Mounting woes could bring Trump presidency to 'nightmarish' end

President Donald Trump has been an incredibly resilient figure in U.S. politics, overcoming four criminal indictments and two impeachments when he returned to the White House 20 months ago. But roughly one and one-half months before the 2026 midterms, Trump is suffering from weak approval ratings in poll after poll. And The New Republic's Timothy Noah is arguing that Trump may not serve out the rest of his second term, which ends on January 20, 2029.

Noah, in his article, acknowledges that Republicans are likely to dismiss his argument as wishful thinking. But he lays out a variety of reasons why Trump, in his view, could leave the White House without serving all of his second term — from his mental health to his growing unpopularity.

"Today, the bad thing that feels like it will go on forever — or anyway, for 28 more months — is the presidency of Donald Trump," Noah writes in The New Republic. "Is Trump like the national debt, or is he like the Berlin Wall? Trump's political career has certainly lasted longer than anybody, including me, could have conceived when it began in 2015, and his comeback after the January 6 insurrection was particularly unsettling. But lately, I've started to consider that our nightmarish political epoch may end sooner than we expect."

Noah continues, "Even as some worry that Trump will defy the Constitution and run for a third term, I've come to doubt that he can finish his second. My reason for thinking Trump may be like the Berlin Wall is the recent acceleration in Trump's mental deterioration."

The burning question about Trump's mental health and increasingly "erratic" behavior, according to Noah, is "How long can this go on?"

"Last week," Noah observes, "Thomas B. Edsall wrote, in The New York Times, that 'no action to remove Trump from the White House will happen until he does something so threatening and damaging that drumming him out of the White House becomes an inescapable necessity.' But does anybody honestly think that day is far off? Not me, and not most people. According to a Washington Post/Ipsos poll, belief that Trump already lacks the mental sharpness necessary to be president has risen from 43 percent in May 2023 to 59 percent in April 2026."

Noah continues, "Trump's approval rating has been sloping downward since his second inauguration; the decline has been gradual, but consistent, with approval falling from 48 percent to 36 percent. The all-time lowest presidential approval rating in history, according to Gallup, was President Harry Truman's 23 percent in late 1951 and early 1952. Trump's approval rating is on track to beat Truman's humiliating record … There is a point at which Trump's approval number will fall so low, and make Trump such a liability to fellow Republican officeholders, that they'll move to get rid of him … This scenario may strike you as implausible. But before you dismiss it as fantasy, show me a more plausible scenario in which an increasingly gaga Trump remains president until January 2029. When I try to imagine that, my mind just goes blank."