Don’t look now, but it’s already time for the DNC and the states to figure out the 2028 Democratic presidential primary calendar, so I wrote an overview at New York:

The first 2028 presidential primaries are just two years away. And for the first time since 2016, both parties are expected to have serious competition for their nominations. While Vice-President J.D. Vance is likely to enter the cycle as a formidable front-runner for the GOP nod, recent history suggests there will be lots of other candidates. After all, Donald Trump drew 12 challengers in 2024. On the Democratic side, there is no one like Vance (or Hillary Clinton going into 2016 or Joe Biden going into 2020) who is likely to become the solid front-runner from the get-go, though Californians Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris lead all of the way too early polls.

But 2028 horse-race speculation really starts with the track itself, as the calendar for state contests still isn’t set. What some observers call the presidential-nominating “system” isn’t something the national parties control. In the case of primaries utilizing state-financed election machinery, state laws govern the timing and procedures. Caucuses (still abundant on the Republican side and rarer among Democrats) are usually run by state parties. National parties can vitally influence the calendar via carrots (bonus delegates at the national convention) or sticks (loss of delegates) and try to create “windows” for different kinds of states to hold their nominating contests to space things out and make the initial contests competitive and representative. But it’s sometimes hit or miss.

Until quite recently, the two parties tended to move in sync on such calendar and map decisions. But Democrats have exhibited a lot more interest in ensuring that the “early states” — the ones that kick off the nominating process and often determine the outcome — are representative of the party and the country as a whole and give candidates something like a level playing field. Prior to 2008, both parties agreed to do away with the traditional duopoly, in which the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came first, by allowing early contests representing other regions (Nevada and South Carolina). And both parties tolerated the consolidation of other states seeking influence into a somewhat later “Super Tuesday” cluster of contests. But in 2024 Democrats tossed Iowa out of the early-state window altogether and placed South Carolina first (widely interpreted as Joe Biden’s thank-you to the Palmetto State for its crucial role in saving his campaign in 2020 after poor performances in other early states), with Nevada and New Hampshire voting the same day soon thereafter. Republicans stuck with the same old calendar with Trump more or less nailing down the nomination after Iowa and New Hampshire.

For 2028, Republicans will likely stand pat while Democrats reshuffle the deck (the 2024 calendar was explicitly a one-time-only proposition). The Democratic National Committee has set a January 16 deadline for states to apply for early-state status. And as the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher explains, there is uncertainty about the identity of the early states and particularly their order:

“The debate has only just begun. But early whisper campaigns about the weaknesses of the various options already offer a revealing window into some of the party’s racial, regional and rural-urban divides, according to interviews with more than a dozen state party chairs, D.N.C. members and others involved in the selection process.

“Nevada is too far to travel. New Hampshire is too entitled and too white. South Carolina is too Republican. Iowa is also too white — and its time has passed.

“Why not a top battleground? Michigan entered the early window in 2024, but critics see it as too likely to bring attention to the party’s fractures over Israel. North Carolina or Georgia would need Republicans to change their election laws.”

Nevada and New Hampshire have been most aggressive about demanding a spot at the beginning of the calendar, and both will likely remain in the early-state window, representing their regions. The DNC could push South Carolina aside in favor of regional rivals Georgia or North Carolina. Michigan is close to a lock for an early midwestern primary, but its size, cost, and sizable Muslim population (which will press candidates on their attitude towards Israel’s recent conduct) would probably make it a dubious choice to go first. Recently excluded Iowa (already suspect because it’s very white and trending Republican, then bounced decisively after its caucus reporting system melted down in 2020) could stage a “beauty contest” that will attract candidates and media even if it doesn’t award delegates.

Even as the early-state drama unwinds, the rest of the Democratic nomination calendar is morphing as well. As many as 14 states are currently scheduled to hold contests on Super Tuesday, March 7. And a 15th state, New York, may soon join the parade. Before it’s all nailed down (likely just after the 2026 midterms), decisions on the calendar will begin to influence candidate strategies and vice versa. Some western candidates (e.g., Gavin Newsom or Ruben Gallego) could be heavily invested in Nevada, while Black proto-candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Wes Moore might pursue a southern primary. Progressive favorites like AOC or Ro Khanna may have their own favorite launching pads, while self-identified centrists like Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttigieg might have others. Having a home state in the early going is at best a mixed blessing: Losing your home-state primary is a candidate-killer, and winning it doesn’t prove a lot. And it’s also worth remembering that self-financed candidates like J.B. Pritzker may need less of a runway to stage a nationally viable campaign.

So sketching out the tracks for all those 2028 horses, particularly among Democrats, is a bit of a game of three-dimensional chess. We won’t know how well they’ll run here or there until it’s all over.

 

As a registered voter in California, I’ve been watching the slowly developing 2026 gubernatorial race in which no Democrat seems to be breaking out of the bipartisan pack. I wrote an early assessment for New York:

The last three governors of California were all legendary, larger-than-life political figures. Arnold Schwarzenegger (2003–’11) was a huge Hollywood and pop-culture celebrity before he entered politics in a recall election that ejected his predecessor Gray Davis. He remains the last Republican to be elected as governor or U.S. senator in the Golden State. Jerry Brown (2011-2019) served in his second two-term gubernatorial stretch, having first been elected to the office way back in 1974 (he also ran for president three times). And the current and outgoing California governor, Gavin Newsom (2019-present), was San Francisco mayor and two-term lieutenant governor before stepping up to the top job in Sacramento. He, too, has dominated California politics in a big way.

The contest to choose the 41st governor of California currently has ten candidates — eight Democrats and two Republicans — and not that many voters could identify them in a line-up. Two Democratic politicians who did have some name ID and who might have dominated the field have given the race a pass. That would be former U.S. senator, vice president, and presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who may instead run for president again in 2028 (very likely against Newsom); and her successor in the Senate, Alex Padilla, who gained a lot of attention when he was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed by Secret Service agents for trying to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question at a press conference.

With those big fish out of the tank, the remaining field is composed of candidates who are far from unknown, but are still small fry, relatively speaking. A well-known former Democratic member of the U.S. House, Katie Porter  (who ran for the Senate in 2024) and current House member Eric Swalwell (who very briefly ran for president in 2020), are running. One current Democratic statewide office-holder, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, is making a bid. So is former state comptroller Betty Yee, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, former Biden administration HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, and former state assembly majority leader Ian Calderon. The most recent Democrat to enter the race was hedge fund billionaire and liberal activist Tom Steyer (who ran a presidential campaign briefly more successful than Swalwell’s in 2020).

Alongside these eight Democrats are two Republicans: Fox News gabber and former British Tory political operative Steve Hilton, and current Riverside County (east of L.A.) sheriff Chad Bianco.

Polls consistently show these ten candidates struggling to break out of the pack. Early on, Porter, building on name ID from her unsuccessful 2024 Senate race, had some buzz, but she damaged herself by pitching a temper tantrum during a media interview that wasn’t going her way. Since then it’s become a sluggish race between snails. The latest public poll, from Emerson, released in early December, shows Bianco at 13 percent, Hilton and Swalwell at 12 percent, Porter at 11 percent, Villaraigosa at 5 percent, and Steyer and Becerra at 4 percent. The remaining candidates combine for 7 percent, and there’s an impressive 31 percent who are undecided or don’t know who these people are. Everyone but Porter has name ID under 50 percent, and hers isn’t all that positive. You may think that’s because it’s so very early in the contest, but in fact, the primary is on June 2, just over six months away.

That primary, by the way, is part of California’s non-partisan top two system in which the first- and second-place finishers, regardless of party, proceed to the general election. And the early polling has created a bit of a freak-out among Democrats bewailing their candidates’ lack of star power, as Politico noted:

“California Democrats have a math problem: They’ve added so many candidates in the race to succeed Gavin Newsom that two Republicans could end up winning the state’s quirky ‘jungle primary,’ shutting the Democrats out.

“A Democratic wipeout is still unlikely. But the prospect of a humiliating pile-up, with no clear powerbroker to act as traffic cop, has put the state’s political class increasingly on edge with each new entrant into the field.”

Even though the race should intensify considerably as we get deeper into 2026, the candidate filing deadline isn’t until March. So the power vacuum in the gubernatorial field could yet attract a late entry from some celebrity (Hollywood is chock full of them) or insanely rich self-funder (one such bag of money, Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso, could run for governor if he doesn’t run again for L.A. mayor). Or more Lilliputs could join the race hoping that lightning strikes (e.g., state Attorney General Rob Bonta).

If the field remains as it is, keep an eye on Steyer, whose vast wealth could buy him the name ID he needs. Ideological divisions and factional alignments could also be key. Thurmond is touting his support for a single-payer health care system and has the endorsement by California’s powerful teachers unions. Villaraigosa (who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018) has a well-worn reputation as a Democratic “moderate.” Porter has scars from her battles with the crypto industry, which savaged her with negative ads in 2024, while Calderon has become a crypto bro ally. Becerra can run on his legal battles with the first Trump administration (when he served as California attorney general) and Swalwell has been trading insults with Trump for years. Meanwhile the two Republicans in the race can be expected to compete for a Trump endorsement (Hilton is a long-time Trump backer on Fox News, while Bianco is a former Oath Keeper).

Ethnic and geographical rivalries could matter too. Becerra, Calderon, and Villaraigosa are Latino; Yee is Asian-American; Thurmond is Black. Calderon, Porter, and Villaraigosa are from the greater Los Angeles area; Steyer, Swallwell, Thurmond, and Yee are from the San Francisco Bay area; and Becerra is from Sacramento. Schwarzenegger was the last California governor from Southern California, but he also represented the last gasp of truly moderate Republicanism.

While the field could shrink or expand even more before the filing deadline, the next governor of California probably won’t enter office with anything like the street cred and national prominence of the other 21st century chief executives, who often acted as though the state is an independent principality with its own foreign and domestic policies. Newsom will also leave some chronic fiscal problems, a perpetually fractious legislature, all sorts of natural resources and environmental challenges, and a housing “affordability” crisis that has spurred a national debate over a so-called “abundance” agenda prioritizing regulatory streamlining to speed up housing and other construction. It’s a lot, but whoever wins will become a lot more famous, fast.

As part of my usual efforts to make sense of each political year, I took a look at Trump’s job approval numbers for the year at New York, and it wasn’t hard to find a trend:

While Donald Trump’s claims of a landslide victory and a huge mandate in 2024 were always ridiculous, he did begin his second term with some of the highest job-approval ratings he’s ever had as president. Per Gallup, he never hit 50 percent job approval during his first term, but Silver Bulletin’s refined polling averages showed him at 51.6 percent the day after his second inauguration. With a disapproval rating of 40 percent, that gave him a double-digit positive net approval rating of 11.6 percent. His net approval stayed positive until early March, going underwater on March 12 and staying there the rest of the year.

Trump’s popularity took a big plunge in April around the time he imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs. It recovered modestly through June and then began a steady decline that reached its nadir around Thanksgiving, when his net approval hit minus-15 percent (41.2 percent approval, 56.2 percent disapproval). He has seen a slight improvement in the month since, but as of December 23, his job-approval average at Silver Bulletin stands at 42.1 percent with disapproval at 54.3 percent.

At this point in 2017 during Trump’s first term, Gallup had his job approval at 36 percent, precisely where Gallup shows him today. On this date in 2021, Joe Biden’s job-approval rating per Gallup was at 43 percent. The only post–World War II president to match Trump’s current poor job approval at this point in his presidency was Trump in his first term.

Obviously, Trump has always had a polarizing effect on Americans. But Silver Bulletin’s tracking of strong approval versus strong disapproval shows the latter consistently ahead in much of 2025, matching the general erosion of Trump’s popularity. At present, 25.2 percent of Americans strongly approve of his job performance, and 44.1 percent strongly disapprove.

Since June, Trump has been underwater in assessments of his job performance on all four major issues tracked by Silver Bulletin’s polling averages. His net approval is currently at minus-8.3 percent on immigration, minus-20.5 percent on trade, minus-21.3 percent on the economy, and minus-28.8 percent on inflation.

Unsurprisingly, specific polling outlets have different takes on Trump’s popularity. But overall, the downward 2025 trend shows up nearly everywhere. Rasmussen Reports (long a Trump favorite) has a daily tracking of presidential job approval that showed his net approval as positive or roughly neutral for two-thirds of the year with a decided downward swing in autumn. As of December 23, Rasmussen has the president’s job approval at 44 percent positive and 54 percent negative. Raz also measures strong approval versus strong disapproval, currently placing the former at 29 percent and the latter at 44 percent. Perhaps a more alarming trend is evident in the highly reputed AtlasIntel findings, which had Trump’s net job approval at minus-5 percent as recently as September but shows him at minus-20 percent in mid-December. One traditionally pro-GOP pollster, InsiderAdvantage, has shown Trump’s net job approval as positive all year long. More typical has been Fox News, which placed the president’s net job approval at single-digit negative levels for most of 2025 but then showed it lurching downward to minus-17 percent in mid-November and minus-12 percent in mid-December.

Tracking presidential job approval by party affiliation is difficult due to differences in ways of determining such affiliation. But Gallup’s monthly polling is typical in showing Trump only modestly losing ground with self-identified Republicans over 2025. He was at 91 percent during Inauguration Week and still at 89 percent in December, though there was a dip to 84 percent in November. But among self-identified independents, Trump’s approval rating was at 46 percent during Inauguration Week and is at 25 percent in December.

How will Trump’s loss of popularity affect the 2026 midterm elections? It won’t help, obviously, if he continues to lose ground. Gallup showed his 2018 job-approval rating at 39 percent in January and 40 percent in November, when his party lost 41 House seats. But the usual low-turnout midterm electorate is slightly less aligned with overall public opinion than the high-turnout presidential electorate. Another factor is that while Trump has been and remains unpopular, the Democratic Party’s approval ratings aren’t great either (though typically midterms are referenda on the president’s party more than choices between competing parties).

The polling number that most corresponds to midterm vote intentions is the so-called generic congressional ballot, which simply asks respondents which party they want to control the U.S. House of Representatives. According to RealClearPolitics’ polling averages, Democrats currently lead on the generic ballot by 3.7 percent. Decision Desk HQ’s averages put the Democratic advantage at 5.3 percent. The two parties were very nearly tied on the generic ballot prior to the 2024 election, in which Republicans eked out the fragile House majority they still have today.

Unexpected things could happen that might change the currently strong odds that Democrats will at least flip the House and make gains in the Senate. With gerrymandering still underway, we don’t even know exactly what the landscape will look like. But Trump is more likely to be a drag on his party than a boon based on everything we know about public attitudes toward him over time. He’s just not a very popular politician, and those who love him fiercely get just one vote.

In understanding how Republicans will deal with the overriding issue of the 2026 midterms, “affordability,” it helps to know their ideological habits, as I discussed at New York:

One of the odder moments in Donald Trump’s big Oval Office “affordability” speech on December 17 was toward the end, when he asserted that mass deportation of immigrants would greatly improve the economy. “We are now seeing reverse migration as migrants go back home, leaving more housing and more jobs for Americans.” The idea seemed to be that a major instrument of the administration’s economic strategy was those masked ICE and Border Patrol agents getting rid of the foreigners draining our resources.

This is a theme that Trump may have borrowed from his vice-president, as Politico’s Ian Ward explains after looking at some of J.D. Vance’s recent speeches:

“At an event in Allentown, Pa. this week, Vance argued that the rise in housing and rental costs — an issue that’s increasingly rankling Republican voters — is being driven primarily by illegal immigration. ‘It’s simple economics. If you have fewer people, fewer illegal aliens trying to buy homes, that means American citizens are going to finally be able to afford a home again,’ the vice president said.

“He has taken the same approach to the increasingly thorny issue of healthcare, arguing during a White House press briefing in October that lengthy wait times at hospital emergency rooms are being caused by ‘illegal aliens’ who ‘get healthcare benefits at hospitals paid for by American citizens.’ Ditto for the decline of blue-collar wages, which Vance has recently attributed to ‘the Democrat model’  of ‘import[ing] low-wage immigrants.’ He’s even suggested that the rise of antisemitism — an issue that has bitterly divided the right in recent months — is being caused by the influx of foreign-born people who bring high levels of ‘ethnic grievance’ with them.”

Offering a simple, uniform explanation for complicated problems the Trump administration is visibly struggling to address is a nice rhetorical device for Vance. But it has two other advantages. First, Team Trump has reason to believe immigration policy remains its strongest issue. According to Silver Bulletin’s polling averages for Trump’s job-approval ratings on handling specific issues, he’s not doing that well on much of anything, but immigration is a relative bright spot. His net approval on immigration policy is at minus-7.3 percent, compared to minus-17.1 percent on trade policy, minus-17.9 percent on the economy, and minus-27.6 percent on inflation. Since there’s zero question in anyone’s mind that the administration is working hard to shut down the border and deport undocumented immigrants, claiming this will help address economic problems makes more sense than talking about Trump policies that are actively unpopular, like his love for tariffs and his cluelessness about health care.

Second, as Ward emphasizes, treating deportation of immigrants as the key to multiple problems shifts attention from policy disputes that divide Republicans and Trump’s MAGA base to an issue on which they enthusiastically agree:

“[I]t’s starting to look like part of an emerging strategy for coalitional management. Confronted with an issue that divides MAGA, Vance responds by reminding Republicans of what unites them: namely, support for immigration restriction.”

Divisions on economic policy between “populists” and Trump’s billionaire backers on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley are a growing problem for Republicans. Meanwhile, conservative allegations of antisemitism against America First zealots have split Vance’s own personal base, as evidenced by tensions between his close friends Tucker Carlson and the Christian Zionists at Turning Point USA. All these warring tribes can agree that getting rid of immigrants is a righteous task. And this is especially important to Vance, who is covering Trump’s flanks as vice-presidents traditionally do, and who also needs a strong MAGA coalition backing him if he wants to step up to the presidency in 2028. J.D. Vance is never going to have a cult of personality like Trump’s. But he can become a unity figure in the party and movement he may someday lead, as Ward observes:

“Vance seems to be betting that opposition to immigration remains the one stance that can unite a movement that is otherwise divided over economics, foreign policy, tech and AI policy, healthcare, the Epstein disclosures and more. Linking these more divisive issues back to immigration offers one strategy for smoothing over the fault lines.”

So get used to regular celebrations of mass deportation as the key to ensuring American Greatness.

Thought I’d add some perspective to discussions about the stakes and odds of the 2026 midterms, and did so at New York.

With all the signs of a Democratic comeback arising from 2025’s off-year elections, there’s understandably some excitement among Democrats about a possible “wave” election next year that would dislodge the GOP trifecta that allowed Donald Trump to enact a legislative agenda this year without any minority-party input or support. The obvious benchmark for an anti-Trump wave is the 2018 midterms, which gave Democrats net gains of 41 U.S. House seats and a 17-seat majority in that chamber.

This week, Politico published a granular analysis of the 2026 House landscape that should curb any excess Democratic enthusiasm. It suggests the 2026 midterms are unlikely to produce anything like the 2018 wave. The landscape of winnable Republican seats is much narrower than in the first Trump midterms, for two basic reasons: (1) two rounds of gerrymandering have reduced the number of competitive districts, and (2) there’s a higher starting point of Democratic House seats. Or as Politico puts it:

“Partisan redistricting — even before this year — has allowed both parties to draw mostly safe seats, dropping the number of competitive districts that are likely to flip. And while the battlefield is smaller, Democrats also already own more of it than they did going into 2018. The very reason Democrats hardly need a blue wave to take back the House this time is that their congressional candidates largely outperformed Kamala Harris in last year’s elections.”

Putting these factors together with the underlying gradual increase in partisan polarization (which reduces split-ticket opportunities), there’s a lot less low-hanging fruit for Democrats than there was in 2018:

“In [2018], Democrats won roughly 90 percent of GOP-held House districts that had either been won by Clinton or that Trump had won by less than 5 points based on two-party vote share.

“And there were a lot of those seats. Republicans were defending 25 districts that Clinton had won two years prior. Next year, they only have three won by Harris. The number of districts Trump won by less than 5 points is similar over the two cycles.

“But outside that competitive zone, flipping seats got a lot harder in 2018: Democrats only picked up four of 18 seats that Trump had won by between 5 and 10 points.

“Next year, Democrats would have to win at least eight seats that Trump won by more than 5 points in 2024, in addition to sweeping every single highly competitive seat to come away with 235 seats as they did in 2018.”

To look at the landscape from a slightly different angle, there are 33 House districts that Democrats won by five points or less in 2024 but only 14 such Republican seats. It would take a big wave to reach beyond those opportunities.

Taking into account the current anti-Trump trend in public opinion and the historical tendency for the president’s party to lose seats, the authoritative Cook Political Report currently shows 18 Democratic-held seats and 17 Republican-held seats at stake in competitive races. Even assuming the landscape continues to shift in the direction of Democrats, that doesn’t provide much of a beachhead for a big wave. On top of that, gerrymandering is still underway, and while Republican gains won’t match Trump’s initial hopes of waveproofing the GOP’s House majority, they could perhaps pick up another few net seats if things go their way in Florida.

The good news for Democrats is they really don’t need to pick up 41 House seats to make 2026 a big victory. A gain of a mere three net seats (as compared to 24 in 2018) would flip control of the House, and that could have a huge impact on the power dynamics of Washington. Without trifecta control of Congress, Republicans could no longer enact filibusterproof budget-reconciliation bills like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. They’d lose control of the House committees that are busily digging into the alleged scandals of the Joe Biden administration; instead, these committees would be conducting politically salient investigations of misconduct and extremist policies in the second Trump administration. And given the extreme polarization in Congress, Democrats wouldn’t need much of a majority of their own to thwart Trump’s wishes. Indeed, a very small House majority might provide a good excuse for Democrats to turn down politically dubious presidential impeachment measures, like those Democrats passed in 2019 that were doomed in the Senate.

Dating back to the Great Depression, there have been only three midterm elections (1962, 1998, and 2002) in which the party opposing the president failed to win at least three net House seats, the Democratic target next year. In all three of those years, the president’s job-approval rating (per Gallup) was above 60 percent when voters voted. Trump’s latest job-approval rating from Gallup was 36 percent, and over two terms it has never even once topped 50 percent. So however small the target Democrats must hit in 2026 to bust up Trump’s trifecta, they’re very likely to hit it.

After realizing how much longer Trump’s second term in office would last, I took a long and sober look at New York at what might happen, and what might restrain Trump from doing his worst:

Donald Trump has a flexible attitude toward truth and facts, typically embracing whatever version of reality that suits his purposes. His latest rally speech in Pennsylvania was something of a “greatest hits” display of fact-checker challenges on a wide range of issues. But he said one thing that no one should doubt or deny: “You know what? We have three years and two months to go. Do you know what that is in Trump Time? An eternity.”

So what will America look like after three more years of this barrage? As always, the administration’s intentions are opaque. But there are several outside variables that will dramatically shape how much Trump is able to do by the end of his time in office (assuming he actually leaves as scheduled on January 20, 2029). Here are the factors that will decide the outcome of this three-year “eternity.”

The midterms could shift the balance of power

One huge variable is the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections. If history and current polling are any indication, Democrats are very likely to gain control of the U.S. House and bust up the partisan trifecta that has made so much of Trump 2.0’s accomplishments (for good or ill) possible. With a Democratic House, there will be no more Big Beautiful Bills whipped through Congress on party-line votes reconfiguring the federal budget and tax code and remaking the shape and impact of the federal government. A hostile House would also bedevil the administration with constant investigations of its loosey-goosey attitude toward obeying legal limits on its powers, and its regular habits of self-dealing, cronyism, and apparent corruption. The last two years of the Trump presidency would be characterized by even greater end runs of Congress, and in Congress, by endless partisan rhetorical warfare (as opposed to actual legislation).

It’s less likely that Democrats will flip control of the Senate in 2026, but were that to happen, Trump would struggle to get his appointees confirmed (though many could operate in an “acting” capacity). We’d likely see constant clashes between the executive and legislative branches.

Conversely, if Republicans hold onto both congressional chambers, then all bets are off. Trump 2.0 would roll through its final two years with the president’s more audacious legislative goals very much in sight and limited only by how much risk Republicans want to take in 2028. You could see repeated Big Beautiful Bill packages aiming at big initiatives like replacing income taxes with tariffs or consumption taxes; a complete return to fossil fuels as the preferred energy source; a total repeal and replacement of Obamacare and decimation of Medicaid; a fundamental restructuring of immigration laws; and radical limits on voting rights. Almost everything could be on the table as long as Republicans remain in control and in harness with Trump. And with his presidency nearing its end, you could also see Trump tripling down on demands that Republicans kill or erode the filibuster, which could make more audacious legislative gains possible.

The Supreme Court could curb or enable Trump

The U.S. Supreme Court will also have a big impact on how much Trump can do between now and the end of his second term. Big upcoming decisions on his power to impose tariffs will determine the extent to which he can make these deals the centerpiece of his foreign-policy strategy and execute a protectionist (or, if you like, mercantilist) economic strategy for the country. Other decisions on his power to deport immigrants and on the nature and permanence of citizenship will heavily shape the size and speed of his mass-deportation program. The Supreme Court will soon also either obstruct or permit use of National Guard and military units in routine law-enforcement chores and/or to impose administration policies on states or cities. And the Supreme Court’s decisions on myriad conflicts between the Trump administration and the states could determine whether, for example, the 47th president can sweep away any regulation of AI that his tech-bro friends oppose.

A separate line of Supreme Court decisions will determine Trump’s power over the executive branch — most obviously over independent agencies like the FTC and the Fed, but also over millions of federal employees who could lose both civil-service protections and collective-bargaining opportunities.

The economy and foreign war could be wild cards

Even a president as willful as Trump is constrained by objective reality. His economic policies make instability, hyperinflation, and even a 2008-style Great Recession entirely possible. If that happens, it could both erode his already shaky public support but also encourage him to assert even greater “emergency” powers than he’s already claimed.

Trump’s impulsive national-security instincts and innate militarism could also lead to one of those terrible wars he swears he is determined to avoid. It’s worth remembering that the last Republican president was entirely undone during his second term by economic dislocations and a failed war.

America could get the full MAGA makeover

Let’s say Trump has the power to do what he wants between now and the end of his second term. What might America look like if he fully succeeds, particularly if his policies are either emulated by state and local Republicans or imposed nationally by Washington?

• A country of millions fewer immigrants, with immigrant-sensitive industries like agriculture, health care, and other services struggling.
• A more regressive system of revenues for financing steadily shrinking public services.
• A fully shredded social-safety net feeding steadily increasing disparities in income and wealth between rich and poor, and old and young, Americans.
• Cities where armed military presence has become routine, particularly during anti-administration protests or prior to key elections.
• Elections conducted solely on Election Day in person, with strict ID requirements and armed election monitors, likely on the scene during vote counting as well.
• A new “deep state” of MAGA-vetted federal employees devoted to carrying out the 47th president’s policies even after he’s long gone.
• A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
• An economy where AI is constantly promoted as a solution to the very problems it creates.
• A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
• A scientific and health-care research apparatus driven by conspiracy theories and cultural fads.
• A public-education system hollowed out by private-school subsidies and ideological curriculum mandates.
• And most of all: a debased level of political discourse resembling MMA trash talk more than anything the country has experienced before.

Some of these likely effects from Trump 2.0 are reversible, but only after much time and effort, and against resistance from the MAGA movement he will leave as his most enduring legacy.

And if Trump bequeaths the presidency to a successor (either a political heir like J.D. Vance or a biological heir like Don Jr.), then what American could look like by 2032 or 2036 is beyond my powers of imagination.

It’s been a wild week in the Texas U.S. Senate race, but it’s a good idea to understand the Democratic options in terms of an old strategic debate, as I suggested at New York:

One of the truly ancient debates in U.S. political circles is whether candidates in highly competitive partisan elections can best win by persuading swing voters or mobilizing base voters. There’s no absolute identity between ideology and strategy, but speaking generally, right- or left-wing ideologues tend to adopt base mobilization strategies that don’t require any accommodation of the other party’s views. Republican or Democratic “moderates” generally hew to the “median voter theory” that winning over a swing voter is especially effective because it adds a vote to one’s own column while denying a vote to the opposing candidate. So they value crossover voting as much as turnout advantages.

Hardly anyone would deny that in the Trump era, Republicans have gone over almost completely to the base-mobilization strategy. To the extent MAGA candidates try to persuade swing voters, it’s mostly via vicious attacks on the opposition as extremists, encouraging a lesser-of-two-evils voting or even non-voting by moderates. But among Democrats, the base-versus-swing debate rages on, and we may be about to see a laboratory test of the two approaches in a red-hot Texas Senate contest.

Thanks to an unusually poor landscape and a current three-seat deficit, Democratic hopes of gaining control of the Senate in 2026 depend heavily on winning an upset or two in red states. And Texas looks promising thanks to an intensely cannibalistic three-way Republican primary involving two MAGA challengers to Republican incumbent John Cornyn.

Two early Democratic Senate candidates embodied (in somewhat different ways) the swing-voter strategy. There was 2024 Senate nominee and former House member Colin Allred, a bit of a classic moderate Democrat. And then there was state senator James Talarico, who gained fame for his battle against the Trump-engineered congressional gerrymander in Texas earlier this year. Talarico actually has a fairly progressive issue profile and is from the progressive hotbed of Austin. But he has gained national notoriety for being conspicuously religious (he’s actually attending a seminary aside from his political gigs) and for reaching out to Trump voters (e.g., via a successful foray onto Joe Rogan’s podcast). Last week, Allred abruptly dropped out of the Senate race, and now Talarico is facing a primary contest with the all-time-champion advocate of base mobilization, Representative Jasmine Crockett.

Crockett is far better known than any other second-term House member, mostly because she has a jeweler’s eye for viral moments and dominates them regularly. In May 2024, she became the acknowledged master of the clapback during a high-profile exchange of personal insults with the most famous third-term House member, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and has subsequently drawn the attention of Donald Trump, as Crockett reminded us in a launch video that simply recited Trump’s insults aimed at her.

Crockett’s vibes-based approach to politics has made her a fundraising magnet and a pop-culture celebrity, but the question is whether that will make her potentially competitive in a statewide race in Texas as compared to Talarico. And it’s not just a matter of issue positioning. Crockett is popular among progressives but has made combativeness rather than progressive policy commitments her signature in a brief career in legislative office. She very clearly believes all the heat she can bring to a tough general election will not just mobilize Texas’s Democratic base but expand it. She has apparently sought the counsel of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who pursued a base-mobilization strategy in two unsuccessful but exciting bids for governor of Georgia. And as you might expect from even a moment’s exposure, she is very sure of herself, as HuffPost reports:

“Early on in her kickoff speech, Crockett said she was running because ‘what we need is for me to have a bigger voice …’

“She reiterated her top priority would be turning out otherwise apathetic voters, a strategy even many other progressives have backed away from. ‘Our goal is to make sure that we can engage people that historically have not been talked to because there are so many people that get ignored, specifically in the state of Texas,’ she said. ‘Listen, the state of Texas is 61 percent people of color. We have a lot of good folk that we can talk to.’”

The idea that there is a “hidden majority” among non-voters that a loud-and-proud partisan can identify and turn out at the polls is a staple of base-mobilization advocates in both parties, though they rarely take into account that such tactics help the opposition mobilize its base as well. There is certainly enough ammunition in Crockett’s brief political history to energize Texas Republicans, particularly her reference to the wheelchair-bound Greg Abbott as “Governor Hot Wheels” (she subsequently claimed this was a reference to his aggressive transportation measures to get rid of migrants, not to his disability). Asked how she might reach out to Trump voters in a state that he carried by over 13 percent in 2024, Crockett offered an interesting theory in a CNN interview: “We are going to be able to get people that potentially have voted for Trump even though I, obviously, am one of his loudest opponents, because at the end of the day, they vote for who they believe is fighting for them.”

It’s hardly unusual for progressive Democrats (or for that matter, MAGA Republicans) to argue that disengaged voters prefer “fighters,” but Crockett appears to be suggesting that the content of one’s message — as opposed to its tone or vibe — doesn’t much matter at all.

You get the sense listening to Texas Democrats that Crockett is very likely to beat Talarico for the party’s Senate nomination and can mount a well-financed, much-watched general election campaign. But the idea she’s going to win that general election by turning up the volume to 11 isn’t widely accepted. She has been in exactly three general elections in her Dallas base, none of which were remotely competitive. And it’s not just about the Senate race, given Texas’s role in determining control of the House. And as the Texas Tribune reports, Republicans love the idea of facing Crockett and pinning her to House Democrats they’re hoping to unseat in the midterms.

Candidates arguing about Crockett won’t be able to focus as much on Trump’s broken promises and poor record. And Jasmine Crockett will never be the sort of politician who deflects attention. Like her or not, she’ll be the big issue in the Democratic primary.

Don’t know if this post from New York about Trump’s immaturity will get me onto the White House list of enemy media, but there’s a chance.

Veteran political journalist Jonathan Martin has a new rant at Politico Magazine with the self-explanatory headline: “The President Who Never Grew Up.” Nothing he said is the least bit revelatory; it’s all about things we know Donald Trump has done and said but lined up in a way that illustrates how very much the president resembles a child, and a not-very-well-behaved child at that. A sample:

Trump is living his best life in this second and final turn in the White House. Coming up on one year back in power, he’s turned the office into an adult fantasy camp, a Tom Hanks-in-Big, ice-cream-for-dinner escapade posing as a presidency.

The brazen corruption, near-daily vulgarity and handing out pardons like lollipops is impossible to ignore and deserves the scorn of history. Yet how the president is spending much of his time reveals his flippant attitude toward his second term. This is free-range Trump. And the country has never seen such an indulgent head of state.

Yes, he’s one-part Viktor Orbán, making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions.

But he’s also a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree — no socks or trapper keepers.

Martin is just scratching the surface here. He doesn’t even mention the president’s inability to admit or accept responsibility for mistakes, which is reminiscent of an excuse-making child, or his tendency to fabricate his own set of “facts” like an incessant daydreamer bored by kindergarten. Now to be clear, the essentially juvenile nature of many of Trump’s preoccupations and impulses has struck just about everybody who’s forced to watch him closely and isn’t inclined by party or ideology to jump into the sandbox with him to share the fun. But since he’s the president, it’s more seemly for critics to focus on problems deeper than immaturity. There are the many worrisome “isms” he is prone to embrace or reflect (nativism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, jingoism, cronyism, nepotism). And there’s also his habit of surrounding himself with cartoon villains like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, and J.D. Vance who are the stuff of grown-up nightmares.

But still, I find myself wondering regularly how Trump’s own followers process his rather blatant lack of seriousness about the most serious job on the planet. If there’s such a thing as negative gravitas, the toddler president has it in abundance. So what are the excuses MAGA folk make for him? There are five major rationalizations that come to mind:

Trolling the liberals

Whenever he says something especially outrageous or embarrassing, we are quickly told by his defenders that he’s just having an enormous joke at the expense of humorless liberals. This dates back to pro-Trump journalist Salena Zito’s famous 2016 dictum that his followers “take him seriously but not literally.” Where you draw the line between the stuff he means and the stuff he’s just kidding about can obviously be adjusted to cover any lapses in taste or honesty he might betray. The “he’s just trolling the libs” defense is a useful bit of jiujitsu as it happens. It turns the self-righteousness of his critics into foolishness while neutering any fears that whatever nasty or malicious thing Trump has said reflects his true nature and inclinations. You see this tactic a lot with Trumpworld social-media takes on mass deportation that exhibit what some have called “performative cruelty” in depicting ICE violence against immigrants, which predictably shock liberals who are then mocked for not understanding it’s all a shuck. Meanwhile, the most radical of Trump’s MAGA fans bask in the administration’s appropriation of their worst impulses.

Playing chess, not checkers

A second rationalization you hear from Trump’s defenders, particularly when he says or does something that makes no sense, is to argue that he’s operating on multiple levels that include some higher strategies his critics simply don’t have the mental bandwidth to grasp. If, for example, he insults a foreign leader, he may secretly be setting off a diplomatic chain reaction that results in foreign-policy gains somewhere else. Similarly, if he defames federal judges, Democratic elected officials, or mainstream journalists, he may simply be trying to manipulate public opinion in a sophisticated way to overcome those who thwart or undermine his substantive agenda. Trump himself set the template for the “chess not checkers” theory by telling us his most incoherent speeches and statements reflect a novel rhetorical style he calls “the weave.” You do have to admire his chutzpah in telling people they simply aren’t smart enough to follow him as he fails to complete thoughts and sentences.

He’s a man of the people, and the people are as childish as he is

An even more common excuse for Trump’s worst traits is that he is focused on communicating with the people, not the media or other snooty elites. If he’s crude or impulsive or irrational, so, too, are the people. As one liberal writer ruefully admitted of Trump circa 2016:

He liked fast food and sports and, most importantly, he shared all their gripes and complaints and articulated them in the same terms some used themselves. For all his crowing about his money and showing off, he really didn’t put on airs. He was just like them.

And he behaved just like they would if they were given a billion dollars and unlimited power. Thus his childishness and even his cruelty could be construed as efforts to meld minds with the sovereign public or, at least, key parts of it. This became most explicit in 2024 when Trump’s crudeness and fury about diversity were transformed into a shrew pitch for the support of the “manosphere” and the masses of politically volatile younger men who spend much of their lives there. It could even serve as an excuse for his destruction of the White House as we’ve known it. Gold plating of everything in sight and the construction of a huge, garish ballroom might disgust aesthetes and history buffs with postgraduate degrees and no common sense. But with the White House set to become a venue for UFC fights, why not go big and loud? Nobody elected architecture experts to run the country, did they?

Trump is an insurgent leader with an insurgent style

A parallel excuse for Trump’s uncouthness is that transgressions are central to his mission. He’s there to overturn the Establishment, not respect its silly rules of what’s appropriate for presidents. His distractors ruined the country, so who are they to complain when it requires someone unconventional to set things aright? Trump campaigned in 2016, 2020, and 2024 as a disrupter and thrilled his followers by refusing to be domesticated in office. When returned to power most recently, he hit Washington like a gale-force wind defying all precedents and expressing an exasperated public’s disgust with the status quo and the people who led it. So why would anyone expect this Robespierre to play by the rules of Versailles? That’s not who he is and not what he was elected to do.

He’s saving America, so he should be able to do any damn thing he wants

The president himself has best articulated the standard by which he judges himself and expects to be judged by his followers, and by history, in a Truth Social post this past February: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” From the MAGA point of view, the 47th president is bending history, reversing a long trend toward national decline, and raising the economic aspirations and moral values of America to heights thought to be long lost. Perhaps the most powerful rationalization for Trump’s many excesses ever written was the famous 2016 essay by Michael Anton comparing those supporting Trump’s challenge to Hillary Clinton to the desperate and self-sacrificing passengers of the hijacked September 11 flight that brought the plane down by rushing the terrorists in the cockpit:

[I]f you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

It’s Trump, warts and all, or the abyss, to many Trump fans, today as in 2016. So if he wants to have some boyish fun while he’s saving America, and perhaps civilization, who are we to deny him?

I can hardly believe the possibility mentioned in the headline, but with the 47th president, you never know, as I explained at New York:

Donald Trump’s superpower, if he has one, is to assert wildly counterfactual things over and over and somehow convince people his version of reality is gospel, or at least plausible. His 2024 presidential campaign was a master class in shameless fabrication: He invented a violent crime wave even as crime statistics were falling nearly everywhere; he invented a nationwide crisis of voting by noncitizens despite almost no evidence it was happening at all; he accused his opponents of consciously betraying the country by deliberately herding violent felons across open borders and directing them to rape, kill, and plunder a helpless population of law-abiding Americans, a narrative supported by little more than anecdotes; and he asserted that all his many legal problems, capping a career marked by vast legal problems, were in fact perversions of justice orchestrated by his enemies. Ultimately, his many lies and exaggerations combined to paint a portrait of a nation that had been on the brink of never-before-imagined glory just a few years earlier but was now on its knees and near to total destruction.

This cartoonish version of current affairs was immensely gratifying to his MAGA base of true believers, and didn’t unduly trouble swing voters who were inclined to believe all politicians make stuff up and who mostly just wanted a change of administration. But now that Trump is totally in charge of the federal government and exhibiting every single day his domination of national affairs, he wants the public to acknowledge the astonishingly bright prospects he has given them, and forget all the troubles that led them to vote for him in the first place. That’s the only sensible interpretation of his fury towards the subject of affordability.

Anyone who can read polls or follow off-year election returns is aware that concerns over the steadily rising cost of living, which contributed powerfully to Trump’s 2024 victory, have not at all gone away. There is, in fact, a growing sense of dismay, within and beyond the MAGA ranks, about Trump’s campaign promises that he wouldn’t simply slow down inflation but would actually reduce prices for the most important goods and services. Many voters give him low marks on that front, which is why addressing affordability has emerged already as the Democratic Party’s key message for the 2026 midterms. It was very successfully introduced in this year’s offyear elections, which were a fiasco for Trump and his party.

For a moment, Trump seemed to understand and accept the assignment to look less interested in ending or beginning overseas wars and more interested in “affordability.” He even got chummy with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in claiming a shared focus on the issue during their congenial Oval Office visit on November 23. But as this November 29 Truth Social post indicated, Trump treats the “affordability” crisis as a marketing problem rather than anything he really needs to address in a substantive manner:

“Because I have invoked FAVORED NATIONS STATUS FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, DRUG PRICES ARE FALLING AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, 500%, 600%, 700%, and more. No other President has been able to do this, BUT I HAVE! This is also the answer to much less expensive, and far better, HEALTHCARE! Republicans, remember, this was done by us, and nobody else. This is a revolution in medicine, the biggest and most important event, EVER. If this story is properly told, we should win the Midterm Elections in RECORD NUMBERS. I AM THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT. TALK LOUDLY AND PROUDLY! President DJT”

Americans didn’t need Obamacare subsidies or Medicaid benefits or lower tariffs or regulations on AI to thrive; they just needed to realize how lucky they were to be alive at this time of restored American Greatness, the “story” that needed to be “properly told” to them. As with his fable-making in 2024, Trump wanted to impose his own version of the facts on everyone his voice could reach. But in this case he isn’t talking about overseas threats or large impersonal forces shaping events or elite conspiracies, but the lived experiences of people who won’t easily be convinced their troubles are a figment of their imaginations.

Politically attuned people in Trump’s inner circle must have cringed inwardly during Tuesday’s televised Cabinet meeting when the president denounced affordability concerns as a hoax, as the New York Times reported:

“President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the cost-of-living pains being felt by Americans, declaring that affordability ‘doesn’t mean anything to anybody’ as his political edge on the economy continues to dissipate….

“After ticking off what he claimed were trillions of dollars of investments and other economic accomplishments, Mr. Trump called the issue of affordability a ‘fake narrative’ and ‘con job’ created by Democrats to dupe the public….

“Mr. Trump has tried to claim he has brought down inflation, glossing over the fact that it ticked up slightly in recent months and some of his policies were contributing to high costs, like his tariffs.

“’There is still more to do,’ Mr. Trump acknowledged on Tuesday. ‘There’s always more to do, but we have it down to a very good level. It’s going to go down a little bit further. You want to have a little tiny bit of inflation. Otherwise, that’s not good either. Then you have a thing called deflation, and deflation can be worse than inflation.'”

Trump appears to be making the same mistake his predecessor Joe Biden made: talking trends and macroeconomics to people who just want prices to go back to where they were before the pandemic — conditions for which Trump himself took so much credit. Worse yet, he’s talking down to Americans, accusing them of being dupes by feeling what they’re feeling and seeing what they’re seeing. It’s not a good look for a billionaire president to become visibly impatient with his subjects and their concerns.

Perhaps his advisers will prevail on him to get on the right side of the affordability issue before the midterms. But it’s possible that after years of telling tall tales about conditions in the country, Trump is beginning to believe his own hype, and is spinning himself as well as the media and the country. If that happens, he and his party are in deep trouble.

As you may recall, the high hosannas with which Republicans greeted Trump’s 2024 win were accompanied by predictions of a new and broader GOP coalition. They aren’t looking so good now, as I noted at New York:

In June, the Pew Research Center’s analysis of validated voters in 2024 gave us the most definitive information on how Donald Trump won the presidency over Kamala Harris. And it left little doubt that the most important gains Trump made between his 2020 defeat and his 2024 win were not among young voters or Black voters or white working-class voters, but among Latino voters:

“In 2020, Joe Biden won Hispanic voters by 25 percentage points, and Hispanic voters supported Hillary Clinton by an even wider margin in 2016. But Trump drew nearly even with Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters, losing among them by only 3 points.”

This shift among Latinos voters was decisive. And since Latinos make up the most rapidly growing segment of the electorate, a lot of the “realignment” talk surrounding Trump’s return to power stemmed from a theory that Latinos were undergoing a sort of delayed ideological sorting out that meant they might keep trending Republican and become a solid part of the GOP coalition. If true, that might have been disastrous for Democrats.

But a new study from Pew, long an authority on Latino voters, suggests otherwise. Trump’s appeal to Latinos is clearly sagging and could erode even further if he doesn’t change his policies on immigration and the economy:

“70% of Latinos disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president.

“65% disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration.

“61% say Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions worse.”

Even among the Latinos who voted for him in 2024, Trump’s job-approval rating has dropped from 93 percent at the beginning of the year to 81 percent right now. Fully 34 percent of these Trump voters say his second-term policies “have been harmful” to Latinos. And 2024 Harris voters seems to loathe him universally. Overall, Latino voters view what’s happening under Trump 2.0 with great trepidation:

“Hispanics are pessimistic about their standing in America. About two-thirds (68%) say the situation of U.S. Hispanics today is worse than it was a year ago, while 9% say it’s better and 22% say it’s about the same.

“This is the first time that most Hispanics say their situation has worsened in nearly two decades of Pew Research Center Hispanic surveys. When we asked this question in 2019, late during Trump’s first administration, 39% said the situation of U.S. Hispanics had worsened and in 2021, 26% said this.

“When asked about how the Trump administration’s policies impact Hispanics overall, far more say they harm Hispanics than help them (78% vs. 10%).

“That’s a significantly darker outlook than Latinos had in 2019, shortly before they gave Joe Biden 61 percent of their votes.”

Since Latinos trended away from Biden in 2024 in no small part because of his economic policies, this finding could be especially important:

“When asked about the overall U.S. economy, Hispanics’ views are mostly negative and unchanged from 2024. Some 78% say the economy is in only fair or poor shape, while 22% say it’s in excellent or good shape. In 2024, 76% gave the economy a negative rating.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s mass-deportation policies are distinctly unpopular among one of ICE’s chief target populations, as it has become clear that they are not at all focused on “violent criminals”:

“52% of Latino adults say they worry a lot or some that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported. This is up from 42% in March …

“19% say they have recently changed their day-to-day activities because they think they’ll be asked to prove their legal status in the country.

“11% say they now carry a document proving their U.S. citizenship or immigration status more often than they normally would.”

Yes, concerns about Trump’s immigration policies vary among those with different countries of origin, but the overall picture remains negative:

“Across Hispanic origin groups, about two-thirds of Central Americans and Mexicans disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration. By comparison, 63% of South Americans, 58% of Puerto Ricans and 50% of Cubans say the same.”

Puerto Ricans are by definition American citizens by birth, and Cuban Americans, long a Republican stronghold, are increasingly either American born or were naturalized some time ago. But Republican hopes for big Mexican American voting margins in states like Texas and Arizona may be in vain as long as Stephen Miller is in charge of deliberately cruel immigration policies.

Even if Trump manages to improve his current standing among Latinos, the idea that they are in the process of permanently trending Republican like the white Southerners of an earlier generation seems delusional. And if current trends persist, Latinos could contribute to a significant Democratic midterm victory in 2026.