The End of the Showman Presidency

The second Trump administration is playing out rather differently from the first. Part of this, as I wrote about back in March , is the sort of people Trump has surrounded himself with this time.

The first Trump administration wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been because it had relatively normal people in positions of power, who responded to incentives in a relatively normal way and had moral features within relatively normal parameters. Some were stupid and evil, yes, but plenty weren’t. And that made it harder for Trump to get done all the stupid and evil things that appeal to Trump.

That happened not because Trump wanted serious people, but because he didn't expect to win, and so his campaign hadn't picked people out in advance. This meant, when they suddenly did need to staff an executive branch, they went to the more typical GOP establishment Rolodex.

But "He chose a lot of kind of normal GOP apparatchiks" isn't the only reason Trump 1.0 was, compared to the last year, comparatively benign. The other feature of Trump 1.0, that doesn't seem to obtain now, is that he responded to the public's dislike of his policies by backing down. He felt, in other words, popular pressure. And Trump's ultimately a branding guy. That's his whole thing. He slaps his name on things, and makes money from his name being on those things. He's a showman, and a successful showman responds to his audience. When Trump tried things eight years ago and discovered they were broadly hated, or weren't playing well in the media he wanted to get glowing reviews from, he'd pivot. He'd blame someone else, and fire someone near him, but he'd pivot. He's not doing that now.

So what's changed? First, Trump is in a bubble.

He was in a bubble before, of course, to some extent. His first term was filled with binged Fox News, but now it's filled with binged Newsmax. He's still active on social media, but it's Truth Social instead of Twitter. (And even if he is still looking at Twitter, the Twitter/X of 2025 isn't the Twitter of 2016.) He doesn't have those "typical GOP rolodox" guys giving him the bad news, but instead has cranks and weirdos and true believers and neo-Nazis who want to keep him content so they can keep inflicting their prejudices and hobby horses and grifts on the country.

He's also, to put it bluntly, quite a lot stupider than he used to be. And Trump was never a genius. He's in significant mental and physical decline. He's confused and tired and epistemically buffered, and so mistakenly believes he's a popular king.

The big story of the last election, when it comes to elites, is that they convinced themselves a second Trump presidency would look a lot like the first. They'd get Biden off their back, there'd be a bit more fight against wokeism, but things would broadly be mostly okay. But the "mostly okay" of that first term was the product of Trump having relatively normal people around him and Trump not wanting to be unpopular. What elites got wrong, then, is that in a second term, Trump picked the worst of the worst to fill the White House, and he'd aged out of the cognitive faculties needed for him to recognize his lack of popularity. You occasionally see something break through to him (he backs down sometimes on tariffs, and the White House is circling the wagons on Hegseth's war crimes). But his decline is accelerating. And the Voughts and Millers who can see the unpopularity aren't likely to back down themselves, but instead do everything they can to inflict as much damage as possible before the American people kick them to the curb in 2028.

Things are only going to get worse before they get better.