Some of the saddest words in American cinema are the last lines of Easy Rider: “We blew it.” The dream of freedom, the moment of opportunity, the hope of beginning again, the promise of revival — all failed, until all that remains is the recognition of failure. Donald Trump was born in the first wave of the baby boom in 1946, came of age in the pivotal year of 1967, and became the last of the boomer presidents. He blew it. They blew it. Only the Democrats can save the Republicans now.
In 2024, Trump and the Republicans offered to restore the American compact. Cut the knots of bureaucratized stagnation and oligarchic corruption in Washington, D.C.; enforce the law at the borders and in the courts; restore free speech in the media and on the campus; oil the wheels of the economy with onshoring and AI, and the old jalopy of the democratic republic would roar back into life and streak ahead of the competition. The people bought it. And now they are paying for it.
The Trump voter coalition of 2024 did the right thing. That was why it got buyer’s remorse almost immediately. When Trump returned to office in January 2025, his approval ratings topped 50% in most polls. He was more popular than President Ronald Reagan in 1981, and President Barack Obama in 2009 — and a Trump presidency was a known and divisive quantity. The almost instantaneous decline in Trump’s ratings suggests that, as with Reagan and Obama’s watershed victories, despair drove 2024’s swing voters as much as, if not more than, hope. So does the almost stately steadiness with which Trump’s approval rating sank to its current nadir of 36%.
Vice President JD Vance and his backers in the MAGA and “America First” factions are only partially right to blame the midterm election rout on the Iran war and its effects on gas and diesel prices. The decline of Trump’s ratings and the exit polls show that these were compounding factors. In the national exit poll, voters placed corruption (90%) and tariffs and the cost of living (89%) ahead of the war (74%) and immigration (73%) as issues of “crucial or major importance” in their decisions. The voters also rejected the Tech Right’s pitch that AI would benefit everyone.
Like the mythical giants Otus and Ephialtes, who tried and failed to overthrow the gods on Mount Olympus, the Trump administration piled Pelion upon Ossa, adding a return to war in the Middle East and a bad feeling at the pump to the domestic long COVID of high prices, high inflation and credit card debt, and the longer-running feeling that, regardless of which party holds power, the political class exists at the expense of the rubes who vote for it. The Trump circle is corrupt beyond the dreams of Hunter Biden. The whiff of Qatari cash is especially rank, and will cling to the Republican nominee in 2028.
“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs,” Enoch Powell wrote in his biography of the British politician Joseph Chamberlain (the uncle of that paradigmatic failure, Neville the Appeaser). Powell would say that. In April 1968, while Dennis Hopper was directing and starring in Easy Rider, Powell blew it. His “Rivers of Blood” speech detonated his career with a percipient but theatrically mistimed prediction about the effects of mass immigration.
PRIVATE INTERESTS, PUBLIC VIRTUES
Character is fate. A popular movement can sack a palace, but it cannot build one. The malcontent factions of the Right that rallied to Trump have failed to institutionalize themselves, and Trump and his appointees seem to have had other business in mind. Instead, in a triumph of private interest over public duty that would not have surprised the Romans or the Georgians, one oligarchy has supplanted another. As it took a Trump to displace the Democrats, so it is Trump’s nature to let this happen. This is a success for Trump and his sons and fixers, their incoming legal difficulties notwithstanding, but a failure of politics and the American way.
What now? Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) quixotic attempt to impeach Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, is merely the opening shot. From January, the Democrat-controlled congressional committees will cry “high crimes and misdemeanors” and send out the subpoenas. Vance retains the inside lane and the support of a substantial bloc of the base, but if he does not run now, his funders and followers will look elsewhere. If he does run, he will be the MAGA man, stained by association. Perhaps the Democrats will oblige by overreaching with their impeachments and nominating a clown or a communist. But even that might not be enough.
Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.