The bottom fell out: Trump's second term in freefall after 18 months

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U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at Reading Regional Airport in Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S., June 23, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Although the United States' 2024 presidential election was quite close — Donald Trump won the national popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent — many right-wing media figures echoed Trump's claim that his victory was a "landslide" and described the election results as a major sea change in American politics. Democratic strategists, meanwhile, spent months asking themselves: Where did we go wrong?

But the New York Times' David Wallace-Wells, in a late June column, lays out some reasons why GOP claims of an "enduring MAGA majority" are now looking more and more like an "illusion."

"Remember the vibe shift?" the Times columnist writes. "In 2024, first as the election approached and then after Donald Trump's victory, pundits and political strategists lined up to declare its cultural meaning quite expansive — a shift not just in electoral politics, but also, in the partisan alignment and cultural life of the whole country. This was the beginning of an era, we were told; his election was perhaps as significant as the one that once heralded the Reagan revolution or what was called the emerging Democratic majority in Barack Obama's multicultural America. A new course had been plotted, and the country would be moving MAGA-ward — both in politics and beyond it."

Progressive Zeteo founder and former MS NOW (then MSNBC) host Mehdi Hasan always viewed Trump's "landslide" claims as ridiculous, emphasizing that a 1.5 victory in the popular vote is a close election — not an actual landslide like Ronald Reagan in 1984 or Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. Reagan, in 1984, was reelected by 18 percent in the popular vote and carried 49 states in the Electoral College; FDR won the popular vote by roughly 18 percent in 1932.

Wallace-Wells notes that "it's been a while since" Republicans discussed "MAGA’s cultural victory" of 2024 in "triumphalist terms."

"The cruel kids' table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country," the New York Times columnist argues. "The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another. And even if Mr. Trump's evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections…. Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it's been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump's second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy."

Wallace-Wells continues, "But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals. We haven't even hit the midterms yet, and the prospect of an enduring MAGA majority doesn't look like the natural path of the American future. It looks like a projection from the recent past, already fading."

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