Speaking at a rally in 2016, Donald Trump delivered these now-famous lines:
“We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No, it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’ ”
Since then, he’s repeated a version of this cartoonish promise over and over again, only to be reminded of it by his opponents when he seems to be on the ropes.
But now, entering the second year of his second term, the wins have been increasingly hard to locate. Trump’s first attempt at winning — appointing Elon Musk to head up DOGE — was a chaotic, ineffective, and ultimately humiliating endeavor that saw the very public fracturing of their relationship.
The president’s signature economic initiative — tariffs — have done little to stimulate the economy and a lot to piss off our allies. His anti-crime and anti-immigration efforts, which initially had voters’ blessing and approval, have turned into deeply unpopular and divisive liabilities for both Trump and Republicans.
And if the last month has felt like a year to you and me, imagine how it has felt to Trump, whose losses are piling up on top of each other like a precarious and chaotic game of Jenga — and it’s poised to topple over. The question is, does he care?
There was Trump’s Greenland folly. Seemingly all-consumed with the bruising impact of losing the Nobel Peace Prize, he set his beady eyes north, attempting to muscle his way into owning the Danish territory with the surgical skill of an axe murderer and the diplomatic soft touch of the Kool-Aid Man.
After insisting America needed Greenland for national security, promising we would get it, and threatening to take it by force if necessary, Trump stormed Davos in hopes of leaving with the island as a souvenir. Instead, rebuffed by Europe and NATO, he was left announcing a vague (and possibly made up?) “framework” of a deal that has amounted to nothing so far.
In Minneapolis, where Trump deployed ICE in response to cases of Somali-American fraud schemes, the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizen protesters, mother of three Renee Good and VA nurse Alex Pretti, have sparked widespread outrage and condemnation.
While the administration and its supporters started out with a lot of tough talk in defense of ICE, often throwing the acronym “FAFO” around to justify violence against anyone who would get in their way, the tone has shifted considerably.
Controversial Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino was moved off of Minneapolis, where DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was also leading the charge. Sen. Thom Tillis called for her ouster, and both Noem and Bovino will reportedly be replaced by Border Czar Tom Homan.
Numerous Republican lawmakers, aware of a looming midterm election, have come out to say enough is enough, and call for Trump to change course. Rep. Mike Lawler penned an op-ed in the New York Times saying what Trump has been doing “is not working,” acknowledging “Americans’ many legitimate concerns about how the government has conducted immigration policy,” and calling for the investigation of both deaths by law enforcement as well as Congress.
Right-wing media, too, has begun calling for a shift in strategy, with many on even Fox News ringing alarm bells.
There’s no other way to describe Trump’s results in Greenland and Minnesota as losses, ending with his retreat from a once emboldened position that no longer was tenable or politically prudent.
Undergirding both of those abject failures, of course, is Trump’s flailing economy. Trump’s approval rating on the economy, the issue most people care about the most, has swung a whopping 26 points in just a year, starting at plus-6 points to negative-20 now. Trump’s faring worse now than former President Joe Biden was at the same point.
Quite simply, Americans do not feel like this economy is working for them. That’s bolstered by reality, the impact of Trump’s dumb trade wars, but it’s also bolstered by perception, a belief that Trump is indifferent to the economic pain of his own voters and is focused on literally everything but affordability. That’s a dangerous combination in an election year.
It almost feels like Trump no longer cares. He’s running the country like a guy who was just told he has a year to live, checking off items on a bucket list. Only, instead of “skydiving,” it’s “depose a dictator,” “steal a peace prize,” and “invade a sovereign nation.”
He may not care, but Republican lawmakers definitely do. And they are tired of so much losing. Can they corral him back to the plot in time? The clock is ticking.
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.