Peak Trump

Nate Silver is known for analyzing polls, not for conducting them, but on Tuesday he branched out. “The pendulum/vibe shift has been in a conservative direction lately,” he observed on Twitter before posing this question to his millions of followers: “When will it swing back toward liberals?”

As I write this on Wednesday afternoon, nearly 85 percent of the more than 54,000 people who responded said they expect the right’s momentum to last at least one year. A clear majority foresees a “vibe shift” lasting at least three years, past the 2026 midterms.

Among the skeptics was New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. “My guess is we’re at or near peak-Trump Vibes” right now, he theorized. To which I’d add: We had better be. Because if the fulsome capitulation lately among the political and corporate classes doesn’t represent “peak Trump,” I shudder to think what peak Trump will look like.

Take, for example, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, an early skeptic of Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be secretary of defense. Ernst looked dimly at placing the Pentagon under the command of an accused predator whose core qualification for the job is being a dancing monkey on Donald Trump’s favorite TV network, reasonably enough. But then right-wing social media goons got involved, browbeating her ferociously and promising to primary her in 2026 if she voted against the nominee.

On Tuesday Ernst announced that she’ll vote to confirm. Notably, her statement made no pretense of having been persuaded that Hegseth is fit for the position. It’s a pure surrender, pathetic by design. She was last seen running away from reporters in the Capitol who asked her to explain her change of heart. That’s what peak Trump looks like.

Or take the pitiful spectacle of Coca-Cola gifting Trump with “the first ever Presidential Commemorative Inaugural Diet Coke bottle.” Four years ago the company called the January 6 insurrection “an offense to the ideals of American democracy.” Now its CEO is flying into Mar-a-Lago for photo ops with the plot’s central figure, presenting him with soft-drink detritus as a token of tribute the way some Roman courtier might have presented the emperor with a bust of his image.

And Coke is one of the lucky ones. According to Axios, oceans of cash from corporate America are flowing into Trump’s coffers in hopes of buying his favor—and, in some cases, his forgiveness. Reportedly the president-elect has confronted the heads of certain businesses by saying, “When I needed you [during the campaign], where the f–k were you? You weren’t with me and maybe you were with her,” referring to Kamala Harris. Shaking down U.S. companies while sounding like Don Corleone scolding Bonasera for not approaching him in a spirit of friendship is a fine example of peak Trump.

Even the weather seems to be conspiring in his favor. What better advertisement is there for a second Trump term than watching the largest city in Harris’ home state go up in flames as the progressive clown car there empties out and continuously botches the response?

Joe Biden’s honeymoon as president lasted not quite seven months, until the Afghan government crumbled and took public perceptions of the president’s competence down with it. How long will Trump’s honeymoon last?

Is Klein right that we’ve already reached “peak-Trump Vibes”?

At the peak?

One fascinating thing about the sense that we’re at peak Trump is that both parties seem invested in it.

That was predictable for Republicans. Historic landslide, yuge mandate, greatest victory ever: Between its leader’s fragile ego and the natural tendency of winning parties to exaggerate their popularity, the right’s reaction to his return to power was fated to settle on hysterical triumphalism.

What’s unexpected is that the Democratic establishment is in no hurry to challenge that spin despite the fact that the margins on Election Day were underwhelming. “Trump won by 1.5 points,” Klein noted. “House R’s have the smallest majority since the Great Depression. Senate R’s hold 53 seats. The vibe victory was much larger than the political victory, and when things move back to politics, it’s going to get harder.”

For all the hype about America’s alleged right-wing juggernaut, Trump has already slipped slightly into negative net favorability. Why aren’t we hearing that more often from Democrats? The losing party doesn’t typically want voters to believe that it’s less popular than it is.

The answer is obvious, I think. Democratic leaders like John Fetterman and Brian Schatz recognize that cultural progressivism has become a chronic drag on the left’s electoral fortunes and are seizing the opportunity presented by Trump’s victory to disgorge it. The more emphatic the public “vibe shift” toward the right appears, the more political cover mainstream Democrats have to pressure their party to move toward the center to keep up. Whether or not we’ve actually reached peak Trump, moderate liberals are pretending like we have in order to marginalize the leftist fringe.

But that doesn’t answer the question. Have we, in fact, reached it?

There’s a case to be made that we have. Klein is right, for instance, that it might be all downhill from here for Republicans as they confront the realities of governing. I wrote about that two days ago. The good news for the GOP is that Trump has expanded the right’s coalition; the bad news for the GOP is that … Trump has expanded the right’s coalition, forcing him and congressional leaders to make hard choices among different factions’ conflicting priorities. Those who get shafted will feel disgruntled and grow resentful. The new president’s days of being a “blank screen” onto which his various constituencies can project their fondest policy desires are almost over.

Many new Trump voters who gulped down the magic beans he sold them during the campaign will also have their expectations dashed, inevitably. If you’re the type of sucker who honestly believed he’d restore 2019 prices at the supermarket or deport 10 million illegals, disillusionment lies ahead and probably sooner rather than later. Splashy promises about ending income tax on tips and retirement benefits might also bump up against difficult math as Republicans in Congress try to come to terms on a new fiscal package. 

The tacit bargain Americans made with Trump on Election Day is that they’ll tolerate his fascist impulses in return for him making the proverbial trains run on time. He gets to fulfill his “retribution” fantasies and voters get a higher quality of life. If he can’t deliver on that—if, for instance, an overdue recession finally arrives—his more reluctant supporters will feel like they’ve been conned. Getting to call people “retards” with impunity won’t ease the disappointment.

And even if he does follow through on some of his pledges, it’s possible that the fickle American public will decide they liked his plans more in theory than in practice. The Iraq war was broadly popular at the start, remember; as the reality of occupation became clear, its popularity slowly disintegrated. One can imagine something similar happening with Trump’s mass deportation program. The public’s appetite for deterring immigration to the U.S. might devolve into queasiness once it starts to taste blood.

An economic slowdown or a deportation dragnet fiasco—those are our best bets for when we’ll turn the corner on “peak Trump” and never look back, I think. Especially the latter: It’ll take a burst of moral outrage from the country’s leftist half over Trump’s villainy to make Democratic and corporate leaders fear a backlash for kowtowing to him. His immigration policies are the most likely part of his agenda to trigger that burst.

Or is all of this wishful thinking?

Not peak yet.

The great fear of Never Trumpers isn’t that Trump will stoop to another travesty on the order of January 6.

He will. No one knows what it will look like but some appalling new civic grotesquerie was written in the stars when the race was called on November 5. Character is destiny. And there’s no sense fretting about what’s destined.

What people like me fear is that the psychology of reelecting Trump will lead the American public to defend him, and ultimately to sustain a sense of “peak Trump,” long past when it’s reasonable to do so. Rationally, Ezra Klein should be correct that at some point soon there’ll be a “vibe shift” with respect to the new president. But a rational country wouldn’t be five days away from swearing in a convicted criminal, now would it?

No one likes to admit that they made a mistake with their vote, but Trump fans have always seemed unusually averse to doing so, presumably because the case against trusting him with power has always been so obvious. It’s not just his strongman persona or the deliciousness of “liberal tears” that’s inspired such freakish loyalty to him since 2015, I suspect, it’s the fact that the only way many supporters could subdue their own boisterous doubts about him was to wrestle them into total submission.

That’s not true of “normal” politicians, whose flaws aren’t so garish that they need to be rationalized away entirely in order to justify voting for them. But it’s always been true of Trump and it was really true in this election, the first one held after he’d confirmed critics’ worst fears about what he was capable of. One could have given him the benefit of the doubt on Election Day 2016 and even on Election Day 2020. Not this time.

“Trump swore to uphold the Constitution in January 2017,” David Frum wrote on Wednesday. “He violated that oath in January 2021. Now, in January 2025, he will swear it again. The ritual survives. Its meaning has been lost.” Empty promises to support the constitutional order are what Americans voted for in November and they did so knowing that those promises are empty. When he commits his next crime against the country’s civic traditions, there’ll be no way for them to pretend that they didn’t see it coming.

What if the way they cope with that is to convince themselves that they’re actually fine with Trump’s failures, or don’t regard them as failures at all?

To save face and spare themselves the humiliation of conceding they were foolish to have given a convicted felon a second chance, like some “woke” big-city prosecutor who neglected to ask that a dangerous criminal be held without bail, they might strain to rationalize his behavior in office as perfectly acceptable. And not just on civic matters. On policy too.

Is his mass deportation program too bloody? Maybe—but how can you hold that against him given the mess that Democrats left him? Are his Cabinet appointees embarrassing and unqualified? Arguably, sure, but the liberal “expert” class had plenty of failures, too. Is his fixation on annexing Greenland unserious given America’s challenges abroad and, frankly, a little weird? Greenland has important resources. Manifest destiny is part of the American fabric. It’s been two years and grocery prices aren’t down yet. C’mon, give the man time. 

Never has America had a presidency that was born unaccountable the way Trump’s second term has, with voters effectively choosing to break him out of jail on November 5. No one should be surprised if that spirit of unaccountability colors how they judge his agenda as well, causing “peak Trump” to persist past its logical expiration date. They sacrificed liberalism for quality of life; they’ll strain to make themselves believe that that trade was worthwhile even if the facts say otherwise.

And Trump can encourage them with successes early in his term. If, in his first few months in office, Republicans pass a border security bill and his deputies prioritize deporting criminals instead of more sympathetic illegals, one can imagine his popularity climbing this year. With both sides exhausted and miserable, a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine war isn’t unlikely either. Headlines about “Trump the peacemaker” would further boost his political capital.

The larger his reservoir of public goodwill, the easier it’ll be for him to muscle friends and enemies into further capitulations. If the essential vibes of “peak Trump” are triumphalism, corruption, and domineering subjugation of rivals, we’re nowhere close to the peak, potentially.

Moments of truth.

I think we’ll have a better sense once his mass deportation program reaches high gear and horror stories begin bubbling up in the press. Opinion on immigration is famously thermostatic; if the “vibes” among Americans don’t change as things turn ugly, Trump’s honeymoon is likely to drag on a lot longer than Klein assumes.

A sizable part of the electorate wanted illegal immigration stopped, knowingly chose a miscreant to do it, and isn’t about to question his methods as he goes about granting their wish. The fateful question is simply “How sizable?”

There’s another question about “peak Trump” that’s worth considering. Is he more likely to behave autocratically, as he did on January 6, when his popularity is peaking or when it’s declining?

The argument for “declining” is easy. Not until he lost a popularity contest to Joe Biden did he fully lose his mind during his first term. A narcissist is most likely to lash out when he feels vulnerable, right? By that logic, peak Trump might actually reduce the risk of him doing something truly nutty to challenge the constitutional order. There’s no need to fight dirty when the people are on his side.

I tend to think that peak Trump will increase the risk, though. That’s because his abuses this time are less likely to involve trying to remain in office unlawfully (although stay tuned for 2028!) than with unlawfully expanding the power of the office while he occupies it. And logically the optimal time to try that is when he’s surfing a wave of public approval. Americans are more likely to let him slide on tearing up the Constitution if inflation and illegal immigration are dropping than they were when thousands were dying each week during a pandemic that he failed to contain.

Peak Trump might mean peak threat. We’ll know soon.