The felon New York Real Estate guy, posing as President, HAS been losing ground, under fire….
Showing his Chaos Protocol is NOT playing well…
Playing Golf ain’t helping him, either….
The opening months of President Donald Trump’s second term have been studded with eye-popping power plays targeting cornerstones of American institutional power: Neutering big business. Forcing white-shoe law firms and elite universities to supplicate. Strong-arming some of our oldest global allies.
But this week, for the first time since he came roaring back to power, “the great grovel” — as my boss John Harris aptly dubbed it — appears to be meeting its limits.
Just hours after urging freaked-out investors and voters to “BE COOL,” quadrupling down on his global trade war, Trump suddenly reversed course Wednesday, pausing some of his sweeping tariffs for 90 days.
A few hours later, Speaker Mike Johnson was forced to pull a critical budget vote due to a conservative mutiny — even after Trump himself leaned over and over again on key holdouts.
It was a striking one-two punch attacking the narrative that has surrounded Trump since November — that he is a political juggernaut able to run roughshod over his party and beyond to get his way on everything from economic policy to his choice for Cabinet secretaries. On Wednesday, Trump implicitly acknowledged there are, in fact, checks on his power: the markets and, if you squint, his own party.
On tariffs, the comedown was sudden but not surprising. After a week of market turmoil that spread from stocks to, crucially, government bonds, Trump finally flinched after days of insisting that there would be no delays and that the world should hunker down for a long, nasty global trade war.
“I know what the hell I’m doing,” Trump told a gathering of House Republicans Tuesday night, bragging that countries have been “kissing my ass” to try to make trade deals.
After the fact, Trump’s courtiers called it all part of a well-articulated plan. “This was his strategy all along,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, citing outreach from some 75 countries begging Trump to negotiate for some sort of tariff reprieve.
Yet this is a case to take Trump both seriously and literally: By Trump’s own admission, he was spooked about the sharp selloff of Treasuries — admitting, as is well known but rarely acknowledged by him personally, that he very much cares about what other people think….
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Yes, the post-”Liberation Day” market chaos might have played a key role in spreading unease. But don’t forget about the lifeblood of any politician — public approval. A Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday found Americans widely skeptical of Trump’s tariff campaign. And a new Economist/YouGov survey found a five-point spike in disapproval of Trump’s job performance, to 51 percent, after last week’s announcement.
Maybe Trump’s reversal on reciprocal tariffs will staunch the bleeding. Certainly many of his already reluctant critics reversed their own course after Trump did: “This was brilliantly executed,” Ackman posted. “Textbook, Art of the Deal.”
But maybe not. Trump might muse about running for a third term, but most Republicans know very well that he’s not facing voters again — and they are. So when they see signs of weakness, as they saw this past week, don’t be surprised if even MAGA faithful start to feel more inclined to freelance….
image…Hayden Jang…NY Timnes
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