Donald Trump Is Bad at Politics
· The Atlantic
Long before he entered politics, Donald Trump divided humanity into winners and losers, and nothing has mattered more to him than counting himself among the former. This need drove his refusal to accept the 2020 election results—how could a man defined by winning lose?
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Whatever misgivings some Republicans may have about Trump’s character or his policies, many subscribe to the theory that, if nothing else, the man knows how to win. And his aura of mastery has extended beyond his followers to the Americans who most detest him. The disgust with which many liberals regard Trump is mixed with fear and envy. His powers of persuasion are a source of endless fascination. They have launched a thousand diner safaris to explore his mystical hold on Real America, and inspired innumerable Democratic activists and intellectuals to ponder how they could create a Trump of their own.
But Trump is not a winner. He is, for the most part, a loser. In 2016, he lost the national popular vote—that is, the measure of which candidate Americans wanted to win the election—by two percentage points. His party lost control of the House in the 2018 midterms. Trump lost reelection in 2020. His sole unambiguous victory came in 2024, when he faced the clumsy fill-in candidate for an unpopular administration, against which he prevailed, almost by default.
And now he has lost again. The 2026 midterm elections are delivering a repudiation of historic magnitude to the president’s party, extending far deeper than the customary pendulum swing against the party in power. Not only did Trump’s presidency as a whole repel the electorate, but also his specific interventions in Republican primaries proved counterproductive. He handpicked Senate candidates, such as Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina, for their loyalty, assuming that any warm body could prevail in such deep-red states. Yet Graham went down to defeat, and Paxton currently trails his Democratic opponent, James Talarico.
[Read: What Donald Trump fears most]
The results help clarify the precise nature of Trump’s political talent. He does possess a certain animal cunning that allows him to home in on human weakness, among both his allies and his targets. (“Jeb’s a loser,” he said in February 2016. “The last thing we need, frankly, is another Bush.”) His speech is so ambiguous and discursive that he avoids being pinned down on particulars. These traits have made him relatively effective as a challenger, exploiting discontent with his opponents while making grand promises (a golden era of wealth, world peace) without specifying any steps he will take to achieve them. None of these skills translates to effective governing.
After his election victory two years ago, Democrats feared, and expected, that Trump would coast on the economic recovery he inherited. The post-COVID inflation that had poisoned Joe Biden’s presidency was settling back to normal, and Trump needed only to allow economic gravity to do its work while taking credit for the result.
Instead, Trump carried out the wrenching economic changes that he was unable to enact during his first term, in part because he was obstructed by his advisers and by senators from his own party. In 2017, he came one John McCain vote short of defunding the Affordable Care Act, a defeat that spared Trump’s party the political repercussions of stripping health insurance from millions of Americans. In 2025, a more compliant Republican Congress granted him his wish to gut the ACA, along with food stamps, courting the pain they had avoided eight years earlier.
After successfully taking advantage of the Biden administration’s failure to contain a surge in migrants, even winning support from millions of Latino voters, Trump proceeded to alienate swing voters with mass deportations carried out through a frequently brutal and occasionally deadly campaign of mass terror.
After promising during the 2024 campaign to bring down prices, he took active measures that economists knew would push them higher. Rather than using tariffs mostly as a bluff and settling for modestly rejiggered trade agreements for which he could claim credit, as he did during his first term, he imposed the costliest tariffs since the Herbert Hoover era.
When enterprising members of Congress decided, without Trump’s involvement, to pass a bill earlier this year to encourage more housing construction, Trump could have taken credit for their work and demonstrated at least an interest in addressing a major cost driver. Instead, angry that Republicans had failed to pass his bill restricting voting, he petulantly boycotted the signing ceremony. Declining to sign a bipartisan housing bill at a moment when housing costs are a top public concern is the political equivalent of being handed a baby and refusing to kiss it.
Most incredible of all, 10 years after he astonished the commentariat by standing on a Republican debate stage in hawkish South Carolina and declaring the Iraq War “a big, fat mistake,” Trump replicated the George W. Bush administration’s signature blunder by launching a war of choice in the Middle East without any plausible exit strategy.
Trump might have received a little bit of grace from voters if he had made visible gestures of concern for the pain that Americans felt from these policies. Presidents in the past have grasped the need to show the country that they are working hard, because, if nothing else, regular people typically assume that improving the economy is a function of presidential diligence, like a landlord fixing a leaky toilet. Instead, Trump turned his attention to decorating palaces, erecting monuments, renaming buildings after himself, and demanding awards.
He has weirdly inverted a classic populist trope, which posits that the wealth and comfort of the capital comes at the expense of the prosperity of the decent, God-fearing people of the heartland. Trump obsesses in public about his focus on the tiny area in the immediate vicinity of the White House. He devoted his closing message the day before the election to a lengthy recitation of improvements in the capital, from his war against algae to a proposed golf course, which he promised would give residents of Washington a discount. This fixation is a source of pride only for those whose chief goal for this presidency is Trump’s glorification.
The theme connecting all of these baffling choices is a misread of the 2024 election results. The MAGA cult was never large enough to win a majority of the Electoral College. Trump won because he offered an alternative to an unpopular Biden administration, and because enough of the public fondly recalled his first presidential term before COVID struck—and retroactively excused him for the consequences of his pandemic mismanagement. The myth of Trump’s political genius is primarily a by-product of this first-term good fortune. He inherited a healthy economy and had little effect on its trajectory, paradoxically benefiting from failure. The buoyant recovery created a floor beneath his approval ratings that no gaffe or scandal could crash through.
Trump, however, convinced himself that he had won because the public shared his conclusion that his first term had been a treacherous betrayal by his enemies. And so, while Trump’s 2024 coalition hinged on Americans who felt nostalgic for his first term, these same voters empowered a president determined not to repeat it.
[David Frum: Only losers play the madman]
He ruthlessly purged the bureaucracy and his party of all dissent so that he could build the dream palace of his imagination—an imperium that would silence his critics in the news media, reduce the business elite to sniveling courtiers, and venerate him as a king.
Many of these efforts have met with success. But the unwavering loyalty he has commanded within his party has come at the price of revulsion outside of it. Trump made the autocrat’s error of believing his own propaganda, thus denying himself the benefit of realistic advice that might help him avert or correct his misjudgments. And by treating disagreement as treason, he locked the exits, trapping his fellow Republicans with him as he burned down their reputation.
While the Americans who worship Trump as a culture-war champion or god-king remain enthralled, the ones who thought they were hiring him for a four-year gig to get a handle on the border and inflation regard his second term as a failure.
Those two constituencies are often conflated with each other, and Republicans have encouraged the conflation by treating his fans as the authentic Volk. In reality, Trump’s base is not synonymous with the country. His base has never constituted anything close to a national majority. Stripped of the protective gloss he enjoyed from the healthy economy during his first term, Trump has no more political magic than Jimmy Carter.