Mad Man

A Shift in the Republican Tides?

I don’t know what is wrong with Donald Trump, but something clearly is. Yes, yes, he’s never been what one might call stable, but his instability is more apparent now, dangerously so. I mean, 150-160 overnight tweets on December 1—some incomprehensible, others just crazy. Michelle Obama controlling Joe Biden’s autopen? And yet—this is kind of crazy, too—none of the great legacy newspapers has done, to my knowledge, an in-depth analysis of what he may have been thinking, what caused these effusions, whether there was any kind of pattern or explanation—or linked them to Trump’s nappiness at the Cabinet Obeisance Festival the following day, where, struggling not to doze off, he called Minnesota’s Somali community “garbage.”

“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,”

Crude is on the crazy spectrum. Crazy is being defined down before our eyes. Trump is in a spitball lather, damp, mushy projectiles splushing in every direction. It may be the tension of impending crises—Epstein files, murder in the Caribbean, inflation coming on, the failure of inconsistent and irrational tariffs, the RFK Jr war on vaccines, the failure of his Ukraine capitulation plan, the mysterious MRI. Or maybe we are witnessing a pure psychological breakdown caused by the combination of tension and impending old age. (I’m the same age he is, and there are senior moments, but Trump seems to be suffering senior infrastructure week collapses…)

His actions are brutal and utterly contradictory: The unauthorized strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean were paired with his pardon and release of the very guilty former Honduran president and drug lord, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who once boasted, according to a witness at his trial:

“We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it,”

Republicans, sensing a train wreck to come, are jumping off the boxcars. It is now permissible to not only vote against Trump (216 did on Epstein), but to question his actions. Not just the flammable Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is fleeing to her Appalachian holler, but the well-respected Senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services, for whom the “double-tap” hit on the survivors of an alleged drug boat, was possibly the last straw. Wicker is known to have had reservations about Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary (I refuse to call it Secretary of War), as did other Republicans, but voted for him. Shame on you, especially, Joni Ernst—also leaving town—who could have called a moral stop to the proceedings. Sort of like Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who had severe doubts about Bobby Kennedy Jr’s vaccine insanity…and yet voted for him, and is now complicit in the consequences to come.

A great many Republicans have had to take disgraceful votes—disgraceful by their own standards, not mine—for fear of being Trumped in the next election or Loomered in the next news cycle. But that is a shrinking cudgel, melting away like the Republican margin in the 7th Tennessee Congressional district.

Bright lines loom:

—Which Republicans are going to admit, contra Trump, that prices are going up dramatically, not just for groceries, but also for health insurance, electricity and housing?

—Which are going to split with Trump (or at least his current dilatory position) and vote to restore the Obamacare subsidies that will run out this month? Will there be a bipartisan breakout?

—What’s the Supreme Court going to do about the legality of Trump’s tariffs?

—Which Republicans will be prepared, contra Trump, to continue to lie about the 2020 presidential election as they run for office in 2026? Or to defend his pardoning of the January 6 perpetrators? Or to defend his pardoning of every other available miscreant?

Politics is a floating crap game. It changes slightly, day to day, week to week. It rarely stays the same for long. Journalists have been reluctant to predict the demise of Trump, and rightly so. He has survived innumerable scandals and personal outrages. He has survived two impeachments. And the betting is he’ll survive this moment, too—which is why the powerhouses of journalism are giving his mental health the same sort of free ride they gave Biden’s obvious debility. But one senses—I sense—that there has been a perceptible, and quite possibly dangerous, change here:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures

Thus, Shakespeare’s plotters against Caesar. The Republicans do not lack for ambitious politicians. This is a moment of shallows and miseries for them. They crossed the Rubicon with Trump but now, I suspect, they quietly fear that the 2026 elections will bring divided government and the end of this authoritarian experiment...or chaos, as a defeated Trump lashes out against those—everyone—he thinks betrayed him. The past week shows him weaker and worse, with a personal and political trajectory that indicates lost ventures to come.

Tis the season. Yo ho ho, and all that. And since Sanity Clause readers have almost everything, especially sanity, you might be tempted to give a gift subscription to a friend: