In the year since Democrats lost the 2024 election, with Donald Trump beating then President Biden in all seven swing states, they’ve struggled to admit exactly what went wrong.
It wasn’t one thing. For starters, Biden got precipitously older in the last two years of his presidency, often leading to moments that seemed to concern voters more than it did those closest to Biden and Dems in leadership, who insisted he was in perfect health.
Then there were several problems of their own making. Biden’s decision to end Trump’s Remain-in-Mexico immigration policy opened our borders to millions of asylum-seekers without the resources to match, breeding resentment and fear in cities and towns across the country over the crush of a new population explosion.
Dems’ soft-on-crime policies in cities like San Francisco, Chicago and Portland — from ending cash bail to sentencing reform and defund the police rhetoric — inarguably made voters feel less safe, and resulted in the ouster of numerous Dem mayors and DAs for failing their cities.
Other problems were inherited or unexpected, like a post-COVID-19 economy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, respectively.
But the biggest problem was that Dems seemed totally out of touch with Americans’ problems. Though voters were telling them over and over again that they were worried about the economy, crime and immigration, Democrats looked them straight in the eye and said: the economy is strong as hell, crime is down, and immigration isn’t a crisis.
It was a recipe for disaster, and disaster is what they got. Republicans now control the courts, the House, the Senate, and the White House, and Trump got a second chance at wrecking our democracy.
Now, with a year before midterm elections that will tell Republicans and Trump in fairly definitive terms what voters think of them, the shoe appears to be on the other foot.
Trump’s obvious cognitive and physical decline — falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, rambling incoherently in press conferences, unexplained medical issues — should be worrisome to Republicans and those in Trump’s inner circle.
Then there are the problems of Republicans’ and Trump’s own making. His definitively dumb tariffs have made the cost of goods more expensive, the cost of operating business more expensive, and unemployment rise. Even as they try to walk tariffs back, the uncertainty he’s created has led to less foreign investment in the U.S., which trickles down to consumers.
Likewise, Trump’s failure to produce the Epstein files, as he promised, has divided MAGA influencers, and has frustrated his base; sloppy and ineffectual DOGE cuts felt unstrategic and pointless; the longest government shutdown in history felt unnecessarily punitive; and Trump’s foreign adventuring — threatening a war with Venezuela, striking Iran’s nukes, bailing out Argentina — felt like anything but America First.
But worst of all, Trump is making Biden’s fatal mistake. He’s telling voters they’re wrong about how they feel.
Polling shows Trump with an abysmal 36% approval rating in the latest Gallup poll, a new second-term low. And even more ominous, a CNN/SSRS poll last month found 61% of Americans believe Trump’s policies “have worsened economic conditions in this country.” Voters, including many of his own, are putting the blame squarely on him.
Trump’s befuddling and dangerous response has been to tell them affordability — the issue they care the most about — is a Democratic “hoax,” “scam,” and “con job.”
During last week’s Cabinet meeting, he sounded a lot like Biden when he insisted, “Our country is wealthy again and secure again.”
His surrogates are similarly brushing off voter concerns. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on one of the Sunday shows, “The economy has been better than we thought,” and “I think, next year, we’re going to move on to prosperity.”
Speaker Mike Johnson said everyone needs to “relax.”
“We are exactly on the trajectory of where we’ve always planned to be. Steady at the wheel, everybody, it’s going to be fine. Our best days are ahead of us. Americans are going to be feeling a lot better in the early part of next year.”
But the early part of next year is around the corner. And so are midterm elections. If Johnson’s not worried, his members certainly are. And they’re starting to talk openly about the party’s failure to sharpen its messaging.
“If we don’t do that, we would be morons, because the economy is very much on people’s minds,” said Rep. Tony Gonzales.
Other lawmakers worry it’s not just a messaging problem, but a policy problem, and they’re right to.
But Trump seems either oblivious to or unbothered by the pain. And he’s repeating all the mistakes Dems made in 2024. If Republicans don’t turn things around, and quick, they’ll surely suffer the same fate.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.