The 2026 midterms are over, which means that the 2028 presidential election is now underway. President Donald Trump occasionally jokes that he would run for a third term despite the Constitution’s two-term limit. The reality is that Republicans will need to find a new frontrunner over the next two years.
This will be a fraught moment for their coalition. Trump’s approval ratings are in the low 30s. The Iran war remains insoluble. Trump cannot achieve victory through conventional strength of arms. He lacks the credibility and temperament to reach a permanent agreement with Tehran. The Iranian government, for its part, seems content to watch high oil prices choke the life out of the American economy.
There will be a temptation for Republicans to propose doing Trumpism the right way, to achieve their goals without the errors that beset Trump’s second term. This is a fool’s errand. Trump’s mistakes were not a deviation from Trumpism; they were Trumpism. His political movement is, at its core, based on a rejection of knowledge and expertise. As a result, it is inherently self-destructive.
The problem began in 2016. Trump’s first term was a fluke. The president and his allies were not expecting to win the election. Trump repeatedly cast doubt on the integrity of the results before Election Day to soften the ground for his anticipated defeat. His team was reportedly shocked that they narrowly won enough votes in key states to eke out a narrow victory in the Electoral College.
As a result, Trump and his team put minimal effort into mapping out what his first term would look like until it was necessary. The president was still a relative newcomer to the party infrastructure and had to rely on more experienced Republicans who shared his policy beliefs—though not necessarily his ideological vision of governance.
What did that mean in practice? Basically, when Trump wanted to do self-destructive things, he was often either sidestepped or talked out of it by people who knew better. Special Counsel Robert Muller’s report on the Russia investigation is a catalogue of incidents where Trump asked aides to commit obstruction of justice or some other crime and they essentially ignored him. Trump threatened to close the U.S. border with Mexico to all trade at one point in 2019, only to back down after advisors warned him of the calamitous economic repercussions that would follow.
Other reversals foreshadowed his second-term mistakes. He constantly claimed that he would soon impose tariffs on all goods from China and from other countries as a negotiating cudgel, only to back down before carrying them out. After Iran shot down an unmanned U.S. drone in 2019, Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iran while his top aides pushed for diplomacy. “The United States is not looking to go to war with Iran,” then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said at the time.
Trump chafed at these restrictions, especially the ones that prevented him from exerting any direct control over the Justice Department. He fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his most ardent Cabinet supporter on anti-immigration policies, for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, which eventually led to the appointment of Mueller as special counsel. The president repeatedly pressured DOJ officials to cast doubt on the 2020 election results, which they refused to do. Those entreaties became part of the criminal case against Trump in 2023. (The Supreme Court had to invent new parts of the Constitution to save him from it.)
At least some voters cast ballots for Trump in 2024 hoping that electing him would magically make it February 2020 again, with no pandemic inflation but everything operating more or less the same. They drastically misread the political situation. Trump and his allies had spent the four-year wilderness crafting governance plans that would cut loose many of the restraints that bound the president during his first term. There would be no more deep-state bureaucrats undermining Trump’s agenda federal agencies, they thought, or weak-willed warfighters who wouldn’t intimidate foreign adversaries. Only fervent loyalists would carry out the president’s will.
Now the Trump administration can’t seem to do anything right. The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln spent so long stationed in the Persian Gulf this year that basic ship amenities began to fall apart and multiple sailors reportedly attempted suicide. The administration’s cuts to food-safety inspections led to a nationwide cyclospora outbreak over the summer; Taylor Farms executives reportedly tried to delay a recall of its contaminated lettuce by calling the White House directly to ask for the president to intervene. That, apparently, is how the country works right now.
By far the worst thing that could happen to the Trump administration was also its greatest success. In early January, U.S. military forces extracted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from his palace in Caracas in a nighttime raid with no American casualties. He currently awaits trial for alleged narco-terrorism crimes in New York City. The raid, which would have been dissuaded by more conscientious advisors, went better than anyone could have hoped. When Iranian protesters rose up against the government in Tehran the following spring, the administration—pushed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—saw an opportunity to do the same thing in the Middle East.
A more sober set of national-security advisors would have warned Trump that attacking Iran would likely consolidate public support around the country’s beleaguered government. They might have pointed out that, if the attack didn’t succeed at overthrowing the government, the surviving leaders would be even more hardline than their predecessors. They might even retaliate by attacking U.S. military bases in the region or U.S. civilians overseas. They could even try to cut off oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and destroy neighboring countries’ infrastructure.
Unfortunately for the world, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was at the helm of the Pentagon instead. Hegseth, a former Fox News host who was confirmed despite multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, had promised to end “wokeness” in the American military. This meant purging Black soldiers, firing a disproportionate number of women and minority generals and admirals, and blocking promotions for qualified officers who happened to not be white men. He also exonerated U.S. soldiers who committed war crimes against Native Americans in the 19th century and renamed military bases after Confederate leaders.
In between these adventures, Hegseth and Trump failed to overthrow the Iranian government by force, blew through most of the U.S. military’s stockpile of advanced munitions, and retreated from the constellation of military bases in the Persian Gulf to escape Iranian retaliation. Tehran now has its hand on the jugular vein of the global economy and it shows no sign of relenting. In deference to how incredibly unpopular a new war in the Middle East landed among American voters, Trump has held off on major strikes until after Election Day.
More than a few Trump voters in 2024 hoped that returning him to power would bring down the cost of groceries. They did not, and they could not. Trump began his second term by imposing hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs on America’s top trading partners, ranging from China to the European Union. The president evinced no knowledge of how they actually work. He consistently lied about who pays the tariffs—it’s American businesses and customers, not foreign governments—and how a trade deficit works.
Trumpism is not a protest against how the world works. It is a rejection of the very concept of knowing how the world works. Ignorance is a virtue and knowledge is a vice. All that matters is what Trump thinks, regardless of whether it can be independently verified or held accountable. By electing Trump, many of his movement’s adherents hoped to prove that their lack of expertise was as good as any credential that some liberal egghead could obtain from a woke, biased university.
Now we are living through their dreams come true. Trump has waged war against the nation’s universities, with some close allies openly calling for the de-intellectualization of Americans because it would be beneficial for the GOP’s electoral chances. He has laid waste to our nation’s scientific and technological research infrastructure out of some obscene desire by apparatchiks like Russell Vought to wield ideological control over it. His administration has purged thousands of scientists, experts, and lawyers from the federal civil service because they refused to unfailingly carry out the president’s whims. An anti-vaxxer who has espoused eugenic sentiments now sits atop the nation’s public-health infrastructure. It has been a two-year triumph for people who love to be wrong and can make themselves rich by doing it.
These actions have a dire cost for ordinary Americans, who are now on track to be poorer, sicker, and less educated at the end of Trump’s second term than they were before it. Even their “successes” are failures. In September, top Trump advisor Stephen Miller shared a graph on Twitter claiming that the country’s foreign-born population had dropped by 2.9 million over the past 18 months. “The first sustained negative migration in 100 years, and picking up speed,” he crowed. The graph also showed that the overall number of immigrants in America hadn’t dropped below the levels they were in January 2024. In other words, the Trump administration has wrought all this damage and destroyed tens of thousands of immigrants’ lives to bring the number down to…Biden-era levels. They can’t even do mass deportations right.
Someday soon, a Republican presidential candidate will campaign on the premise that he can deliver the “good” parts of Trumpism without the collateral damage of its namesake’s mistakes. They will be lying. All of this damage flows naturally from an exaltation of ignorance and the demonization of expertise. They will merely be promising easy solutions to make a quick buck and hoping to outrun the harms they cause. Hopefully future generations of Americans will see through the con more easily than past electorates.
