Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The promise to wrap up the war in Ukraine in a single day was unfulfilled. A majority of the American public thinks the roundups of migrants have gone too far. The Trump political base is inflamed by the administration’s failure to release documents relating to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The effort to attract Blacks and Hispanics to the Republican Party is facing substantial headwinds.
Is this the moment that the Donald Trump ascendancy – challenged by two impeachments, an election defeat and 91 indictments – starts to falter? Memo to Mr. Trump’s doubters, skeptics, haters, even agnostics: maybe not.
Mr. Trump is the boomerang of American politics. He always comes back. He is the Richard Fariña of the 21st century, having been, as the 1966 novel that became a cult favourite put it, down so long it looks like up to him.
Just Saturday afternoon, an e-mail from Mr. Trump flew into the internet inboxes of his supporters. “Every time they count us out – count YOU out – we come back bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” it said.
Two days earlier, a Presidential e-mail to supporters (“True MAGA Patriots like you”) asked for financial contributions and asserted, “Before the day ends, I’m asking EVERY SINGLE ONE of my supporters to chip in and say, I’LL NEVER ABANDON PRESIDENT TRUMP!”
Commentators and historians once argued with conviction and certainty that Richard Nixon (defeated in the 1960 presidential campaign, mortified by his loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial race only to win the White House in 1968) was the greatest comeback artist in American history.
Opinion: The Ukraine emergency is far from over – because Donald Trump is the emergency
The commentators and historians of the next generation were just as insistent that the reigning master of resilience and resurgence was Bill Clinton, who declared himself the “Comeback Kid” even as he lost the 1992 New Hampshire primary. Nine years later, even after having been impeached, he had approval ratings that were extraordinarily high for a departing president.
Those two may have eclipsed Andrew Jackson (defeated by what he called a “corrupt bargain” that benefited John Quincy Adams in 1824 but elected in 1828) and Grover Cleveland (thrust out of the White House in the 1888 election but returned to the presidency four years later – making him for 132 years the only president to return to the office after being defeated for re-election).
Now it can be said, also with conviction and certainty: The greatest political magus and comeback artist of American politics is in the White House now.
Mr. Trump uncannily matches the classic personality traits of the resilient.
“These are people with the ability to take unfortunate situations and alchemize them into something that moves them forward,” said Pamela Mitchell, founder of the Reinvention Institute, a boutique training company in Sarasota., Fla., dedicated to nurturing clients’ resilience. “For them, it’s always about forward motion. They use adversity as fuel to move them to the next level of their lives.”
The President has a surfeit of adversity right now. These obstacles come despite his claims that he is the impresario of the most successful presidency since Franklin Delano Roosevelt if not, as he suggested at the State of the Union address in March, “the most successful in the history of our nation,” surpassing George Washington. Democrats held aloft placards reading: “False.”
A University of Massachusetts poll showed that the Epstein matter has significantly eroded Mr. Trump’s standing, especially among his loyalists. Nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that the President is handling the matter “not well.” That includes a plurality of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters and nearly half those who voted for him last year.
If the Trump political base remains unsatisfied, “perceptions among Trump voters that he has mishandled the controversy could reduce enthusiasm and participation in the [midterm] elections,” the five UMass political scientists who conducted the study wrote in The Conversation, an online academic journal. “Even if the share of Republicans alienated by the Epstein controversy is relatively small, this could hurt Republicans in close contests.”
This finding comes as Trump-supported Texas state lawmakers undertook an extraordinary effort to redraw congressional ridings to boost the prospects of Republican candidates in districts now held by Democrats. The drive puts in electoral jeopardy two moderate Democrats, Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, who have bipartisan Hispanic support.
Opinion: Is a system where politicians pick their voters still a democracy?
That’s one of the factors endangering the progress Mr. Trump has made among Hispanics. He lost the Hispanic vote in 2020 by 25 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Center, but lost the group by only three percentage points in 2024.
Poll ratings among Hispanics on immigration now are dangerously low for the President. More generally, only one-third of Hispanic voters now support Mr. Trump’s performance in office.
Some Blacks are troubled at what they consider the targeting of Black officials; the effort to remove Black achievements and the travails of the civil-rights movement from museums and historic sites; and the President’s apparent greater interest in white “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” than in the economic and social struggles of Blacks in the United States.
The President’s support among Black voters grew from 8 per cent in 2020 to 15 per cent last year, but support of the President’s performance in office has fallen by half since May, according to an Economist/YouGov poll.
Even so, Mr. Trump still may be poised for one of his trademark comebacks.
“It’s not that things roll off his back,” said Sonja Lyubomirsky, a University of California, Riverside, psychology professor and author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.
“He’s insecure and always threatened. But like all resilient people, he bounces back.”