Soon after the 2024 election, I published an article titled “How Donald Trump could succeed: Or, more likely, fail.”
I think that clearly, as of late September 2026, he is failing.
The once-vaunted “vibe shift” has evaporated and young voters have swung back to the left. We have a House incumbent in a Trump +15 district distancing herself from Trump’s immigration policy. The big question of the midterms is whether Democrats can win Senate races in Iowa, Texas, Alaska, and Kansas — states that should not be in play.
This doesn’t mean that MAGA is down for the count, by any means. The Republicans have a daunting cash advantage and the Senate math is objectively very difficult for Dems.
But Trump is undeniably unpopular. And in terms of the scale of his failure, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that Republicans’ best electoral news is just that while Democrats have good nominees in a number of well-chosen races, the national party leadership has not moved to the center since 2024 and a lot of blue state progressives are being replaced by even-further-left politicians.
That’s keeping Republicans in the game, to an extent. But it also underscores the reality that Trump is doing the opposite of crushing and discrediting the left — he’s rocket fuel for thermostatic counter-mobilization, just like he was back in the “Woke 1” days.
So if Trump has failed, how does my own diagnosis hold up?
I think the answer is that it’s pretty good, but not perfect.
My most successful, most fundamental forecast, one that I think a lot of tech industry people might have benefited from listening to, was that Trump was more likely to fail than succeed. Something about the Silicon Valley fast-follower mindset seems to make these guys struggle to understand the basic nature of the political pendulum, and a lot of folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos who used to have more progressive personas bought high on MAGA right after Trump won, when they should have hedged their bets.
Presidents usually overreach, and Trump is certainly not a person of above-average discipline or judgment.
Bad luck or bad policy?
One thing I noted in the piece was that despite Trump’s anti-war rhetoric on the campaign trail, the national security team he announced shortly after the election was “an extremely hawkish group that screams ‘hot war with Iran.’”
In retrospect, I wish I’d made a bigger deal about this.
I noted at the time that it seemed like a team that would lead the country into war with Iran and then hedged with the observation that presidents sometimes surprise us. So far so good! What I didn’t do in the piece was dwell on the idea at any length, which is too bad because I was right about the team of super-hawks and this seems to have kind of wrecked Trump’s presidency.
I mentioned this back in April, but there’s a weird finding in the economics literature that Democratic Party presidents enjoy systematically better economic performance even though they don’t pursue systematically better economic policy.
Republican war-mongering is their worst economic policy
Mark Mills writes in City Journal that the economic chaos unleashed by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz should teach environmentalists that they are underestimating the indispensability of oil and gas to the world economy.
The explanation, according to Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, is that “the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior total-factor-productivity (T.F.P.) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future.”
They seem to primarily understand this as a question of good luck. But having watched both the George W. Bush and second Trump presidencies unfold, I think it’s because Republicans have systematically bad foreign policy that is inattentive to the downside risk of saber-rattling and hawkishness. Trump made a great show of breaking with the Bush-era “neocons” over their idealistic invocations of democracy-promotion. But the actual problem with Bush-era foreign policy wasn’t belief in democracy; it was excessive belief in the potential upside of coercive military force. Trump has retained the error while reconfiguring the goals.
Overreaching on immigration
In the piece, I also argued that “nothing did more to drive support for Trump than backlash to the multi-year span of chaos at the southern border due to widespread exploitation of asylum loopholes,” which gave Trump a huge opportunity to reap a political win by forcefully doing what voters wanted and shutting down the irregular inflow of unselected immigrants.
He did that, and I think it’s worked well for him.
I also said he’d be tempted to try to actually deliver on the promise of “mass deportation” from the interior and that this would probably generate backlash.
My view was that the most prudent course would be to return to the Obama administration’s first-term policy of rapid-fire jailhouse pickups of illegal immigrants arrested for non-immigration crimes in cooperative jurisdictions and to try and avoid picking other fights. Trump has done plenty of that style of immigration enforcement, but he’s also done a lot of more aggressive interior-enforcement actions of the sort that I thought would spark mass public backlash.
They kind of have, but my read of the evidence is that it’s much less backlash than I would have hoped and much less than a lot of progressives seem to believe has actually occurred — Trump’s immigration approval rating has drifted down, but it’s significantly higher than his overall approval rating or approval on any other major issue.
Or to put it another way, the really clear backlash has been to extreme forms of overreach — such as immigration officials literally killing American citizens without cause and the White House covering for them.
That’s incredibly bleak and it did generate, eventually, some pullback from the administration. But they’ve really gone quite far on immigration issues. Interior enforcement has been consistently aggressive, they are stripping as many people as possible of legal status, they’ve deported a considerable number of people erroneously, they’re messing up skilled legal immigration — and I think it’s hard to argue that they’re paying a big price.
This dynamic is bad for Trump in a handful of South Florida and South Texas districts that are heavily Latino but swung heavily to the right in the 2020 and 2024 cycles, so it’s not like there’s zero backlash.
But still, immigration is consistently one of Trump’s best-performing issues, so he’s kind of incentivized to do cruel, flashy things to drive attention to it and away from the core affordability questions that are crushing him.
Moving backward on affordability
I noted in the piece that the most obvious way Trump could fail would be by trying to actually implement his campaign promises on tariffs, since they directly contradicted the mass public’s urgent desire for cheaper stuff.
“Trump’s supporters in the business community say that he’s just lying and won’t do this,” I wrote, “that he’ll use the threat of tariffs to coerce certain policy concessions out of certain foreign countries.”
I thought threatening tariffs and then calling off trade wars in exchange for minor, superficial, or even totally fake concessions was a pretty good idea given how much Trump himself dominates the MAGA information space. The risk to his presidency was that he’d really do it.
Trump very early in his administration did the huge Liberation Day tariffs, faced massive market and political blowback, and backed down. But ever since backing down, he’s been trying to recreate Liberation Day in the aggregate while minimizing stock market blowback. In terms of the problem Trump is trying to solve, this has worked. Notably, the data center industry has gotten exemptions so that the construction boom is going on unabated.
But this does not help people with the cost of living.
In fact, the furious pace of A.I.-related investment is raising the price of consumer electronics that compete for the same stuff.
Meanwhile, the tariffs as such are not having that large an impact on the overall cost of living. But in political terms, they’re a salient and obvious example of a president who was elected on a promise of lower prices acting to make prices higher.
I said in the piece that it was “basically inconceivable” that Trump would avoid the kind of deficit-financed regressive tax cut that added inflationary pressure to the economy and pushed up interest rates and, indeed, that’s exactly what Trump did. So we have not only the war spiking energy prices but also Trump’s two most high-profile economic initiatives — the One Big Beautiful Bill and the tariffs — both pushing up the cost of living.
It’s honestly incredibly stupid to win an election on the basis of making an impossible promise of lower consumer prices and then to take deliberate policy actions that go in the other direction. But here we are.
A cautionary tale, not a model
I don’t want to claim oracular wisdom on any of this, but I do think the general tenor of my forecast — that Trump would probably overreach across a broad range of issues and spark significant backlash — was basically borne out and a lot closer to the mark than once-widespread speculations about a vibe shift or a realignment.
The immigration backlash point proved, I think, to be further away than I thought it was, which still didn’t stop Trump from going too far.
The immigration case is a particularly pointed illustration of why I find it disturbing that so many progressive policy entrepreneurs continue to cast Trump’s approach as a model to emulate rather than as a cautionary tale.
I do understand the appeal of heavily relying on legal creativity and aggressive assertions of executive power as the main mode of policymaking. The alternative is to focus on winning supermajorities, which requires a more moderate big-tent approach or else relying on bipartisan legislation as the main mode of policy change.
But even on immigration, where Trump had the public squarely on his side and he acted with maximum aggression and got away with more than I thought he would in terms of public opinion, he hasn’t actually enacted any permanent legislative change. I’ve seen conservatives on social media jumping up and down with delight about Trump enacting a new “public charge” regulation for visa issuance that reverses the Biden administration’s reversal of conservatives’ prior effort to enact this regulation in Trump’s first term.
This kind of see-sawing is inherently less impactful than a push to change actual immigration law would be. But to change the statutes governing who gets visas and the terms by which foreign-born people or residents of mixed-status families can access the social safety net would require Republicans to set priorities and to give Democrats some wins on topics that Republicans have decided are lower priority.
By insisting on purism, you find yourself limited to executive actions and you actually achieve less.
And it seems to me that as progressive schemers plot their agenda for 2029, they are basically aiming to recapitulate these mistakes. The reason Trump didn’t genuinely focus on reducing the macroeconomic drivers of high prices and high interest rates is that doing so would have required sidelining his pre-baked ideas around taxes. Democrats, similarly, will face a choice between doing internal coalition management by rebranding a progressive-interest-group agenda as “affordability” and actually focusing on affordability. And then on the broad suite of other agenda items, they will face the same tradeoff between purity-maxxing through executive action and the annoying — but ultimately more impactful — process of securing durable base hits through bipartisan legislation.
If you want to reshape the country in more profound ways than that, you need some combination of winning huge congressional majorities and/or being popular enough to survive midterm backlash cycles, either of which requires being way more prudent and disciplined than Trump was rather than plowing ahead like a bull in a china shop.
If you want to find a Republican model to emulate, I would forget Trump and look at New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte, who is cruising to re-election in a state Kamala Harris won despite a terrible national political climate.
Notably, she pulled this off without being a Phil Scott type who’s checked by a Democratic supermajority in the legislature. There’s a red trifecta in New Hampshire, and they have chosen to behave in a disciplined way — they refused to do a MAGA gerrymander of the House map, for example, to avoid nationalizing state politics — and have made incremental policy gains and built power.
I often hear that it’s impossible for political coalitions to be disciplined in the social media era, but while I agree that it’s hard, I think this is learned helplessness. They’re disciplined in New Hampshire. Trump and the Republicans have been very disciplined about abortion, while they’ve chosen to be reckless in other areas and are paying the price.
Democrats shouldn’t try to harness that same recklessness to progressive ends; they should learn to behave more prudently.
This piece tries to argue, in part, that the right and progressives lack the center-left's strategic foresight and restraint to implement policies that will be popular with Americans.
I think it's instructive to go back not to the 2024 piece on Trump, but to the Biden era.
Granting the idea that voters were primarily upset about immigration, inflation, and Biden's age, my take is that at least initially, Slow Boring was somewhat supportive of the administration's excesses in all of these areas (at least until it was too late and they became clear failures).
1. On inflation, SB was "team transitory" [1] and was already arguing for slowing down hikes in 2022 [2] with some charts from selected sectors of the economy about how inflation was about to turn around.
2. On immigration, SB lamented the chaos at the border but argued that Biden's strategy (through June 2024!) was prudent: the main impediment was the lack of a "Border Bill" [3]. (Of course, later, Biden somehow managed to close the border without one.)
3. On Biden's age, Matt spent the run-up to the July 2024 debate arguing that these concerns were something of a hoax, and that Robert Hur is a hack (which he still maintains). Later, he wrote a mea culpa, but even still the gist was "My assessment under uncertainty was maximally rational; alas, I was still incorrect."
In retrospect, SB has painted failings on (1)-(3) primarily as the Biden administration being too cozy with progressives (e.g., the worst Biden dead-enders were Bernie and AOC).
Nevertheless, SB was largely in favor of gambling on these issues until it became painfully obvious that they would become liabilities. (Note: This is *precisely* how Trump has failed as well. He does something stupid and then backs down once the polls turn bad, but then it's too late!)
Moreover, if Kamala had won, I think SB would probably look back on pieces about (1)-(3) as evidence of the strategic wisdom of center-left policies.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/transitory-inflation
[2] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-fed-cant-save-the-economy
[3] https://www.slowboring.com/p/biden-is-doing-the-right-thing-on
I really hate the whole Tim Walz theory of politics where you have a finite amount of political capital that you can burn up before you leave office just because it’s so obviously incorrect! Politicians don’t hold obligations to their voters so much as they hold obligations to govern well: if you seriously think that your opponent will govern poorly, than you ought to develop some sort of platform that will let your side be in charge rather than turbocharge the electoral seesaw.