Donald Trump stood before the United Nations on Tuesday and threatened to “annihilate” Iran. Yet even as the most powerful man on the planet flexed his military muscles, he was powerless to keep the gravitational pull of domestic politics at bay. Heading into the UN building in New York, the US president was questioned by Kaitlan Collins, an anchor at CNN, which he had banned from the White House before a judge ruled against him.
Indeed, 20 months into his second term, there is a widening gap between the president’s self-perceived invincibility and the reality of his waning influence. Federal courts are reining him in. Congressional Republicans are straying from the script.
Poll numbers are tumbling to historic depths, driven by persistent inflation, rising fuel costs and an increasingly unpopular war in Iran. For the first time since his improbable political resurrection, Trump’s aura of authority is fading. Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist, prophesied: “This is the beginning of the end.
As powerful and transgressive as he’s been, the country does not have a positive outlook right now. In fact, the negativity and pessimism among voters has reached a point that is unparalleled since Jimmy Carter.” Trump’s self-belief never wavers. He faced four criminal cases and two assassination attempts before winning the 2024 election.
He has lived by a mantra of “it will all work out well in the end” while his supporters wear hats that state: “Trump was right about everything.” Yet he has had a rough month. The Federal Reserve defied him on interest rates. The supreme court blocked his administration’s attempt to impose new restrictions on mail-in ballots for November’s midterm elections.
One judge prevented him adding his name to the Kennedy Center, prompting him to threaten the national arts complex with demolition; another judge blocked his ban on three news outlets from the White House grounds, ordering the administration to “immediately return, reinstate and restore” their access. Now even Trump’s dependable power base, the Republican party, is showing cracks amid fears that he will cost them seats in November. In Florida, his home state, gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds quietly scrubbed most Trump references from his campaign website, while the congresswoman María Elvira Salazar ran campaign advertisements openly declaring that federal immigration enforcement had gone “too far” and asserting that Latino voters “feel betrayed”.
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