So, this is the Golden Age?

We have bombed Iran for Israel.

Trump is tweeting “Watch Mark Levin on FOX News! NOW!”

He is posting Bomb, Bomb Iran videos like John McCain on Truth Social.

He endorsed Lindsey Graham while trying to purge Thomas Massie from Congress.

The president is taking victory laps over bringing back cane sugar in Coca Cola, but has failed to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Instead, he has chosen to send more weapons to Israel and Ukraine.

He is calling the Epstein Files a Democrat Hoax made up by Obama and condemning his “past supporters” for wanting justice and transparency in the case of the worst pedophile in American history.

I could easily write a 20,000 word article on all the stupid shit Blumpf has said and done over the years and call it a day. We could dwell on every cringe and grating Boomer tweet, but the problem with Trump 2.0 runs much deeper than his unfiltered posts on Truth Social. Most of us who supported Trump in 2024 who are not part of his personality cult accepted that we would be annoyed for four years. It is a price we were willing to pay to stop the invasion of our country by brown Third World hordes.

Donald Trump has caught political lightning in a bottle twice in 2016 and 2024.

As everyone here remembers, Trump got distracted by the Mueller probe, lost focus and frittered away his populist energy and political capital in his first term. He bombed Syria. He had a falling out with his populist allies like Steve Bannon. He endorsed “Big Luther” Strange and managed to fumble a ruby red Senate seat here in Alabama which hamstrung his legislative agenda. He destroyed Jeff Sessions’ political career while endorsing his avowed enemies like Mitt Romney. He listened to Paul Ryan and spent his political capital on traditional unpopular GOP priorities like repealing Obamacare and passing the tax cuts. Democrats were rewarded for their opposition to his accomplishments in the 2018 midterms. He ran on KAG and the Platinum Plan and lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

After a strong start based on a meticulous and well executed plan, Trump 2.0 in July 2025 feels like it is rapidly reverting to the first term. Epsteingate is becoming the new Russiagate. Trump is aligning with Lindsey Graham while lashing out at his populist allies like Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson. Trump’s attempt to purge Thomas Massie from Congress is reminiscent of his purge of Jeff Sessions. Having learned nothing from the 2018 midterms, Trump has signed his big tax cut package into law which is paid for by unpopular cuts to Medicaid. The GOP is a prisoner of its obsession with tax cuts.

The pessimistic view of Trump 2.0 is that after over a decade of Donald Trump dominating the Republican Party he has barely changed the GOP. Trump’s personality cult has simply floated on the surface and occupied and wasted our time. It is still addicted to paying for unpopular tax cuts with spending cuts to popular entitlements. It is still addicted to absurd and unjustifiable levels of military spending. It is still obsessed with Israel. It is still addicted to cheap labor. It is still addicted to foreign interventionism in Eurasia. It is still addicted to culture war theater. Fundamentally, Trump hasn’t changed the DNA of the party. He was only interested in commanding its loyalty which it gave without changing its priorities. In fact, the people he ran against like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Israel) are still there and have the same ideology. They are waiting in the wings to reclaim their control of the Republican Party in 2028.

What will the GOP look like when Donald Trump steps down and is no longer the president in 2028? How can a cult of personality organized around one man function without his personal leadership?

The people who grudgingly paid lip service to Trump like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-Israel) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Israel) will revert to form after biding their time and waiting out the storm. The unreliable lackeys who Trump will leave behind in his wake in Congress never had any real ideology or principles and advanced their political careers purely through flattery and loyalty. They will trim their sails. We are headed toward a world where MAGA is reduced to Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House amid a sea of basic Republicans because Trump was never interested in the long term and failed to stock Congress with ideologues to carry on his movement. The long term is 3 and 1/2 years from now and Trump is endorsing the likes of Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. This is his last chance to shape the future of his movement.

JD Vance was plucked from the Senate and tapped as Vice President because he was arguably the sole plausible candidate for a MAGA successor. This decision was due to the foresight and intervention of Tucker Carlson who stopped Doug Burgum and Marco Rubio. Trump has spent four election cycles endorsing the likes of Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Mark Robinson, Kari Lake, etc. who all lost their races. Vance doesn’t have the charisma or force of personality to hold together and command all of the disparate factions in the Republican coalition who have been cowed into submission by Trump. Even if Vance wins the Republican nomination in 2028, which is likely, politics as usual is destined to return. Vance will struggle to corral and mobilize a Republican Congress to advance any type of nationalist agenda. Trump will have done him no favors as a strongman by leaving behind so few natural allies to work with in Congress.

We shouldn’t discount the possibility that the public may have soured on Trumpism by then:

• Trump has unilaterally wielded tariffs as clubs to hammer other countries into submission to his will, not to revive American industry. The erratic and bipolar way that Trump has wielded tariffs in fits of rage, which is totally different from how tariff policy was crafted by Congress in the 19th century with the national interest in mind, has made tariffs unpopular with the public. There is no reason to believe that Trump has even permanently convinced the GOP to embrace tariffs
• Trump’s decision to bomb Iran, cover up the Epstein Files and defer to Bibi Netanyahu has created the impression that he is puppet of Israel’s genocidal government. Unlike in his first term, the fallout from this extends beyond the alt-right and can be seen in a massive dip in support with young men, first term voters and Independents who have soured on Trump since Operation Midnight Boomer. The electorate has changed over the past decade and has much less tolerance for this. There are fewer older voter watching FOX News and more younger voters listening to brocasters who do not want to be involved in dumb wars in places like Ukraine or Iran
• Trump is doing immigration enforcement theater for FOX Geezers with publicity stunts like deporting handfuls of illegals to Guantanamo, El Salvador and “Alligator Alcatraz.” Trump administration officials recently toured Alcatraz itself with cameras tow and boasted that it may be revived as an immigration detention facility. It appears the goal of the administration is to play into stereotypes that immigration enforcement is cruel and inhumane WITHOUT ACTUALLY DEPORTING ANYONE. The public is souring on mass deportations which haven’t even happened.
• The tax cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill like No Tax on Tips are a bunch of campaign gimmicks which expire in 2028 while the corporate tax cut is permanent
• Throwing poor people off Medicaid to pay for unpopular tax cuts for billionaires which have already failed at the ballot box or siding with student loan debt collectors over underemployed college graduates isn’t economic populism. It is a recipe for political disaster
• Add to this the list of Trump 2.0 failures like DOGE which mindlessly gutted NOAA to take on the Deep State or the FBI and DOJ restoring trust by covering up the Epstein files

Arguably, the biggest flop of the Trump presidency has been the rapid dissolution of Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk and the Tech Right, which had the potential to replace the GOP’s financial reliance on Miriam Adelson and the Republican Jewish Coalition aka “Z.O.G.” Six months ago, it appeared we were moving into a new Gilded Age with Elon Musk playing the role of Andrew Carnegie. We are still in a Second Gilded Age, but what is likely to happen now is the resumption of more turbulent “throw the bums out” cycles of backlash politics with the Democrats retaking the House in the 2026 midterms. This was the norm in Gilded Age, not long stretches of political stability like the New Deal coalition.

Instead of building a new MAGA majority by expanding his coalition, Trump is already losing bits and pieces of his 2024 coalition. He is purging the libertarians with dumb rants on Truth Social. He has alienated the fiscal conservatives with the Big Beautiful Bill. He is losing White Nationalists and non-interventionists with his subservience to Bibi Netanyahu who he has called “the greatest man in the world.” He has alienated the schizos over the Epstein files. Disillusionment is starting to set in with swing voters and swathes of the MAGA base. It is enough to propel the Democrats back to power.

I can imagine a world where Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill has funded the creation of detention camps throughout the United States like “Alligator Alcatraz” and the hiring of thousands of new ICE agents, but where those detention camps are left to rust like the materials for the border wall in his first term because the Democrats have retaken Congress and the White House. I can imagine the Democrats defunding Trump’s new souped up version of ICE. I can see the thousands of new ICE agents being laid off like Trump fired the diversity bureaucrats. I can see the border being reopened by the next Democratic president who simply overturns Trump’s executive orders like Joe Biden. It is easy to imagine because this is what happened after Trump’s first term as a consequence of frittering away his coalition.

There seems to be no plan to lock in a MAGA majority. There are no new candidates running for office in the midterms to get excited about. The GOP has used power to reward traditional constituencies like the ultra wealthy, big business, defense contractors and Zionist donors. Nothing has really been done about inflation or the cost of the living which is what mattered to swing voters. Gas prices are decent and the stock market is doing great, but most Americans are not part of the investor class and those who can afford to live in affluent suburbs increasingly vote for Democrats. The mass deportations and arrests of evil elites which were promised during the 2024 campaign still haven’t been delivered.

We have boasted about “moving the Overton Window,” but the Iran strike underscored how little the GOP has changed. FOX News blasted out an avalanche of George W. Bush era propaganda about Iranian Islamo-Nazi mullahs armed with nuclear tipped ICBMs who were poised to blow up New York City in “under two weeks.” The U.S. military was ordered to take action on the basis of this nonsense. It had to be done to stop a “second Holocaust.” Sen. Katie Britt went on national television to save Western civilization from Iran which politely responded by notifying the president it was targeting Al-Udeid in Qatar with a few symbolic missiles. The official House Republican and Senate Republican accounts on X are a daily reminder of how little attention the people who are actually in power have paid to how Trump has changed the Republican coalition. It is true the base has changed and the Overton Window has moved, but the gravity of Trump’s personality cult has stopped the GOP from falling through the floor of political reality with its own voters. It still hasn’t been enough to save the GOP in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.

The MAGA endgame is already visible.

A disastrous midterm shellacking in 2026 will make Trump a lame duck president. This will be followed by a final unproductive two years of impeachment hearings and investigations. The daily rants on Truth Social are meaningful in that they show how the president is becoming distracted and losing focus again like in his first term. The Trump administration is drifting and failing to deliver on core campaign promises to the base. Even worse, the president is lashing out in anger at his own supporters many of whom went to prison for him over January 6. The whispers have already begun that Trump is blowing it.

https://occidentaldissent.com/2025/07/22/the-pessimistic-view-of-trump-2-0/