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It now appears that the wheels are beginning to come off of the Trump Train.
Trump and MAGA hit the ground running in January 2025, and accomplished a tremendous amount in the first nine months of Trump’s second term, in terms of dismantling the government. For much of this time, the Trump autocratic machine seemed unstoppable. I had to stop checking in with the website tracking the gains of Project 2025 because it was so depressing to watch the rapid erosion of civic life. Trump’s minions took over all three branches of government so quickly that the success of the coup appeared inevitable. Trump continued to stack the courts with partisan judges while operating under the Supreme Court’s blanket immunity for any crimes he commits while in office.
The most unlikely part of the Trump phenomenon was his ability to convince working-class people that he cared about them, even though he’s always made it clear that he thinks people who work for a living are suckers and losers, and in the first year of his second term, he has continually undermined labor unions and removed antitrust curbs on corporate consolidation, harming workers across the board.
For most of the first nine months, it looked like Trump was going to be able to completely destroy the constitutional republic and the rule of law with woefully little effective resistance. During this time, the institutions of democracy looked too weak and too slow to mount a timely response to Trump’s lawlessness. Then things began to shift.
The first nine months of Trump’s second term were the worst nine months in terms of job growth and the labor market in fifteen years, except those during the Covid pandemic. The unemployment rate is at a four-year high. Working people are miserable, and are looking at increasing uncertainty due to Trump’s catering to the wealthiest people and corporations.
The effects of Trump’s disastrous tariff policies and incoherent worldwide trade wars have begun to reach consumers, as have the effects of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill on food aid and health insurance. More and more farmers are going out of business because of Trump’s trade policies. Inflation and grocery prices continue to rise, and high interest rates are wrecking the housing market. Rents are out of control. You can tell people that all of this isn’t happening only so long, until it becomes inescapable.
More than 7 million people demonstrated against Trump all over the country in the second “No Kings Day” on October 18, 2025, and thousands more have effectively mobilized against ICE’s illegal mass deportations. Much of the grassroots organizing that’s happening on the ground is not being reported by the mainstream media.
The off-year elections on November 4 were a complete wipeout for Trumpist ideas and candidates, signaling a sea change among voters, and Trump’s fawning over Zohran Mamdani during his visit to the White House, after calling him an evil Communist, confused, then enraged the MAGA base. Trump loves strongmen, and Mamdani’s decisive victory in the New York mayoral election looked good to him.
After saying he would stop the Russian war on Ukraine in his first day in office, Trump is now pushing a 28-point plan that is being widely characterized as “the appeasement plan,” since it gives Russia everything it wants and Ukraine nothing, solidifying Trump’s role as the Neville Chamberlain of today.
Trump is appearing more and more diminished physically and mentally, and he seems more and more disconnected and disoriented, and the utter incompetence of members of his cabinet has become impossible for people to ignore.
Going after Mark Kelly for his post encouraging military personnel not to obey illegal orders is politically suicidal. Kelly is a living, breathing example of everything Trump is not: a real hero in war and peace, an astronaut, and a steadfast husband and father. Trump and Hegseth going after Kelly is connected to their plan to use military tribunals against civilians who disagree with them, but the tactic is backfiring. And now it looks like Hegseth may soon be prosecuted himself for war crimes or murder for ordering Special Operations to kill the survivors of a September 2 strike on a small boat off the coast of Venezuela.
Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID has led to the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of which are children, and it is projected that millions more will die in coming years if these aid cuts continue, including 4.5 million children under five years old who will die by 2030.
People hate and fear AI, even as Trump signs an Executive Order to make it impossible for states to regulate AI, and while Trump continues to rake in billions of dollars in crypto corruption schemes. Trump’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar David Sacks is personally benefiting financially from the policies he sets for the industries.
All but one of the Republicans in Congress turned against Trump on releasing the Epstein Files, forcing him to capitulate, and the Epstein issue shows no signs of going away. If Trump pardons convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, MAGA may openly revolt. And Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t the only Republican in Congress who is abandoning this sinking ship. There could be many more resignations before the midterms next year.
Trump is one of the most unpopular presidents in American history, and his poll numbers continue to crater. His approval rating is now at 36%, which is 24 points underwater, and down 14 points from the beginning of his second term. 64% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. Like Bob Marley said, you can’t fool all the people all the time, and an autocrat still needs public support.
In the first nine months of his second term, the speed and effectiveness of Trump and Project 2025, and the complicity of so many elites in business, education, and media, made it look like democracy and the rule of law were truly doomed, but now it looks like the juggernaut is beginning to break down and Trump’s forces may not be able to finish the planned destruction in the next year. I’m sure the Democrats will find new ways to squander all this political capital and fail to do what needs to be done to win back voters. But they may win the midterms anyway, in spite of themselves, and then they’ll still have to move fast to stop the coup. Trump has always feared being impeached.
But the midterms and further checks on Trump’s power are still quite far away, and Stephen Miller is not about to temper his rage to tear down as much of the rule of law as he can for as long as he’s in power. Much more damage can be done before there is a chance for voters to change things, even with a newly functioning Congress. The fascists in Trump’s orbit know that they have a limited time to accomplish their goals, and they are not going to stop until the People force them to stop.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.