Trump’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ threats conceal seeds of political weakness

President Donald Trump is vowing to wield apocalyptic power inside the United
States, even as the adverse impact of some of his key policies is becoming
clear.

His weekend share of a social media meme in which he threatened to wage war
on Chicago, the next Democratic city up in his crime and immigration crackdown, was
a classic Trumpian tactic. It depicted him as a strongman unafraid to impose
force and incited liberal outrage to delight his base. It was also laced with
menace and implied lawlessness that reflects his view of the presidency as a
tool of personal power rather than a constitutionally limited national trust.

Still, beneath Trump’s hyperbole, there are signs that his second
administration, eight months in, is entering a new phase. His frenetic pace and
thunderclap tests of the Constitution have thus far had a disorienting impact.
Courts struggled to keep up. Democrats flailed, mourning their election loss and
trying to work out the basic business of learning to talk to Americans.

But on the economy, public health and foreign policy especially, Trump’s
policies are having impacts that risk political blowback. Democratic opposition
is stirring through governors like California’s Gavin Newsom
and Illinois’ JB Pritzker,
who are both looking for a fight to elevate their own political futures. The
president had a terrible time in the courts last week, with policy priorities
at least temporarily disrupted.
A landmark Supreme Court decision is pending on Trump’s tariff policy that
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” could be
“terrible” if the government loses, since Trump would have to cut refund checks
for half of tariff revenue.

The White House response to mounting challenges is to double down on more
disruption and executive power grabs. It’s the only way Trump knows. Its new
front against drugs cartels in the Caribbean underscores the point. US forces
last week blew up a speedboat
off Venezuela allegedly holding drug traffickers. Officials reacted to questions
about the potential illegal use of force and destruction of due process with
machismo. “We have the absolute and complete authority to conduct that,” Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth said, without bothering to explain why.

The administration’s claims the boat was run by the Tren de Aragua gang could be
true. But presidents lack constitutional authority to wage war without informing
Congress or the public. Vice President JD Vance upped the populist defiance by
saying he didn’t “give a sh*t” on X after a Trump critic described the killings
as a war crime. Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul responded that it was
“despicable and thoughtless sentiment … to glorify killing someone without a
trial.”

Pundits often warn that events such as those off Venezuela are “distractions”
from other Trump vulnerabilities. But there comes a point when the distractions
threaten the Constitution as much as the original escapades. And when is a
distraction simply distracting from another distraction?

CHALLENGING POLITICAL MONTHS MAY LIE AHEAD

Putting aside inflammatory X posts and military bombast — Trump now wants
Hegseth to be called “secretary of war”
— there is growing evidence that the administration is headed into treacherous
political waters.

Trump’s economy — the pre-Covid first-term version, which offered a brief window
of voter security — helped win last year’s election. But the Trump economy 2.0,
now fully exposed to his idiosyncratic theories on trade and government
intervention, is floundering in uncertainty. Friday’s jobs report
was dire, not just because only 22,000 positions were created in August. It showed
negative jobs growth in June, unemployment at 4.3% at the highest level since
2021, and the impacts of Trump’s tariffs and immigration purges on hiring.

By most measures in the report, the Biden economy was stronger than the Trump
one. The manufacturing sector has taken a particular hit, which feels somewhat
ironic since the president’s trade wars are meant to revive a 1950s-style utopia
of factories running full steam.

For those Americans who buy dinner in grocery stores and who will not be
regulars at Trump’s new White House “Rose Garden Club,”
his claims that prices are falling are absurd. If this disconnect deepens, the
administration’s spin could have a similar impact to the false trope that
inflation was transitory, which helped sink President Joe Biden’s hopes of
reelection.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pyrotechnical
display
in a Senate hearing last week, meanwhile, portends extreme disruption to public
health. It raised the question of whether Trump’s election win last year was
really a message that voters want to destroy all the progress
made by vaccines and to risk new epidemics this winter.

In foreign policy, the embarrassing failure of Trump’s summit with Russian
President Vladimir Putin was laid bare by this weekend’s ferocious air assault
on Kyiv,
the war’s largest yet. How much more carnage needs to unfold before Trump
becomes the last person in the world to realize his Russian friend doesn’t want
peace?

The president told reporters Sunday he was ready to impose tougher sanctions on
Russia.
But he’s made threats before. Trump also wondered last week whether India was
“lost” to the US after his tariffs pushed a nation US presidents have been
courting for 30 years into the arms of China.

Last week was also a setback for the administration in the courtroom. A judge
ruled Trump’s deployment of the federalized National Guard to California in June
“willfully” violated the law. The ruling coincided with a huge military parade
in China
showing the immense domestic power of President Xi Jinping. It was a reminder
that a US strongman still faces more constitutional constraints than genuine
tyrants.

Another US judge ruled
that the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan gang members is
illegal and blocked its use in several Southern states. One federal judge handed
Harvard University
a huge victory, ruling that Trump had unlawfully blocked $2 billion in funding
against the Ivy League school. And another
froze Trump’s termination of temporary status allowing more than a million Haitians
and Venezuelans the right to live in the United States.

WHY TRUMP FANS DON’T THINK HIS ADMINISTRATION IS IN TROUBLE

The administration doesn’t have much time for district court rulings, arguing,
sometimes with reason, that it will fare better in more conservative appeals
courts and at a Supreme Court with an expansive interpretation of executive
power.

And supporters see the political environment differently.

Trump has been using wrecking-ball power executive power, defying courts and
attacking public health, military, legal, educational and media establishments
ever since he took office. This is an end in itself for many MAGA supporters.
His relish for battles is a selling point, one that was noted by Florida’s
surgeon general,
Dr. Joseph Ladapo, on “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I have tremendous respect
for who he is. And a lot of people have tried to really, really make life very
difficult for him. And he’s emerged and he’s been a terrific leader and a
terrific symbol for many, many Americans,” Ladapo told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Still, Trump seems unconvinced by Ladapo’s attempt to end Florida’s school
vaccine requirements. “You have vaccines that work; they just pure and simple
work. They’re not controversial at all, and I think those vaccines should be
used,” he said Friday.

Cabinet officials like Hegseth, a former Fox News anchor, understand the base.

Tough talk and forcing liberals to argue that alleged drug traffickers were
victims of war crimes can be good politics. So can sending National Guard troops
into Democratic cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, DC, that have
tolerated high levels of crime and homelessness.

“Thank God President Trump called the National Guard in to bring peace,” Trump’s
border czar, Tom Homan, said on “State of the Union,” crediting reservists with
lowering crime rates. His comment underscored the political equation here. In
the abstract, it may be troubling that soldiers are on city streets and often
look under-occupied, with some reduced to picking up trash during a
$1-million-a-day deployment.
But might not voters get used to their presence and see it as reassuring? Can
you put a price on lives saved in the inner cities?

Trump has another thing on his side — there’s no chance that supine Republicans
on Capital Hill will do anything to check him, even though his actions off
Venezuela and in trade wars are usurping congressional power.

And if all else fails, the White House simply declares victory. Trump’s claims
to have ended seven wars
might be an exaggeration, and his trade deals lack details — but they sure sound
good.

LOW POLLING NUMBERS HAUNT TRUMP AGAIN

New polls Sunday showed Trump’s approval rating in the low to mid-40s. The
latest CNN Poll of Polls has him at 43%.
Historically, this is threatening territory for Republicans, with a midterm
election just over a year away. But Trump has almost always polled at such low
levels during White House years when he’s made little effort to govern for every
American, so the West Wing may not be alarmed. However, this a poor place to
start if the economy does deteriorate this year.

And that’s the key question. Will Trump’s so far impregnable support from a base
that always sustains him crack if the economic goes bad? How long will his
promise that a golden age is beckoning stand up if inflation strikes,
unemployment rises and economic gloom envelops the nation?

In the short term, Friday’s jobs report may offer some political help by
prompting the Federal Reserve into larger interest-rate cuts than expected. But
Trump’s attempt to eviscerate the independence of the central bank is a
longer-term issue. He could send prices soaring if he orchestrates huge rate
cuts next year after the end of the term of the Fed chief, whom he calls “Too
Late” Jerome Powell.

The impending peril can be detected in in scattershot response to the jobs
report from Trump’s subordinates. Bessent said on NBC that August was the
“noisiest” month of the year statistically. National Economic Council Director
Kevin Hassett said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the problem was “dissonance in
data.” Wealthy Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick predicted on CNBC that great
jobs numbers would be “starting six months from today to a year from today.”
That’s no consolation for a working American who just lost their job in Trump’s
economy.

None of these officials addressed the core issue: the impact on the economy of
idiosyncratic trade policies that have long obsessed one man — the president —
but that most experts believe are rooted in fantasy.

Perhaps the economy, which has been extraordinarily resilient, will save Trump.
If not, Americans will learn whether he can truly defy political gravity. At
that point, a meme of Bill Kilgore, the amoral but guilt-free protagonist of
“Apocalypse Now,” wouldn’t be of much help.