Over years and years of covering politics, the last decade of which has been spent covering Donald Trump specifically, I’ve learned you can never really count him out.
It’s been a painful, exhausting, and deeply disappointing lesson, but an important one nonetheless. He keeps on keeping on. The things I find disturbing, revolting, and utterly disqualifying are inexplicably the same exact things that a not small number of Americans find appealing. Racism, incompetence, corruption, to name a few.
The things that would end any other politician’s career for good seem to have the opposite effect on his — instead of diminishing his power they only seem to embolden him. An impeachment, an insurrection, a criminal conviction, to name a few.
It’s been said many times, but the rules — of law, of political gravity, of general decency — just don’t seem to apply to him, and he’s taken extreme advantage of this phenomenon. And moreover, he seems to delight in his invincibility, flaunting the double standards and hypocrisy of one set of rules for him and another for everyone else, almost taunting his opponents to try getting away with what only he can.
So I almost never say what I’m about to say, because I’ve lived this exhausting reality for so long. But it feels like it’s finally true: this might just be the beginning of the end for Trump.
To be clear, this isn’t mere wishful thinking — though, for the good of the country I very much want to be rid of Trump and Trumpism once and for all.
It’s based on the inarguable reality of what we’re all witnessing — the walls are closing in on him.
Let’s take the polls to start.
A brutal new poll from Gallup has Trump’s approval in the gutter — he’s at -24%, down from -1% in January. Only Richard Nixon had a worse approval at this point in his second term, and he never recovered. Many other polls show similar, or even worse news for Trump’s standing among the electorate, where support from independents, Gen Z, and Hispanics has eroded significantly since his reelection. He’s even losing support among his base.
Then, there’s his economy. The signature pitch he made to voters was that he’d end inflation and make housing, energy, and consumer goods more affordable. Thanks to tariffs, DOGE cuts, profligate spending, and incompetence, Trump’s exploded the national debt and deficit, inflation has risen since January, unemployment is also up, consumers are seeing higher, not lower, prices at the grocery store, small businesses are seeing increased costs of operating, and more Americans believe Trump has been worse for the economy, not better.
Then there’s his personnel. Trump has been fending off serious issues of incompetence inside his administration since Day 1. His secretary of defense is being accused of war crimes. His head of the FBI is rumored to be on the chopping block. His attorney general is routinely mocked for her ineffectuality. Scientists from nearly every field of study have called for his head of health and human services to be replaced. His homeland security secretary may be prosecuted for contempt.
Then there’s his party. One-time staunch allies like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace are ignoring his threats and breaking with him on issues of America First, Jeffrey Epstein, and the shutdown. At least five Republicans have announced they are retiring or will not seek reelection. GOP senators ignored Trump’s urging to end the filibuster, and state lawmakers have rejected his redistricting efforts.
Finally, there are his media surrogates. Top MAGA influencers, who mainly reach Trump voters on Youtube and other platforms, are intentionally alienating the normies in the center-right by elevating neo-Nazis, excusing pedophilia, and engaging in some truly bizarre conspiracy theories.
But the biggest red flag that not all is well in Trump world? Trump himself. Monday night, Trump flooded Truth Social with more than 160 posts in five hours — an unhinged mix of high and low, from posting his cameo in “Home Alone 2” to demanding disgraced Colorado election official Tina Peters be released from prison.
It was a disturbing look at someone who’s clearly lost control — of his presidency, of his party, of his messaging. Flooding the zone with utter nonsense to distract us all from his obvious failures is seemingly all he has left.
Again, it’s never wise to declare Trump dead, politically. Somehow he always manages to slither back into a place of power and protection. But this time, with midterms around the corner, it feels different. This time, it feels like it might be the end.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.