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Whatever their other failings, the millennials contributed to civilisation the word “cope” in noun form. To translate, a cope is an attempt to make a situation seem less desperate than it is, and so examples abound in these grim times. “At least Donald Trump will be good for business.” That is a cope. “If there is one thing Donald Trump takes notice of, it is the stock market.” That is a first-class cope. Citing the worsening economic data and presidential approval ratings, on the premise that “Donald Trump can’t ignore these numbers”, is the cope of the month.
Of course he can ignore them. The central fact about Trump’s second term is that he cannot run for a third. He is now emancipated from public opinion, which did a serviceable job of keeping him in check last time around. If his tariffs induce a recession, or his foreign policies a world crisis, driving his approval rating to hellish depths, what exactly does he lose? At worst, the Republicans — for whom he cares little — will crash at the midterm elections, after which a second-term president is a lame duck regardless.
Having nagged about this since November, I can anticipate two responses. One is that Trump wants to launch JD Vance or perhaps a blood relative as the GOP candidate in 2028, so mustn’t queer the pitch for them with economic and geopolitical chaos. Please. Even leaders as conventional as Angela Merkel, Tony Blair and Joe Biden were negligent in their succession planning. Are we to believe that an egoist of Trump dimensions will restrain himself out of strategic concern for another person’s prospects three years hence? (Incidentally, a politician looks better, not worse, if their successor flops with voters.)
The other response is that Trump will just override the 22nd amendment and run again, or even cancel the next presidential election. It would be rash to dismiss this out of hand. But we are talking about the collapse of a great constitution here. It is a tail event. The base case has to be that Trump will have to leave office on schedule, at 82, and knows it. As such, the prospect of recession and unpopularity in the coming years might not haunt him as much as rational analysts tend to think.
It is worse than that, in fact. Of the three most damaging things that Trump is doing — stinting Ukraine, eroding domestic institutions and imposing tariffs — a recession might spur the president to go even harder on the first two. The worse the economy, the better the pretext to withhold scarce US resources from European defence. The worse the fiscal numbers, the more reason to gut the federal government and other public bodies. Recession might be a radicalising, not chastening event.
In essence, Trump is now an almost post-political figure, able to do things as ends in themselves rather than parsing them for electoral effect. First-term Trump would not have volunteered the information that tariffs bring “disturbance”, as it would have been political self-harm. The first administration minded swing voters; this one longs to commune with the Maga base. The first had business figures who were drab and reassuring ExxonMobil types; this one contains millenarist dreamers of truly untouchable wealth. The first practised common-or-garden populism; this one has a trace of something better described as nihilism.
There is but one Trump cope that contains an element of truth. He does still respond to concessions from opposing parties, whether in the form of personal flattery or material sops. For evidence of this negotiability, see the on-off pattern of tariffs against Canada or intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, which seem to hinge on those countries’ degree of capitulation to Trump on a given week. But the electorate? The discipline of having to mind the floating voter? He slipped that yoke in November.
Because it puts so few written limits on the executive, Britain’s constitution is said to be, at core, a huge bet on the good faith of politicians. One aspect of the US system isn’t so different, and that is the second term of a presidency, and in particular the last two years. At that point, the commander-in-chief knows their date of departure, but remains the most powerful human being on earth. While the Supreme Court and other curbs still apply, a lot rests on that individual’s conscience to keep them straight (as well as their fear of being persona non grata in retirement). Iran-Contra, the bulk of the Watergate cover-up: it is telling how many postwar scandals occur in second terms.
Now imagine someone in that setting who has neither a sense of custodianship over the republic nor, as he enters his ninth decade, aeons of retirement time to fill. The circumstances couldn’t be riper for Trump to go out in a blaze of whatever the inverse of glory is.
Ever since November, it has been hard to avoid the thought that lots of people, believing themselves to have over-panicked about Trump in his first term, are now under-panicking. You see it in the great shrug that passes for the Democratic message right now. I see it, above all, among business leaders, with their always touching belief that everyone in the end shares their pragmatism. Their bet seems to be that Trump, having a politician’s fear of recession and the public odium that comes with it, will reconsider his worst ideas as their economic effects become clear. It strikes me as a cool and penetrating analysis of the man, eight years ago.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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