Power is seeping away from Donald Trump as his health and poll ratings slump, says Fleet Street Fox. The big question is what an insecure, ageing bully with nuclear weapons will do next
A man with tiny hands who’s already lost power once was never going to hold onto it for long a second time.
But Donald Trump’s declining political strength is impossible for him to comprehend, and because all journalists have the time or energy to report is whatever falls out of his mouth, hardly anyone is pointing out that he’s growing weaker by the day.
The US economy is in a slump, prices are rising, his opponents are surging, his base doesn’t give a damn for his patchy and so-far inconsequential wins in Ukraine and Gaza. Jefrey Epstein pours scorn on him from beyond the grave. The only thing this guy is winning at is beating himself to be the most unpopular US president of modern times.
There is a downside to the fact Trump’s poll ratings have descended through the Earth’s crust and are speeding towards the inner core: when a bully starts losing, they get angry. Go and ask the Capitol how that turns out.
Trump doesn’t need to know or accept that he’s in decline, in the same way a dementia patient doesn’t have to understand their diagnosis to react to it. The loss of all the things he has regarded as a constant – women, popularity, fear – will disrupt his internal processes in the same way as a dose of castor oil. And what this man contains, and excretes, is hatred, bile, cowardice, and every other gobbet of awfulness you can think of.
There are multiple factors at play. First, he’s flat-out unpopular because he’s not doing a very good job. He promised to lower the cost of living, but a year in prices are still going up. He promised to control the border, but his goons have been snatching US citizens off the streets, including children and cancer patients. The biggest economy in the world is stagnating due to worldwide tariff wars, and tottering under the weight of an enormous AI bubble his administration has been inflating.
Second, he’s getting old. He’s 79, overweight whatever he says, wearing make-up to cover bruising, clearly retaining water in his ankles, and appearing to fall asleep at public events. His swaggering, wide-ranging public speeches have become short, random eruptions.
And according to an analysis by the New York Times, his public appearances are 40% down on his first term. Then, he would generally appear in public around 10am. Now, it’s gone noon, and it’s not like his workload is worse – this time he has a government machine censored, threatened and appointed to share his aims. It should be easier to be Trump, this time around. Instead the only thing that’s really holding up is the hairspray
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And politically his time is equally finite. All US presidents find their power begins to ebb at the mid-term elections, if not before. On the one hand they’re a bellweather for public opinion, and an excellent protest vote for an electorate that wants to punish a president they may still support. But for a president in his second term, they also mark the point at which their party’s thoughts turn to a successor. Rivals vie for position, and support begins to coalesce around the favourite.
Could Trump conceive of anything worse, than a younger, healthier man – possibly, like his vice president JD Vance, with a mixed race family, or also like Vance with a history of criticising Trump when it is useful – replacing him? Throw in the possibility that the resurgent Democrats, who were as surprised as anyone else to find themselves winning governorships and senate seats by up to 20 points earlier this month, may seem capable of winning a general election and he really will implode. If it’s a woman, or a Muslim, he’ll be beside himself.
With a normal, only slightly-bonkers man in post, the world is none the worse for it. But Trump has a history of lashing out, provoking supporters to take appalling steps, and the American public is not averse to throwing up would-be assassins of all political stripes. The National Guard is on the streets in blue states, two troops have just been shot in Washington, and the domestic situation is consistently febrile.
All of that is a risk to Americans. But where the whole world enters uncharted waters is the combination of Trump’s decline and his instructions to resume the testing of nuclear weapons. Do not be fooled by calm-down-dear assertions that they’ll be safety tests, or ultra-low-yield, or underground, and it’s no more than others are doing. All those things can be true, while at the same time moving 7 billion people closer to certain doom.
If the US – which hasn’t detonated a nuclear weapon since 1992 – does so again, even in the most minimal, unseen, “we’re just checking the wiring” kind of way, Russia and China will have an excuse to go further. And while the US may need to check the 50-year-old tech it relies on, China has hypersonic nukes it wants to play with, and Russia wants to test its prototypes too.
The US has its own superfast missiles, but the nuclear elements are a long way off. That means Trump could start a new arms race he’s already lost. They tinker with Trident, other powers fling around fusion bombs faster than the speed of sound, and the US – plus UK, France, North Korea, Iran – will have no option but to up its game, militarise, and spend trillions on an insurance policy that was in no need of upgrading.
That moves all of us closer to the precipice. It could degrade the US as the world’s main power, and that puts democracy itself in decline while the demagogues of the East rise to prominence. And we’d be relying on man who wants Ukraine to dress more smartly to save us. Trump’s collapse could be a blessed relief, or the start of a block hole that sucks everything in. If only people stopped listening to him, and started looking at him instead, we might be able to figure out how to get through it.