What The Hell America!

And as you mentioned before, there’s a litany of other things as well. If you’re looking at this administration from other lenses, particularly in foreign policy but also immigration policy as well, you’re seeing a succession of scandals that are just going to pry people loose. The germ of that piece came from reading an NPR poll that came out for the 100th day yesterday where they asked respondents to grade Trump. And the top-line number there was that twice as many people gave him an F as gave him an A; so 46 percent gave it a failing grade and 23 percent gave an A. But what stood out to me about that is that the 23 percent number looks increasingly like a floor to me. Those are people that are looking at the chaos of the last 100 days and saying, Two thumbs up, we want more of that. Well, you’re going to get more of that. And I think if that continues, that’s all that’s going to be left.

Sargent: I’d like to close by getting at what I think is a really deep tension that flows out of Trump’s pathologies. As we talked about earlier, when Trump actually seems to learn something from the markets and adjust accordingly, like when he dialed back some of the tariff stuff, a bunch of people that he seems to respect on Fox News rush in to provide this positive reinforcement by saying, That was a great decision, Mr. President, in hopes that he’ll learn from that. But then on the other hand, when the news gets really bad like it just did, there’s this intense internal pressure inside MAGAworld to build a wall around Trump and turn the adulation and the sycophancy and the North Korea–level subservience up to 11, which works against the goal of getting him to course correct. Can you talk a little bit about that? It seems to me like that latter force is the more powerful one within MAGA. And as a result, as the crises get worse, they will become more dug in against correcting.

Shephard: Yeah. I think that part of it is they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid on the idea that they are part of a world-historical project, that they are remaking the country, and that this actually requires constant maintenance, both in terms of messaging and action. So what you’re seeing is partly just an exercise of people who are failing and incompetent and are, in many cases, actively anti-constitutional, justifying the necessity of what they’re doing or at least of breaking with a consensus of governance that has existed for a very long time.