Trump's crack-up
Donald Trump is losing control.
This is the most important political fact in America today, and it explains the mounting rage, escalating recklessness and frantic aggression pouring out of the White House.
For years, Trump’s power has depended on a single illusion: inevitability.
He cultivated it carefully and ruthlessly.
The essence of Trumpism has never been ideology. It’s never been conservatism. It’s never been patriotism. It’s never been Christianity. It’s certainly never been fidelity to the Constitution of the United States.
It’s always been fear.
Fear of retaliation.
Fear of humiliation.
Fear of exile from the cult.
Fear of the mob.
Fear of the tweet.
Fear of the primary.
Fear of the fanatic.
The entire architecture of Trump’s political power has rested on the perception that resistance is futile because Trump always wins.
But what happens when the illusion cracks?
What happens when the strongman suddenly starts losing?
Over the past several days, the cracks have widened.
A federal judge blocked Trump’s grotesque $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund — a corruption pool masquerading as governance. The fund was designed to reward loyalists, finance vengeance operations and institutionalize grievance politics as an arm of the American state.
It was authoritarianism in plain sight.
The courts intervened.
Trump’s tariff schemes are unraveling under judicial scrutiny as courts increasingly reject the absurd and unconstitutional theory that one man can manipulate the American economy by decree, while Congress watches silently from the corner in a state of moral paralysis.
The Kennedy Center fight is another humiliation.
Trump attempted to seize cultural authority the same way he’s attempted to seize political authority — through intimidation, domination and personal humiliation campaigns. Yet the courts pushed back here too, rejecting another exercise in arbitrary power and another attempt to bend an American institution around the emotional needs of a single vain old man.
Even the grotesque White House ballroom project — a vulgar monument to ego and national desecration — is colliding with resistance.
The People’s House isn’t Trump’s palace.
It doesn’t belong to him.
It doesn’t belong to his family.
It doesn’t belong to MAGA.
It belongs to the American people, and the revulsion spreading across the country toward Trump’s desecration of the White House grounds is becoming politically dangerous for him because it strikes at the heart of the myth he’s tried to build around himself.
Strongmen must appear invincible.
Donald Trump suddenly doesn’t.
Even Senate Republicans are beginning to crack.
Think carefully about what that means.
These aren’t brave people.
They aren’t profiles in courage.
They are weak men who submitted themselves to humiliation because they feared Trump more than they feared history.
Case in point is John Cornyn, who lost his primary this week and then tweeted this yesterday, which I initially thought had to be fake:
Clearly, he has the self-awareness of a stoned gnat. The more apt quote would be “beware the foolish men who sought power by trying to ride the back of the tiger only to wind up inside.” Cornyn purchased his disgrace, debasement and defeat with one act of submission at a time. The result? He met a coward’s end.
But something is changing.
Republican senators are beginning to understand that Donald Trump may not save them politically. He may destroy them.
The tariffs are unpopular.
The corruption is visible.
The chaos is exhausting.
The economic pain is real.
The vulgarity is endless.
The incompetence is impossible to hide.
When Senator Thom Tillis publicly humiliates Pete Hegseth, and calls attention to the staggering incompetence surrounding Trump, what you’re witnessing isn’t merely a policy disagreement:
You’re witnessing the beginning of panic.
Cowards eventually panic when they realize the strongman can no longer protect them.
History teaches this lesson over and over again.
Richard Nixon appeared invincible until suddenly Republican senators walked into the White House, and informed him the game was over.
Senator Joe McCarthy terrorized America until chief Army counsel Joseph Welch finally asked the question that shattered the spell during the Army-McCarthy hearings: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
Strongmen always appear indestructible right before they begin to collapse.
This doesn’t mean Trumpism is over. In fact, far from it.
Cornered strongmen are dangerous strongmen.
Trump’s rage will intensify because rage is all he’s ever truly possessed. He’s a man animated by appetite, grievance and revenge. He’s incapable of reflection because reflection would require the one thing Donald Trump has spent his entire life fleeing from: self-awareness.
What’s unfolding now isn’t the restoration of American health.
It’s the beginning of a stress test.
Can the courts hold?
Can the Constitution hold?
Can elections hold?
Can reality itself hold against a movement powered by lies, hatred and organized delusion?
That remains unknown.
But this much is certain: Donald Trump’s aura of inevitability is fading.
The fear is weakening.
The illusion is cracking.
And for the first time in a very long time, the American strongman looks vulnerable.
That’s why he’s becoming more dangerous.
That’s why the attacks will intensify.
That’s why the lies will become even more unhinged.
Because underneath the screaming, the threats, the vulgarity and the spectacle sits a frightened old man watching the thing he values most in the world begin to slip from his grasp: the perception of power.
Once that goes, everything goes.
Trump should be required to restore the East Wing and thoroughly clean up his mess on his own before this is over…
Steve Schmidt, you are the best of all the strategist that have ever come before in your previous career and in working for John McCain. I admire you so much and I trust you implicitly.
The Light of God Never Fails