The window of opportunity that allowed President Trump to overwhelm his adversaries with an onslaught of executive orders dismantling core American institutions is closing.
Public opinion has turned against him, the economy is faltering, the Supreme Court has ordered him to stand down, his tariffs have backfired and such conservative mainstays as National Review and The Wall Street Journal are questioning his judgment.
How does a stymied autocrat deal with defeat? As the opposition gains strength, frustrating the nation’s commander in chief, how will Trump respond?
It is unthinkable to imagine him graciously acknowledging defeat, changing direction and moving on.
Will he claim victory in defeat? Will he try to provoke his adversaries into violence in order to invoke the Insurrection Act?
Trump’s unpredictability makes it impossible to answer these questions with any certainty, but as his actions in the first three months of his second term demonstrate, Trump’s choices veer to the extreme.
In a jointly written email, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, political scientists at Dartmouth and Harvard who wrote the 2024 book “Ungoverning: The New Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos,” contend:
A striking feature of politics in 2025 is how quickly the “vibe shift” that seemingly ushered in a new conservative era after the 2024 election has diminished or even disappeared.
