This Won’t End Well
Panic; dismay; discord: These are the product of the second Trump term, and we’re not even three months into it. After weeks of domestic turmoil due to catastrophic government cuts and forced restructuring under the auspices of DOGE, Elon Musk, and Project 2025, the chaos has gone international with the imposition of a devastating tariff regime that has sent markets spiraling and the wealth class into a frenzy. Even if it were all walked back tomorrow, the impact on the global economy, the reputation of the United States, and the financial well-being of US citizens would remain catastrophic.
And we all know it’s not ending anytime soon.
The reason for this is the same as it has been for all of the other terrible things that Donald Trump has done since he entered the political sphere: Nobody is willing to stop him.
For Democrats, this unwillingness to aggressively intervene has taken the shape of good faith and “fair” play, where maybe Trump himself is bad, but the people around him and the voters who unreservedly support him deserve the benefit of the doubt. So they avoid dealing with him directly. They assume that voters can recognize that Trump is bad, and they assume that this is sufficient as a reason to vote for Democrats. They refuse to get combative or inventive in their tactics because it might hurt someone who isn’t Donald Trump, and that would be terribly unfair. Even though the Republican Party has built itself around Donald Trump, elected Democrats feel it would be unsporting to blame them for his continued resilience. For them, the opposition to Trump must be bipartisan, and so there is no real opposition.
For Republicans, it is more complicated and yet so much simpler: To stop Donald Trump is to destroy themselves, and yet it is the only guarantee of their survival.
Donald Trump is the fetid, beating heart of the GOP. They are nothing without him; there are no heirs. Donald Trump is singular, a centrifugal force that keeps the increasingly unhinged political forces gathered under the Republican banner spinning in the same direction. It is why they have given him monarch authority over the party and the government, and it is why their panic and dismay is largely confined to anonymous quotes and whining on background. It is impossible to confront him directly without also being destroyed, and it is unlikely that any individual confrontation will actually stop him.
There have been so many off-ramps to the situation we found ourselves in, but, simply put, no one was courageous enough to use them. In 2016, Republicans decided that Hillary Clinton winning the election and establishing three consecutive terms of Democratic presidencies was too high a cost to pay, and so rather than kick Trump out of the primaries, consolidate behind one candidate to beat him, or start a floor fight at the convention to oust him, Republicans lined up to get him over the finish line. They stuck with him through both impeachments—one of which was for attempting to murder them and install himself as dictator—and the few renegades who joined with Democrats were ousted from the party, lost their subsequent elections, or have dutifully sat down, shut up, and gone back to eating their food. Congress is currently in the hands of a seditionist in the House and an obedient dog in the Senate, and neither Mike Johnson or John Thune is going to assert their authority as the first and most important branch of government.
It is, frankly, a baffling set of decisions. Not because their political self-interest is unclear—it’s obvious that they can only hold onto Republican voters by holding onto Trump—but because none of this is going to end well regardless. There is no actual winning hand. Elevating a mad king to power doesn’t ever result in peace and prosperity and unified political power; it always ends with sadness and bloodshed and a lot of misery for a lot of people, and that’s the best case scenario. More likely, for those visible officials in the regime, it results in late night escapes, being shot by your own security services, or replacing the effigies when people decide they prefer the real thing. There is no version of this country where Donald Trump reigns and Republicans live in peace.
This is why the breaking point for Republicans will not be market devastation or constituent calls; it will be when they realize that they are irredeemably fucked regardless. When they realize that there’s no actual way to win, that they have consigned themselves to devastation no matter what they do, there will be a shift. But not before that.
This is because imposing consequences on Donald Trump for his decisions is an all-or-nothing proposition. Monarchy powers come with monarchy rules, and there’s only one way to remove a king. It’s true that Trump isn’t a king beyond the Republican Party. He’s still (nominally) a president. However, reminding him of that, constraining him within his role, limiting his capacity as a political actor: This is the same as ending the Republican political project full stop. Once there is a line, there is a question as to why other lines aren’t established, and once people know there’s a limit, then limits become real. As long as they don’t confront Trump, the unpopular efforts to unmake the New Deal can continue apace—without any of their fingerprints on it. But once Trump can be contained, he must be contained.
Trump has operated outside of the rules for the entire time he has engaged in politics. He has said things that are outrageous and hasn’t been punished by voters; he’s done and condoned things that are supposed to be the kiss of death to candidacies and campaigns; he has attempted to overthrow the government of the United States and then succeeded in the election to prevent himself from being held accountable for it. Creating a hard stop on a rule, forcing him back into the box that presidential power is supposed to sit in, is enough to make him shatter. The authority Donald Trump wields is hard…but brittle. He remains intact simply because no one is willing to confront him head on.
The pace with which we are falling apart is too fast to be sustained, and everybody knows it. There is almost no chance that Trump makes it all four years—even if his health sustains him, the politics won’t. We are 78 days into a regime that has already alienated all of our allies, asserted the right to seize anyone under its authority and deny them due process, set fire to the global economy, started a protection racket via tariffs, and has claimed the intention of assisting further in a genocide to build a resort atop the corpses. It’s not going to get better.
The question, then, is where it becomes clear that there’s no way out for Republican lawmakers. I expect that point to be much more drastic and unfortunate than most people: It will be when they are as unsafe staying with Trump as they are opposing him. Right now, Republicans are dealing with shouty town halls and upset constituents, but they aren’t feeling unsafe for their refusal to act against DOGE and Trump. The impact of the tariffs though…these are different. It won’t sink in until something happens, but once it does, there will be no going back.
One thing has been true throughout the entire ascendancy of Trump to ultimate power: His political coalition is willing to live with his decisions, but they aren’t willing to die for them. We are about to see whether Republicans have learned what the rest of us have always known: None of this can end well.
