The recurring theme of my writing the past few weeks is that Donald Trump is not invulnerable. His win did not upend the rules of American politics or render him immune to political misfortune. Like everything we experience, his victory was contingent — a function of specific people in specific circumstances making specific choices. To change any of these variables is to change the ultimate destination.
To put this a little differently, whatever you think of the nature of his win, Donald Trump is still Donald Trump. He is overwhelmingly strong in some areas and ruinously deficient in others. He holds so much sway over his supporters that, as he famously put it nearly 10 years ago, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose “any voters.” He’s almost incapable of managing himself or the people around him. His White House was notoriously chaotic and he remains as impulsive, dysfunctional and undisciplined as he was during his first term.
There was, in the first weeks after the election, some notion that this had changed, that we were looking at a new Trump, ready to lead a united Republican Party. But as we’ve seen over the past few days, this was premature. First, the Republican Party is far from unified, as their struggle to pass a bill to continue to fund the government showed. It took days. What’s more, Trump is not alone as a figure of influence among congressional Republicans; Elon Musk has imposed himself onto the president-elect as a consigliere of sorts and is trying to build a political empire for himself via X, the social media platform he essentially bought for this purpose.
It was from X, in fact, that Musk urged Republicans to kill the continuing resolution, throwing the House into chaos and prompting Trump to escalate the confrontation to save face, demanding a new resolution that suspended or raised the debt limit. On Thursday evening, Speaker Mike Johnson tried to pass that bill. But a number of Republicans broke ranks, and unified Democratic opposition meant it was dead on arrival.
Together, Trump and Musk have not only walked the Republican Party into an otherwise needless defeat; they also have given Democrats the jump start they apparently needed to behave like a real opposition. According to Axios, House Democrats even broke into chants of “Hell no” when confronted with proposed Republican spending cuts.
That’s more like it.
The absurd battle over the continuing resolution should stand as a vivid reminder that Trump is in a much more precarious position than he may have appeared to be in immediately after the election. With a 41 percent favorability rating, he remains unpopular. He cannot count on a functional majority in the House. He has no plan to deliver the main thing, lower prices, that voters want. And one of his most important allies, Musk, is an agent of chaos he can’t seem to control.
There have been enough presidents that there are a few models for what a well-run administration might look like. This is not one of them.
What I Wrote
I wrote this week about the Democratic Party’s listless response to Trump’s victory and what it would mean for Democrats to act like a real opposition party:
It would prioritize nimble, aggressive leadership over an unbending commitment to seniority and the elevation of whoever is next in line. Above all, an opposition would see that politics is about conflict — or, as Henry Adams famously put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds” — and reject the risk-averse strategies of the past in favor of new blood and new ideas.
In the latest episode of our podcast, John Ganz and I discussed “Men in Black,” the 1997 sci-fi action comedy starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. I also had a great conversation with Luke Winkie of Slate about my use of TikTok, which you can read here.
Now Reading
Adam Serwer on MAGA’s media literacy problem, for The Atlantic:
As Trump reshapes the nation in his image, some of his supporters seem inclined to turn cautionary tales on their head, empathizing with villains or antiheroes to such a degree that they miss the point of these stories entirely, even when the writers make the message as clear as possible. We might call this problem Tony Soprano Syndrome, after the patron saint of flawed antihero protagonists.
E. Tammy Kim on South Korean democracy for The New Yorker:
Can a democracy be simultaneously brawny and brittle? A single man managed to fling a nation of fifty-two million back in time, toward authoritarianism. Yet ordinary Koreans resisted and a range of institutional backstops held. Legislators scaled the walls of the National Assembly to vote against the martial-law decree, Yoon was impeached, and, late Saturday night, the Constitutional Court convened to start the clock on its review. All of it, together, amounts to a rescue of South Korean democracy, at least for now.
Kaila Philo on “Black utopianism” for The Baffler:
This is the spirit that animates Black utopianism, a hodgepodge of racial, religious, and political movements forged in response to the structural racism of the United States. While their contemporaries fought for further integration into the system, Black utopians sought to work around — or beyond — it, often creating their alternative systems or organizations, like interracial communes or pro-Black capitalist mini-metropolises.
Hend Salama Abo Helow writes about Gaza and her family’s olive grove for the Institute for Palestine Studies:
Once alive with tradition and warmth, this season is now marked by loss, mourning, panic, hunger, and displacement — an endless maze without an exit. As the war crossed its first year, autumn returned to find us still standing. We refused to abandon the rituals that tethered us to life, even while the world around us crumbled under relentless bombings and the shrill, deafening buzz of drones.
Alan Elrod on the example of John Quincy Adams for Liberal Currents:
John Quincy was morally fixed, but intellectually wide-ranging. He frequently spurned party loyalty and was fundamentally quarrelsome. As biographer Harlow Giles Unger describes the later Adams, “he was argumentative and politically unpredictable, but consistent in his fierce and constant defense of justice, human rights, and the individual liberties that his father and other Founding Fathers had fought for in the American Revolution.”
Photo of the Week
A view of Athens from the Acropolis.
Now Eating: Roasted Garlic and White Bean Dip With Rosemary
I have no notes for this recipe, which comes from New York Times Cooking. It’s easy and cheap to make and great as part of a light lunch spread.
Ingredients
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1 head garlic
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1 teaspoon plus 5 tablespoons olive oil
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2 (15-ounce) cans white beans, like cannellini, Great Northern or navy beans, drained and rinsed
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3 tablespoons lemon juice (from 1 lemon)
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1 tablespoon roughly chopped fresh rosemary leaves plus 1 full sprig
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¼ teaspoon black pepper
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1 pinch of cayenne, plus more for garnish (optional)
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1 tablespoon hot water
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1¼ teaspoons kosher salt
Directions
Roast the garlic: Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Peel off most of the garlic’s outermost skin but leave the whole head intact. Trim about ¼ inch off the top of the garlic to expose the cloves. Place the garlic on a large piece of aluminum foil, then drizzle 1 teaspoon olive oil over the exposed cloves and close the foil into a pouch. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, until you can pierce the center of the head with a knife. Let cool slightly.
Squeeze the roasted garlic cloves into the bowl of a food processor. Add the white beans, 4 tablespoons olive oil, lemon juice, rosemary leaves, black pepper, cayenne (if using), hot water and salt. Purée until smooth, then taste for salt, pepper, rosemary and lemon juice. Adjust as necessary. Transfer to a serving dish.
Heat remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a small heavy skillet over medium-high heat. When hot, add the remaining rosemary sprig — it should sizzle. Cook until brown and crisp, flipping once, about 1 minute per side, then transfer to the top of the dip as a garnish. Pour or spoon the remaining olive oil, now infused with rosemary, over the top of the dip. Sprinkle with cayenne for a little additional heat.
The post Donald Trump Is Vulnerable appeared first on New York Times.
