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Notes -
People now have to game out the answer to one question:
What does it take for ~85 Republican representatives in the House to vote, with a veto-proof majority, to reassert congressional control over tariffs? I say the House because I think if it gets to that point in the House, the Senate will probably be fine.
How far do Trump’s ratings have to fall that they are no longer afraid of retribution?
How far does polling for the party have to fall that they are worried for their jobs, even in erstwhile deep red districts?
It's gonna be tough, because they don't just have to be worried for their jobs, they have to be more worried for their jobs via general election than via primaries. It takes a lo to make primary voters disregard Trump saying 'THIS TRAITOR KILLED OUR BEAUTIFUL TARIFFS! VOTE HER OUT!'.
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I took a crack at answering here. Willingness to veto obviously depends quite a bit on the specific policy being vetoed, not just Trump's approval rating, but I'm guessing Trump's approval rating would have to fall to somewhere between 36% on the very upper end and 28% on the low end for the house republicans to start turning against him in those sorts of numbers.
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It might take more than that because there is actually a fair bit of support among Democrats for what Trump is doing.
Where? Do you have examples?
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What would motivate Democrats to support what Trump is going on tariffs?
Opposition to free trade and a belief that it has cost Americans good jobs.
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Either pure "never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake," or "absorbed too much leftist radiation about economics." Or a bit of both. There was this tweet, for example.
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I’m actually bullish on this happening. People are already shitting themselves and we haven’t even begun to feel the inflation, layoffs, pullback in consumer spending etc.
Even Trump cannot survive 10-20% inflation, layoffs, market meltdown, etc. when all it takes to rebound it is either get rid of him or take his tariff power away
I think you're underestimating the extent to which people can fail to accept that Trump's trade policies are the cause of any bad economic effects and the extent to which they can fail to accept that the bad economic effects are even happening.
I’m literally watching the goalposts move in real time. It’s infuriating.
One of the great things about setting the bar at "economic apocalypse" is that you can back off to merely raising prices a bit while failing to achieve any your stated goals and still claim victory.
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Certainly possible. My prediction rests on the assumption that we are about to see economic catastrophe worse than 2008. That’s my take at least.
If that doesn’t end up happening and we instead just have something like Covid or an average recession then absolutely he will ride out the term.
But I simply don’t see how if we have financial oblivion Trump survives. There are too many powerful elites that will also be impacted and even the average GOP voter will revolt and turn on Trump if the bread and circuses are gone
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Who is going to do it? The Republicans either agree with him or don't have the cojones. The Robed 9 won't save us (they could, with the major questions doctrine, but Roberts is going to enjoy whispering "no")
There’s all kinds of fun options depending on how bad it gets.
There’s already 7 GOP senators trying to take his tariff power away and nothing tangible outside the market has even happened yet. Elon is calling other members of the inner circle retards for their trade policy (proxy shot at Trump).
Most realistic scenario is that congress just votes to take tariffs away and overrides the veto. If there is blood in the streets even a GOP congressman will be loyal to his constituents who are mailing him death threats and threatening his political career forever. And it’s much easier to swallow just taking back tariff power over an actual impeachment or something.
If it gets really bad, like Great Depression bad, I would bet my life savings he gets JFKed or has a mysterious heart attack/plane crash/take your pick.
You simply cannot survive as a politician in America if you fuck with the economy to this extent. We already see the campaign ramping up, Jamie Dimon and other financial bigwigs are pressuring Trump (first option in the toolbox) but if he continues to go full retard they will take the other tools out too.
How many politicians were assassinated during the COVID lockdowns or during the Great Depression?
A couple in the Depression. More if you count local politicians, conventions, etc.
Not so much during COVID, perhaps because, you know, it wasn’t that bad?
This asshole tried to kill a judge in 2020, but it was some sort of unhinged #MeToo grift instead of a COVID thing. And then there was this random act of schizophrenia in 2023.
But really, violence is rare.
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If you believe the FBI, there was that plot to kidnap governor Whitmer.
Well, the plot existed, even if it was developed at the Hoover building.
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The COVID lockdowns made the rich richer than ever before as infinite money was ploughed into pumping equities and real estate, why would they have been unhappy with that?
The lockdowns caused a massive plunge in the stock market. There was a recovery, but I don't see how that could have been caused by money printing. Printing money doesn't affect the real prices of assets.
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Well, if Elon wins and gets Peter Navarro fired, that would be great, but it ain't going to happen. The problem is that Trump likes tariffs. Without Navarro, maybe he'd have less-stupid tariffs (still damaging but not Great Depression damaging), but he's going to be inclined to go with his tariff-friendly advisors over Musk on this.
The non-MAGA members of the GOP don't have the cojones. They never did, that's one of the reasons MAGA won in the first place.
The Deep State will like the Great Depression; the last one is what created them, after all.
Idk about this, but I do wonder the extent to which Democrats will be tempted to let Trump shit the bed for two or even four years given that the ensuing backlash could create the environment for New Deal-era levels of political dominance. If the question arises they can't credibly choose not to step in, but in ways the best case scenario politically is for mostly-Democratic majorities in Congress to try to stop him and then a majority of the Republicans prevents the overriding of his veto, which prevents them from trying to shed the Trump legacy down the line. Indeed, when there was shutdown talk Nate Silver said Democrats should stop trying to be the adult party and just let Republicans take ownership of their own messes.
I doubt you're going to get that. It's much more likely you'll get an equivalent to what's going on in the UK right now.
The UK already had multiple medium sized political parties though, I don't know the odds of that situation coming to be in the US (though it would be good).
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Up till now MAGA has been neutral to positive for the average American. Trump didn’t really do anything that’s impacted Joe Six-pack and if anything has delivered some wins on woke and DEI. And his tax cuts broadly benefited Joe Six-pack in the short-term as well.
So the only real reasons to oppose Trump have been “he’s vulgar” or political games like Jan 6 that democrats also played. Or you’re a woke lib who hates him on principle.
But now all of a sudden people are staring at GFC part 2 with the potential for much much worse. Joe Six-pack will get annihilated with inflation and might get laid off too. And whose fault is it? It’s 100% on Trump and everybody knows it.
All of a sudden even conservatives are like “wait a minute wtf” and that will lead to political pressure on Trump from essentially all of America except the most diehard of his base (and how many of them are diehard enough when they are about to lose their homes and a t-shirt is $50?)
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Two questions. With the second question being-
'When the Trump tariff rollback doesn't happen over the next two years, what next?'
Great new American golden age, Don Jr selected as presumptive next nominee (all other contenders drop out), Amazon buys Truth Social for $20bn cash in exchange for slightly reducing tariffs on China and Vietnam (15%)
GOP gets destroyed in the midterms, Supreme Court gets scared of getting packed in a future Dem trifecta and starts limiting Trump in a big way, lamest of lame duck final 2 year presidencies, woke coalition return to power not out of any competency but because Trump screwed up so badly (85%)
Even if the GOP ultimately gets destroyed in the midterms, I think there will be a GOP pullback well before then, probably beginning at the end of this year, assuming, of course, that the tariffs stay in place. As the effects are more fully felt, I think Trump's intransigence on the issue may cause some of his supporters in congress to see the writing on the wall. You can guarantee that some otherwise safe seats will have primary challengers basing their entire campaigns on tariff policy, particularly in districts where losing the seat to a Democrat is a real possibility. The Republicans who are currently standing with Trump will have a hard enough time getting reelected already, and will have to pull back in order to have any chance of salvaging their careers. This is doubly true if Trump's approval ratings tank among Republicans, at which point supporting the cult no longer scores you any points.
one other interesting twist on all of this is that Trump is extremely old. This is not a charismatic 40-year old who has the potential to cement his rule for a decade+. Trump is inherently a short-term politician, and if he starts being a short-term loser then it’s a lot easier for people to jump ship. There is little chance he stages some kind of comeback in the future after this which would cause people to doubt if defecting now will come back to bite them later.
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Full on
communismEuropean style socialism once the democrats take over. And they don't eliminate the tariffs either.More options
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A veto-proof majority? Not gonna happen in any realistic scenario. I doubt Trump's approval rating will drop below the high 30s for any sustained period of time, he just has that much of a lock on the Republican base. Trump has also invested quite heavily in purifying the party from all critics. He's been much more focused on that than any durable policy goals. With all that in mind, Republican legislators (beyond a few dissidents) will not broadly from Dear Leader.
Would you take even odds against Trump's approval rating falling below 37% for at least 30 consecutive days before the midterm elections according to yougov's data?
Looking at Trump's first term approval ratings, the 37% mark is close to where I'd put the 50-50 at. But 1) I make a habit of not betting on prediction markets unless I have a decent alpha, and 2) Trump is one or two standard deviations more buffoonish this term than he was in his first term, which needs to be factored in. I could probably barely be persuaded to make an even-money bet at 35%, and I'd feel genuinely good if I could make the bet at 33%.
I probably put the 50/50 around 35% rather than 37%, but it does seem like we're actually pretty close in our assessment of how things are likely to go in terms of approval rating.
That said, the actual number to watch is "how many reps can go against Trump without being voted out". If Trump's approval rating drops to 35% or 37%, that indicates that his enthusiastic approval rating is probably a fair bit lower, which means that at least some republican reps will be in districts where less than half of the republican voters are enthusiastic Trump supporters. I pulled down 10 representatives at random from the House website and then did a vibe check of how Trump-aligned they were and whether they could/would oppose him if he got unpopular.
So if Trump became deeply unpopular (and a 35% approval rating is pretty deeply unpopular, even end-of-term Biden only dropped to 38%), I think at least 3 and maybe 4 of these 10 reps would oppose Trump if he was pushing to do something deeply stupid and unpopular. With 218 democrats and 223 republicans in the house, you'd need about a third of republicans to flip... and it looks like about a third of republicans could flip if there was a compelling enough reason (and "compelling enough" is quite a bit short of "literally Hitler").
I'd personally do my napkin math from the Cook PVI instead.
I'd break Republican Reps into the following buckets
So I see what you're saying as fairly unlikely. Trump would have to do something truly cataclysmic to get a third of Republican Reps to fear losing re-election more than Trump coming after them with a primary challenge. The 2022 midterms showed Trump would gladly prioritize eliminating "traitors" over actually having Republicans win. Purifying the party is something Trump has always shown very consistent determination in doing, far above any actual policy goals.
Cook PVI seems useful from a contestedness-of-district perspective. I do think Trump-alignment-of-winning-rep matters too, especially in cases like Sheri Biggs, who won in SC-3 over her Trump-endorsed opponent Mark Burns. SC-3 isn't contested at all (72% R), and so your analysis would put her as "low susceptibility to breaking from Trump".
Keep in mind that Trump would have to do something pretty bad to get his approval ratings all the way down in the 35% range. For reference, his approval rating is currently sitting at 45% (and within-Republican-party approval rating sitting at 90%). So I agree that as things stand now, representatives mostly can't oppose him.
But the question is what happens when 25-30% of his own party disapproves of what he's doing. Once we're conditioning on him doing something bad enough that his loyal base stops being so loyal, I think the set of safe actions for house representatives changes too.
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Probably true, but even a 55-45 margin in Presidential elections implies a landslide. Bush/Dukakis was 53/46.
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There is no realistic number at which this is true. Trump only needs to maintain a majority of the primary voters, not a majority of the country, or even a majority of Republicans.
The nature of Trumpism is that a GOP revolt is going to look more like various advisers being ousted and Trump having new handlers put in. I don't think open confrontation will happen. The GOP establishment has consistently shown that they lack either the ability or the courage to do so.
Trump's problem is that a big chunk of his passionate supporters are retirees with 401ks. These people have something to lose. Up to this point, Trump's suck-it-Libs style hasn't come with a tangible cost. It was all pwnage and upside. My Trump-loving family has fallen conspicuously silent in the runup to RV season. I guess we'll see.
A 30% drop in a retiree's 401k is "it's going back to 2019 levels" due to the massive amount of inflation (also 30%) the previous government caused protecting this particular group at everyone else's expense.
And I think a lot of
shy ToriesTrump voters know that. And no, that doesn't make paying back taxes any less fun; I believe that Trump made it as fun as such a thing possibly could have been. But the missing money needs to come from somewhere, and if it doesn't come at the sole expense of the youth of the country for once that's the biggest step forwards for this country in almost 60 years- bonus points if they remember that.More options
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Perhaps, but I genuinely believe that most Trump supporters will not blame his tariff policies for resulting economic damage. The stock market is fake anyway, the woke (((financiers))) are manipulating prices to make Trump look bad. Reports of inflation are either fake or price gouging by greedy businesses. Unemployment numbers are fake or just lazy people who don't want to work.
I think maybe you underestimate how normie a lot of these people are and how often they check their portfolios.
We're both guessing.
80% of voters don't vote in midterm primaries as compared to 63% in the 2024 general. Assuming that all of the primary voters did vote in the general, essentially 1/3 of the general election voters voted in the midterm primary. So within that slice of voters in Republican primaries, as long as Trumpists maintain 50% control, you can't win a primary. Even if the anti-Trump candidate would do better in the general, or even among R voters who don't show up, it doesn't matter because they'll lose the primary before any of those people get a vote.
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There’s certainly a never-say-die subset of true believers but I doubt that’s even the majority of the coalition that elected him in November. I think most people were voting against democrat incompetence on inflation and illegal immigration in that order.
If trumpflation ends up being even worse than Biden’s and comes with stagflation and layoffs to boot, I can easily see a new GOP coalition that unites around “Trump but minus tariffs”. And there’s a very clear and straightforward process to make that happen, just need the veto-proof majority in congress to take away tariff powers and let Trump do whatever else he wants
You're confusing units of analysis. We're not talking about the coalition that elected him in the presidential general election; they only need to be an effective majority of the Republican primary voters in the midterms. Which is a much smaller and more motivated subset. It doesn't even need to be a true majority, just a sufficient plurality that you'd need to run the table otherwise to win the primary.
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I don’t think you can talk about ‘handlers’ in Trump II. Trump I had handlers of a sort, in that Trump was new to politics and there were seasoned veterans who just flagrantly hid documents from him and ran things while he postured. Trump II doesn’t have handlers. Surely (?) there are still some ultra deep state CIA types in Langley with things that never get shared with Trump, but that’s not the same thing.
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The old-guard GOP establishment helpfully defenestrated itself when Liz Cheney led her failed useful-opposition ploy with the post-Jan 6 hearings. That may have been courageous by a certain standard of courage, but it was also foolish by the standard of remaining politically relevant within the GOP, and led to both a direct diminishment and further party-base skepticism of the neo-liberal wing that she was a part of.
If Trump's attempted coup wasn't the time for her to stand up, what situation would be more fitting?
After an actual coup attempt would probably have been more fitting.
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Every bet that the GOP will finally break with Trump has been wrong.
Intellectually, I know there has to be a point but I can't put my own money on it.
I imagine it's the same for actual Republicans.
It’s coming. You can’t just nuke the market in America and expect to survive politically. It will take time but nothing Trump has done up till now has really been bad economically, so it’s easy for GOP to hang on because he kept the money flowing and people remember Trump 1 as a great time for the economy. But if all of a sudden we have GFC Part 2 and it’s 100% attributable to his actions he will be toast.
Not sure how trustworthy this is as a proxy but the comments section on Wall Street Journal articles was a MAGA shithole up till a few weeks ago. Now it’s full of people with regret and complaining about their investments and how Trump is a buffoon, etc. Once the mass layoffs and 10-20%+ inflation hit it will be over
My concern is that he'll crash the economy then provide some form of long-term inflationary "relief" right before the midterms which enough voters will attribute to him actually knowing what he's doing that Republicans aren't totally screwed in the midterms.
DOGE checks? Dollars to donuts Trump can just mail them out before the judges intervene.
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