U.S. President Donald Trump exits the House Chamber after delivering the State of the Union address on Tuesday.Kenny Holston/The Associated Press
There will be no Ceausescu moment, no “at long last sir have you no decency” turning point, no dramatic climax in which the tyrant’s power suddenly evaporates: That instantaneous, simultaneous crystallizing of long-inchoate doubts, wherein those who feared him lose their fear, and those who believed in him lose their faith. Life rarely supplies the needs of narrative, and if it did America is no longer a society capable of coming to that kind of collective moral awakening.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump is losing. He may yet survive; he will not be brought down easily or swiftly; nothing is foreordained. But he has suffered a series of blows in recent weeks that have substantially dented his authority, dispelling the impression of inevitability on which his audacious assault on American democracy depends.
Consider the many fronts on which Mr. Trump has yielded ground of late. Internationally, he is encountering one of the paradoxes of power: the more that he has attempted to impose his will on other countries, the less capacity he has retained to actually do so.
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Thus his insistence that NATO countries spend more on their own defence has resulted in lessening their dependence on American arms. Withdrawn American military support for Ukraine has been replaced by European and Canadian support, leaving Ukraine less beholden to U.S./Russian demands at the negotiating table. The threat to invade Greenland persuaded European leaders they had no alternative but to stand up to Mr. Trump; his subsequent capitulation will have emboldened them to do so more often.
The same phenomenon has been at work in trade. Mr. Trump’s attempts to monetize other countries’ dependence on American markets, by means of confiscatory tariffs they would supposedly have no option but to accept, have instead encouraged them to find other markets.
Large economies like the European Union are increasingly “trading around” the U.S., with the help of a flurry of new free-trade treaties: EU-Mercosur, EU-India, soon to be joined, perhaps, by an agreement between the EU and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The tariffs Mr. Trump’s advisers imagined would be absorbed by exporting nations instead have been, as economists predicted, almost fully passed on to American consumers.
One consequence of this has been declining support for Mr. Trump among the American public. Several polls have his approval rating in the 30s. Worse, perhaps, he is now weak in areas in which had hitherto been political strengths for him. Tariffs have done for him on the economy. The brutal tactics employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have done the same on immigration. (One indication of how toxic ICE has become: Mr. Trump failed to mention it in his nearly-two-hour-long State of the Union speech.)
Another consequence, perhaps, of Mr. Trump’s declining popularity: The Supreme Court decision invalidating Mr. Trump’s imposition of tariffs, ordinarily the preserve of Congress, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). It had been speculated this might be the case Mr. Trump would use to defy the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, marking his final break with the rule of law.
That might explain why the Supreme Court hesitated so long to issue its ruling. And Mr. Trump’s low approval rating might explain why it eventually ruled as it did. Those countries that had earlier succumbed to Mr. Trump’s pressure tactics, accepting disadvantageous trade agreements at the point of a tariff gun, may now be moved to reconsider.
Mr. Trump has endured numerous other legal setbacks: on the deployment of National Guard troops in major cities, on the deportation of detainees without due process, on attempts to restrict asylum eligibility through executive order, among a long list. A grand jury, unusually, refused to indict six members of Congress for the “crime” of informing service members of their obligation under military law to disobey illegal orders.
Meanwhile, the drip-drip-drip of revelations from the Epstein files, and Mr. Trump’s desperate attempts to prevent further disclosures, are eating further into his support, particularly among his MAGA base, and the members of Congress that live in fear of them.
The party is visibly split: Over Epstein, over tariffs, over the wars into which Mr. Trump keeps plunging the United States. The mid-term elections, assuming they are still held and still fair, promise to be a disaster. Already some members of Congress have begun to break with him. Once the primaries are safely over, expect others to join them.
Mr. Trump is badly bloodied. People are no longer quite so afraid of him as they were. The momentum toward autocracy has stalled. Whether that will acquire its own momentum, loss of power feeding further losses of power, is still to be seen. But for the first time it is possible to imagine it.