Latest news with #Trumpism2.0
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - July 2025 is when the Trump era started to end
It took six months into President Trump's second term to get here, but something shifted in Trump World this month. The administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case — including its assertion that a 'client list' doesn't exist — sent tremors through the MAGA ecosystem, creating a permission structure for key players on the right to start treating Trump like a lame duck. This was a significant development, even though there are obvious reasons to view Trump this way. Constitutional limits prevent him from running again after 2024. That alone creates an expiration date on his relevance that even the most obsequious loyalists can't ignore forever. Then there's the Epstein connection, which didn't just put a fresh stink on an already scandal-soaked politician. It found him on the wrong side of a definitive MAGA narrative. It's one thing to be indicted multiple times; it's quite another to be entangled in the biggest conspiracy theory of our era. But there's something else in the air: Trump looks old. We may have grown accustomed to his ALL CAPS rants, but the physical symptoms are harder to normalize — the swollen ankles. The makeup caked awkwardly on his hands. Taken together — the reality of Trump's lame-duck status, being out of touch with much of his base and now the physical deterioration — we are left with a picture of a man whose once iron-clad grip on his party is finally beginning to loosen. The base might not say it outright. MAGA influencers certainly won't admit it — but they absolutely see it. And more importantly, they're starting to act on it. The jostling has begun. For this reason, it's no longer absurdly premature to start talking about succession. And, for my money, there are three leading contenders. Vice President JD Vance — seemingly the obvious successor — is clearly positioning himself as heir apparent to Trumpism 2.0: similar themes, better vocabulary, a little more polish and (crucially) a future. Tucker Carlson now also seems to be testing out what it would look like to actually run for office. And Donald Trump Jr. is lurking around the perimeter; the assumption is that his name will carry him somewhere, though it's not clear where (or even if) anyone would follow him. For those hoping the MAGA spell would break post-Trump, the prospects are strikingly bleak. These three men all occupy somewhat similar turf — a figure like Nikki Haley will not be not on this list. Trumpism will survive, albeit without Trump. But winning the internecine battle to lead this movement might be a Pyrrhic victory. Trump's coalition cannot be inherited any more than his celebrity status or charisma can. The coalition wasn't built to outlive 2024. It is an unruly jumble of people with wildly incompatible worldviews, glued together by little more than shared grievance and a cult of personality. It includes paleoconservative nationalists and neoconservative interventionists, Christian fundamentalists and manosphere libertines, fans of McDonald's and crunchy health nuts. And it worked, somehow, in 2024 — but only for Trump. This has always been the dirty secret of Trumpism: It's not transferrable. You could see it in the 2018 midterms, when Republicans took a beating without Trump on the ballot. You saw it again in 2022, when a rogues' gallery of Trump-endorsed candidates flopped spectacularly. The Trump base doesn't show up for the brand — it shows up for the man. So what happens when the man is gone? We're about to find out. For the first time in nearly a decade, the right is confronting a future without a clear standard-bearer. And every would-be successor faces the same paradox: To win Trump's base, you have to sound like Trump. But the more you sound like Trump, the more you remind people you're not him. It's difficult to imagine that any of the frontrunners could maintain the same patchwork coalition. Vance might be able to pick off the nationalist-intellectual set, but he lacks Trump's charisma, and gives off oily politician vibes. Tucker might dominate the culture-war lane. Don Jr. might do okay with the too-online meme crowd. But no one can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Because the thing they're all trying to inherit — Trumpism— isn't an ideology. It's a person. This is the tragedy and farce of the post-Trump GOP: It bet everything on a single man, and now it has no idea how to function without him. Trump hollowed out the party, scorched the institutions and rewired the voter base. And he will likely leave behind a political husk that still bears his name but contains little of his animating style. Of course, Trump isn't gone yet. Republicans — thanks, perhaps, to their plans to gerrymander Texas — could still hold on to Congress in November. Maybe Trump can ultimately find a way to outrun the Epstein controversy and set the terms for the next four years. And, regardless, he could also play a vital role in picking (or sabotaging) whoever inherits his mantle. But that doesn't change the fact that his era is already ending. The spell is finally starting to wear off. And somewhere, just beneath the surface, it feels like the scramble for 2028 has already begun. The question isn't whether someone can pick up the torch. It's whether that person can prevent the flame from being extinguished entirely. Matt K. Lewis is a columnist, podcaster and author of the books 'Too Dumb to Fail' and 'Filthy Rich Politicians.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
July 2025 is when the Trump era started to end
It took six months into President Trump's second term to get here, but something shifted in Trump World this month. The administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case — including its assertion that a 'client list' doesn't exist — sent tremors through the MAGA ecosystem, creating a permission structure for key players on the right to start treating Trump like a lame duck. This was a significant development, even though there are obvious reasons to view Trump this way. Constitutional limits prevent him from running again after 2024. That alone creates an expiration date on his relevance that even the most obsequious loyalists can't ignore forever. Then there's the Epstein connection, which didn't just put a fresh stink on an already scandal-soaked politician. It found him on the wrong side of a definitive MAGA narrative. It's one thing to be indicted multiple times; it's quite another to be entangled in the biggest conspiracy theory of our era. But there's something else in the air: Trump looks old. We may have grown accustomed to his ALL CAPS rants, but the physical symptoms are harder to normalize — the swollen ankles. The makeup caked awkwardly on his hands. Taken together — the reality of Trump's lame-duck status, being out of touch with much of his base and now the physical deterioration — we are left with a picture of a man whose once iron-clad grip on his party is finally beginning to loosen. The base might not say it outright. MAGA influencers certainly won't admit it — but they absolutely see it. And more importantly, they're starting to act on it. The jostling has begun. For this reason, it's no longer absurdly premature to start talking about succession. And, for my money, there are three leading contenders. Vice President JD Vance — seemingly the obvious successor — is clearly positioning himself as heir apparent to Trumpism 2.0: similar themes, better vocabulary, a little more polish and (crucially) a future. Tucker Carlson now also seems to be testing out what it would look like to actually run for office. And Donald Trump Jr. is lurking around the perimeter; the assumption is that his name will carry him somewhere, though it's not clear where (or even if) anyone would follow him. For those hoping the MAGA spell would break post-Trump, the prospects are strikingly bleak. These three men all occupy somewhat similar turf — a figure like Nikki Haley will not be not on this list. Trumpism will survive, albeit without Trump. But winning the internecine battle to lead this movement might be a Pyrrhic victory. Trump's coalition cannot be inherited any more than his celebrity status or charisma can. The coalition wasn't built to outlive 2024. It is an unruly jumble of people with wildly incompatible worldviews, glued together by little more than shared grievance and a cult of personality. It includes paleoconservative nationalists and neoconservative interventionists, Christian fundamentalists and manosphere libertines, fans of McDonald's and crunchy health nuts. And it worked, somehow, in 2024 — but only for Trump. This has always been the dirty secret of Trumpism: It's not transferrable. You could see it in the 2018 midterms, when Republicans took a beating without Trump on the ballot. You saw it again in 2022, when a rogues' gallery of Trump-endorsed candidates flopped spectacularly. The Trump base doesn't show up for the brand — it shows up for the man. So what happens when the man is gone? We're about to find out. For the first time in nearly a decade, the right is confronting a future without a clear standard-bearer. And every would-be successor faces the same paradox: To win Trump's base, you have to sound like Trump. But the more you sound like Trump, the more you remind people you're not him. It's difficult to imagine that any of the frontrunners could maintain the same patchwork coalition. Vance might be able to pick off the nationalist-intellectual set, but he lacks Trump's charisma, and gives off oily politician vibes. Tucker might dominate the culture-war lane. Don Jr. might do okay with the too-online meme crowd. But no one can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Because the thing they're all trying to inherit — Trumpism— isn't an ideology. It's a person. This is the tragedy and farce of the post-Trump GOP: It bet everything on a single man, and now it has no idea how to function without him. Trump hollowed out the party, scorched the institutions and rewired the voter base. And he will likely leave behind a political husk that still bears his name but contains little of his animating style. Of course, Trump isn't gone yet. Republicans — thanks, perhaps, to their plans to gerrymander Texas — could still hold on to Congress in November. Maybe Trump can ultimately find a way to outrun the Epstein controversy and set the terms for the next four years. And, regardless, he could also play a vital role in picking (or sabotaging) whoever inherits his mantle. But that doesn't change the fact that his era is already ending. The spell is finally starting to wear off. And somewhere, just beneath the surface, it feels like the scramble for 2028 has already begun. The question isn't whether someone can pick up the torch. It's whether that person can prevent the flame from being extinguished entirely.
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Chris Selley: Donald Trump's library of failure
The 'Team Canada' approach against Trumpism 2.0, ostensibly sealed in ink in January after a meeting of the premiers, looked good on paper — at first glance, anyway. Only Danielle Smith failed to sign, insisting on Alberta's particular interests and causing many palpitations among learned folk in the eastern time zone, but François Legault's commitment to the team was hardly any more compelling for his having signed it. Le Quebec politicians have been roughly as enthusiastic about limiting hydroelectricity exports to the U.S. as Alberta politicians have been about limiting oil and gas exports. Smith was again taking it on the chin this week for her Alberta-firstism, after meeting with new Liberal Leader Mark Carney and issuing 'a specific list of demands to the prime minister, regardless of who that is.' It boils down to a case for a totally unfettered oil-and-gas industry, with some other stuff thrown in as well. Andrew Leach, the University of Alberta energy economist, called it 'effectively a separatist manifesto,' and he's not wrong. But there are far worse fates awaiting countries out there than being a stable federation of 10 provinces fighting Ottawa and each other for their best and biggest piece of the pie. Canadian jurisdictions need not be united in their economic or sociopolitical goals to still cohere into something much stronger than Trumpism. Speaking of which: America's Orange Wave has come, perhaps inevitably, for one of the less consequential but more symbolic artifacts of Canadians' hundreds of years of mostly friendly relations with Americans. Effective immediately, Canadians will no longer be able to visit the historic library that's split between Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Que. — the border being demarcated inside with a freely crossed black line — without going through customs first. If you hadn't heard of the library before, you might have recently when Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, paid a visit last month. Deborah Bishop, the library's executive director, told the Boston Globe that Noem made a little pantomime of stepping back and forth across the border. 'She stood on the American side and said, 'USA No. 1.' Then she crossed the line and said, 'The 51st state,'' Bishop told the Globe. 'She did it at least three times.' It's best to avoid negotiating with petulant vandals unless you have to These, I submit, are not the sorts of people Canada should be allowing to dictate our national conversation. It would be nice to say no one has ever tried to use the library's Can-Am status for nefarious purposes. But in 2021 seven people drove across the library's lawn from Canada into the U.S., only to be nabbed by U.S. Border Patrol moments later and sent back to Canada — unsurprisingly, since that's one of the stupidest ways to cross the border illegally. Why not just call ahead and tell them where and when? In 2010, meanwhile, the library — specifically its men's washroom — was the scene of an equally idiotic scheme to smuggle significant numbers of guns into Canada. As it turns out, that's difficult to do without a librarian noticing. But the Haskell Free Library and Opera House is clearly not a threat to border security. Inasmuch as it entices moron border criminals, it seems to be a boon! What it is is perhaps the greatest symbol of an era of Canada-U.S. that doesn't just predate Trump or 9/11, but that you probably have to be Gen-X or older to remember. You didn't even need a passport to drive to Buffalo or Detroit for a day's shopping in a country where they actually sold all those things you saw on television. We may not have had free trade in goods and services, but travelling was a breeze compared to nowadays. Trump wants to blow that up for his own reasons, whatever they are — if he even knows. He's a petulant vandal, and it's best to avoid negotiating with petulant vandals unless you have to. We, alas, do have to. But that's no reason for us not to have a knock-down, drag-out fight over Canada's immediate and longer-term political future. Politesse and patriotism be damned, for once let's see a proper election campaign about real things. National Post cselley@ Chris Selley: Draconian B.C. bill repeats lessons we failed to learn from COVID Chris Selley: Mark Carney's showing his weaknesses. But so is Poilievre Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what's really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.
