It is hard to know whether Donald Trump or the MAGA movement he created is falling apart faster.
The 79-year-old president is deteriorating rapidly before our eyes—cankles puffier, bruises and bandages on his hand more ever present. He’s nodding off at event after event, slurring his words, his behavior increasingly erratic. And he has become painfully sensitive to the fact that his decay is so apparent, going as far as suggesting that media outlets reporting about his health are guilty of treason.
Of course, every effort he makes to prove he’s not one step away from melting into a bubbling orange puddle seems to make it clearer that he’s losing it.
As bad as all that is, however, MAGA may be collapsing even more quickly than its creator. Prominent Republicans are defecting—like Marjorie Taylor Greene—and more are rumored to be threatening to do likewise. More former loyalists are willing to stand up to him—whether Indiana legislators rejecting Trumpian demands that they gerrymander the state or GOP senators leading inquiries into the possibility that war crimes were committed as part of Trump’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” phase.
Others are speaking out against Trump’s opposition to extending vital health subsidies to Americans—including hardliners like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley—or to express their discomfort with new executive orders seeking to block states from enacting AI regulation.
Trump is losing in the courts. His illegal picks to be U.S. attorneys are being kicked out; his efforts to, well, trump up charges against opponents like James Comey and Letitia James have been shot down by grand juries that simply will not go along with cases so obviously fabricated and motivated by retribution rather than any respect for the law.
And he is losing at the ballot box. Recent election results suggest that the onetime star to whom so many MAGA upstarts have hitched their wagons to in the past decade is now electoral poison. Across the country, elections last month produced resounding defeats for the GOP, while in the few elections in which Republicans squeaked out victories, their margins shrank considerably compared to 2024 support for Trump.
Just this week in Miami, Eileen Higgins beat a Trump-favored candidate to become the first Democrat to be voted the city’s mayor in three decades.
The economy is floundering. Deficits are exploding. Tariffs are unpopular. Trump’s inhumane and draconian immigration crackdowns are alienating substantial numbers of his erstwhile supporters, while his foreign policy plans have alienated our allies and empowered our enemies. His overt corruption and catering to billionaires at the expense of average Americans is driving real backlash. (Pro-tip: With a tanking economy, rising prices and tens of millions of Americans about to lose healthcare coverage, it’s a really, really bad idea to spend taxpayer money on mega-ballrooms and turning the Oval Office into a gilded throne room.)
Donald Trump has fallen and, given projections of a rough year ahead, it seems increasingly likely that he can’t get up.
Also fallen? His approval ratings, and to historic lows. One poll this week showed that only 31 percent of Americans think Trump is doing a good job with the economy—an area in which he had long been seen as strong.
This percentage point is significant in other ways too. There has always been a floor to Trump’s base—the group of a little more than a third of Americans who have been loyal to him no matter what kind of crazy s--t he was up to.
No longer. He has pierced what we might call the “Darwin Threshold.”
Let’s put it in perspective. The size of Trump’s seemingly impenetrable base has roughly corresponded with the number of Americans willing to believe truly crazy nonsense. (That is no surprise. His stock in trade is, in fact, spewing crazy nonsense.)
According to studies, between 33 and 37 percent of Americans do not believe in evolution. (A 2024 Gallup poll found, for example, that 37 percent believe God created humans in their present form in the past 10,000 years.) An even more common view, held by over 40 percent of Americans, is that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.
In other words, there are now millions of Americans who believe it is more likely than some Fred and Wilma Flintstone lived alongside an equivalent of their pet snorkasaurus than those who believe Trump’s assertions that he has made America the hottest economy in the world.
This is not to say that all of Trump’s supporters believe in crazy conspiracy theories or that only MAGA voters buy into kooky ideas. Nor is it to suggest a rock-solid correlation between Trump’s base and people who don’t, say, believe in science. On the other hand, it’s a notable coincidence that whenever he wants to placate his base, Trump’s go-to move is to go after science-based policies like vaccines or climate change.
But what those of us who do believe in empirical facts can see, however, is that the president and his movement are in deep trouble. They are entering uncharted territory in which even some of the most gullible among us are no longer buying what our president is selling.
This is not to say Trump and MAGA have no future. Their presence will likely be felt by most of us for years to come, like a shiver down our collective spine. And that’s not just because something like 60 percent of Americans believe in ghosts.
