MAGA’S DYING DAYS

Nate Silver Delivers Brutal Verdict on Lame Duck Trump’s Future

The statistician does not see a way back for the president or his movement after its midterms shellacking.

Statistician Nate Silver says he cannot envision a situation in which President Donald Trump can regain his peak popularity in his final two years in office.

Silver, who projected Trump’s crushing midterm defeat before it happened, says the 80-year-old president’s dreams of being the country’s most popular politician are over unless something extraordinary, like curing cancer, occurs.

“I feel like this midterm was the climactic action that triggers the ending, right?” Silver said this week on the Still Counting podcast. “It’s hard to imagine Trump returning to a place where he’s substantially more popular.”

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Silver gave his verdict on lame-duck Trump’s final years after co-host Clare Malone cited an analogy from former Politico reporter Rachael Bade, who estimated on her Substack that if Trump’s political years were an eight-novel series, we are just at the beginning of book No. 7.

Bade estimates the saga will end with an eighth book about Trump as the “kingmaker heading into the 2028 primary.”

Silver did not sound as confident that the president’s political sway will still be so strong.

“Are you familiar with the term ‘denouement’?” Silver said. “You know, the key actions have kind of—well, it depends, right? In a Shakespearean tragedy, then you’d have things go totally mad over the next two years.”

The White House did not respond to an email seeking reaction to Silver’s remarks.

Post-election polling shows that Trump is losing his iron grip on the Republican Party. A new Reuters/Ipsos survey asked Republican voters to rate a series of possible 2028 presidential contenders, and they soundly rejected the possibility of a Donald Trump Jr. candidacy, with just 12 percent of respondents calling him an “excellent” choice. Forty-three percent said he would be a “poor” choice.

That same survey found that more established MAGA figures, like JD Vance, are also not universally popular within the increasingly fractured Republican Party, which has split during Trump’s second term over the Epstein files, the war with Iran, and the White House’s failure, in addition to a lack of prioritization, in bringing down everyday prices.

Just 34 percent of respondents said Vance would be an “excellent” candidate in 2028. That figure was slightly higher for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with 36 percent of respondents saying he would be an excellent GOP presidential nominee.

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Josh FialloBreaking News Reporter

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