, sad, joke. His claims that he could end wars in Gaza and Ukraine? All bluster. More losing. As was his brief escalation against the Houthis in Yemen.[fn at least he lost well there]
Even where he seems to win, he loses. Take the megabill that the House passed last week. Yes, Trump seems to have helped get the bill over the finish line. And House Republicans did include his various tax promises from the 2024 campaign, so that (so far) counts as a real win for the president. But along the way, he repeatedly said he was against slashing Medicaid, and they entirely ignored him – indeed, after he came to the Hill early last week and told them to leave Medicaid alone, they wound up adding additional cuts to get House Freedom Caucus radicals on board.
The truth is that the bill that passed the House is much more similar to the pre-Trump GOP than to any supposed capture of the party’s agenda by the president. Or, to put it more broadly: Whatever the “Trump” agenda might have been, outside of the trade war he’s been rolled by Republican radicals, RFK Jr.’s health cranks, and Elon Musk’s personal interests and prejudices. (Yes, sometimes some of that stuff overlaps with recognizable Trump preferences, but when his impulses conflict with others he’s often – usually – rolled).
And this is all on top of another set of setbacks that I wrote about in early May.
Really, no president loses as much as Trump loses.
Do y’all know who Dick Stuart was? Dick Stuart was a first baseman with the Pirates, Red Sox, and other teams in the 1960s. But the most memorable thing about him is that before he reached the majors he once his 66 home runs in a single minor league season (which is a lot; the record at the time for the longer major league season was 60). The baseball analyst Bill James had a riff about this. He noted that the Pirates didn’t rush Stuart to the majors, and concluded that people just didn’t know how to deal with 66 home runs, and wound up discounting it because it just was off their normal scale.
I think there’s some of this in how people, especially the media, treat Trump. He can’t possibly be as big a loser as he seems to be, so there must be more to it than that.
So….No! The starting point with Trump is he’s really, really bad at the job of being president. Awful at it. This isn’t some sort of secret strength; it’s a tremendous weakness that can be (and often is) exploited.
One of the ways he differs from others is that he doesn’t appear to have any sense of self-preservation. It’s not unusual for presidents to overestimate their skills and their influence, but I can’t think of another who wasn’t at least minimally risk-averse. It appears with Trump that it’s all impulse; if he wants something, he wants it, and there’s zero thoughts about the consequences for saying so, either to his reputation or to any longer-run goals.1 For that matter, there don’t seem to be any long-term goals.
The problem is that the same things that make him such a frequent loser also make him incredibly dangerous. This plays out in several different ways, but one in particular is underappreciated.
Trump is hardly the first president who wanted to be all-powerful. I suspect most of them do. But other presidents correctly assess the very slim chances of achieving that goal, and settle for incremental attempts to increase their influence. Similarly, Trump is far from the only president surrounded by people who advocate policy extremism and are willing to try to make it happen regardless of the consequences to the president’s popularity. Not to mention wanting to make their own pet policy ideas reality. Normal risk-averse presidents, however, back off their own and their administration’s least popular positions – and try to make sure that something has a reasonable chance of working before they move ahead with it.2
Trump, on the other hand, moves ahead with things even if there are flashing lights and screaming sirens warning him not to. And all it takes is for the occasional disastrous plan to “succeed” to damage the nation. This is particularly the case with democracy issues, where even if Trump is ultimately totally defeated the very fact that he (and therefore his supporters) attempt to undermine democracy tends to weaken the republic. But the same can be true for the economy and foreign policy.
At any rate…anyone who is concerned that Trump can’t be beaten should realize that he is defeated All. The. Time. And anyone who doesn’t recognize the urgency of defeating him as he attempts to seize power and undermine the Constitution should realize that most presidents stop themselves before they go too far — and this one definitely won’t.
This shows up, too, in the felonies he’s been charged and in some cases convicted of. There was nothing subtle or tricky about his attempt to illegally overturn the 2020 election, or his theft of government records. He just did it.
Of course, other presidents have made mistakes in which they underappreciate the risk of failure. Take George W. Bush and Iraq. Note that most people accept that Iraq for Bush was just a costly mistake for the nation and for himself, rather than being some clever long-run strategy. People should feel the same way about Trump’s many fiascoes!
This post and others of yours before it are very reassuring. There’s another Substacker, Mersault, who recently posted a similar perspective in a post called, “The Great MAGA Unravelling.” A wonderful read in case you or anyone here hasn’t seen it. And I too have argued that Trump is the leading vulnerability in this whole sorry episode in our nation’s history. Trump IS losing and, most recently, Trump seems to be losing IT (as in control over his own mind). But he’s also the poster man-child for winning by losing. — or ‘failing-up.’
Because he really has succeeded a great deal.
He has succeeded in turning the presidency itself into a worldwide shakedown racket where he and his family and a few other close associates and opportunistic American Confederates are amassing great wealth and not a little political power.
He has succeeded in cracking open the paper-thin facade of liberal norms and order — and the institutions we have built to institutionalize them.
He has succeeded in unleashing a form of political and martial ‘shock and awe’ that goes beyond a mere self-enriching shakedown. He has been serving a much more fundamental purpose in enabling a national and global geopolitical SHAKEUP. Not only are the bulwarks of liberalism being deconstructed at home — forcing we in the managerial elite to taste of the precarity of our social status and assumed economic security; but so are the bulwarks of the entire post-WWII and post-Soviet Union/Eastern Block liberal world order being broken-up. Trump, both because of and in spite of his pathos and depravity is forcing our nation into a radical reset — a reset that many historians and other scholars and experts believe has been needed for some time.
To me, the most critical issue for those of us wanting to perpetuate our nation and world along the lines of liberal values is that we must understand and address the larger historical forces at work here that the confab of Trump with our home-grown reactionary neo-Confederates are working with. The latter are the real danger!
Trump’s win/loss record is not as critical as the effectiveness of these Project 2025 opportunists and consiglieri who are doing the real damage. Trump himself may falter or possibly even sidelined by his own people if he becomes more mentally challenged.
We liberals need to be turning our attention to building-out a positive, proactive alternative to the reset towards autocracy now going on here and worldwide. We need to reassert the liberal/democratic project upon which our nation was founded.
This post and others of yours before it are very reassuring. There’s another Substacker, Mersault, who recently posted a similar perspective in a post called, “The Great MAGA Unravelling.” A wonderful read in case you or anyone here hasn’t seen it. And I too have argued that Trump is the leading vulnerability in this whole sorry episode in our nation’s history. Trump IS losing and, most recently, Trump seems to be losing IT (as in control over his own mind). But he’s also the poster man-child for winning by losing. — or ‘failing-up.’
Because he really has succeeded a great deal.
He has succeeded in turning the presidency itself into a worldwide shakedown racket where he and his family and a few other close associates and opportunistic American Confederates are amassing great wealth and not a little political power.
He has succeeded in cracking open the paper-thin facade of liberal norms and order — and the institutions we have built to institutionalize them.
He has succeeded in unleashing a form of political and martial ‘shock and awe’ that goes beyond a mere self-enriching shakedown. He has been serving a much more fundamental purpose in enabling a national and global geopolitical SHAKEUP. Not only are the bulwarks of liberalism being deconstructed at home — forcing we in the managerial elite to taste of the precarity of our social status and assumed economic security; but so are the bulwarks of the entire post-WWII and post-Soviet Union/Eastern Block liberal world order being broken-up. Trump, both because of and in spite of his pathos and depravity is forcing our nation into a radical reset — a reset that many historians and other scholars and experts believe has been needed for some time.
To me, the most critical issue for those of us wanting to perpetuate our nation and world along the lines of liberal values is that we must understand and address the larger historical forces at work here that the confab of Trump with our home-grown reactionary neo-Confederates. The latter are the real danger!
Trump’s win/loss record is not as critical as the effectiveness of these Project 2025 opportunists and consiglieri who are doing the real damage. Trump himself may falter or possibly even sidelined by his own people if he becomes more mentally challenged.
We liberals need to be turning our attention to building-out a positive, proactive alternative to the reset towards autocracy now going on here and worldwide. We need to reassert the liberal/democratic project upon which our nation was founded.