Donald Trump Got Mugged by Reality

 Morning Shots 
All he has now is shtick

William Kristol, Andrew Egger

The midterms hammer hasn’t fallen yet, but it’s getting closer every day. Today, the New York Times reported that top Republican super PACs are giving up on two embattled House incumbents, Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and New Jersey Rep. Thomas Kean Jr. The PACs are pulling more than $10 million out of the two races, essentially giving them up for lost in an effort to spend more on other seats they hope will be more defensible.

Nothing Left to Give

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump’s rallies all have so much in common—the stock grievances, the stock insults, the stock anecdotes, the decade-old bits—that they can run together. But there are differences.

Two years ago yesterday, Trump had a rally in Coachella, California, and he was riding high. His political comeback had once looked impossible, unthinkable, and now he was close enough to taste it. He was in Kamala Harris’s backyard. The Biden administration was deeply unpopular, and Harris was struggling to get out of its shadow. Trump, out of power, had no recent record to defend. He was the outsider again, back on attack, and he had a vision to offer.

“The Republican party will always put America first,” he said, “and lead us on to victories like you have never seen before.”

What victories? “We had no wars, and I’ll keep you out of wars,” Trump bragged. “I will end the war in Ukraine, stop the chaos in the Middle East, and I will prevent, very definitely, World War III.”

Or take prices. “I will cut your energy prices in half within twelve months,” Trump promised.

Yesterday, Trump had another rally. And while much was the same, the basic vibe couldn’t have been more different. No time for blue-state stops now: Trump is currently on a lightning tour through some of the reddest states in the union, trying desperately to revive his base’s sagging energy. Yesterday was Youngstown, Ohio—his second Ohio stop in just over a week.

In some ways, the crowd got what they came for. There were the usual moments of surreal shtick, like Trump’s bizarrely lustful description of Sen. Jon Husted’s post-football physique: “I started examining his body, because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked and I watched, up and down. I looked at his ass. . . . Look at his hands, he’s got these, like, claws. And I got it. You are a great athlete.”

And there was the usual current of xenophobia and violence. Trump led the crowd in chanting for the deportations of two prominent Muslim Democrats, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed. And a woman who stood up to protest was physically assaulted by the people around her, while Trump jeered her from the stage. Police quickly whisked the protester away; the man who had punched her, pushed her, and yanked her hair was allowed to return to his seat.

It’s easy to dwell on all the gross stuff. (Sam and I did plenty of that in a video we cut after the rally last night.) But the gross stuff, unfortunately, isn’t why Trump’s in trouble. He’s been doing that stuff for a decade now; his people eat it up.

The reason Trump is in trouble is because, beyond the gross stuff, he has nothing else to give them. That was the most extraordinary thing about the rally yesterday, about all Trump’s rallies these days: The remarkable absence of an actual positive case for what his administration has been doing and still intends to do. All those 2024 promises about ending wars, abundant cheap energy, and so on—so easy to make as an insurgent outsider—have simply fallen away.

There are the usual stabs at branding the administration. The forever-repeated story that Biden handed over a “dead country,” but that Arab princes now tell him America is the “hottest country in the world”; the usual hallucinated numbers like the supposed $21 trillion in foreign investment now “pouring” into the country. But mostly, Trump now offers excuses for why things aren’t as good as they will be at some point off in the future—and an endless supply of fearmongering about “radical left Dumbocrat communists.”

The lying, the bigotry, the love of violence—a critical mass of Americans has been and remains enchanted by all this. And a larger group is willing to put up with it. What’s amazing is that Trump, the figure who unlocked and channeled that energy like nobody before in American politics, is now falling apart for so much sillier a reason: He just can’t make the trains run on time.

Our Elites Booked It

by William Kristol

Yesterday I remarked that “seeing support for President Trump collapse among the public—with very little help from our pitifully complacent and fearful elites—is heartening. Even inspiring.”

I didn’t go into any detail to justify my swipe at our elites. I don’t really think much justification is needed. But I thought I might mention here one of the most helpful characterizations I’ve heard of their behavior. It came from Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the grassroots activist organization Indivisible and a key organizer of the No Kings demonstrations, in a conversation we had under the auspices of the New Haven Democracy Project.

I was lamenting the performance of our elites, and asked Leah what she thought of them. Her reply:

So there’s a 2014 Swedish dark comedy called Force Majeure in which a family goes to a ski lodge. It’s a husband and a wife and their two small children, and there is an optical illusion of a controlled avalanche that makes them think that an avalanche is coming at the ski lodge. And the husband just books it. He grabs his phone and he runs and he leaves the wife and their two small children. You know, the wife is desperately trying to shield the children from what they think is an oncoming avalanche. And it turns out it was an optical illusion. Everyone’s safe. It’s fine.

But now they have to live with what that moment has revealed about the fact that the husband will flee and save himself at the drop of a hat. That is kind of how I feel about elites in American society right now. That’s the best metaphor that I’ve been able to come up with for what we have experienced over the last year and a half, which is to say that I think we’ve got a lot of really revealing data about when the chips are down, what people will do, how much they will fold . . . to save themselves, how much they will risk to push back. And, you know, it’s a lot faster to make a list of the people who did push back in early 2025 than the people who did not.

I haven’t seen the movie (or for that matter its 2020 American adaptation, Downhill, starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus). But from what I can gather, it’s pretty clear by the end of the movie—if not earlier than that—that the husband/father won’t be able to regain trust or respect, and that the family won’t be getting back together. The status quo ante can’t be restored.

Nor can ours.

Nor should it be.

And so, assuming we survive our current political avalanche, we’ll have to keep two things in mind: Every society has elites. And we need to figure out how to produce a better class of them.