We are only seven weeks into Donald Trump’s second term of office. It is difficult to grasp that small handful of a figure given the torrent of executive orders, firings, reorganizations, torn international treaties and social media mayhem. For those with the stomach to try and follow the day-to-day progress of Trump 2.0, it is head spinning and nauseating work. Most people’s outrage processing neural engines are screeching with overload.

Where do you start? Bonkers on/off tariffs that seem likely to trigger worldwide trade wars and a new Great Depression. The destruction, almost overnight, of eighty years of post-war alliances and NATO security. The plans to seize foreign countries for their mineral wealth. The decision to start a trade and diplomatic insult war with Canada which seems rapidly to be descending into something far more dangerous and frankly post-satire mad involving the Great Lakes. The unleashing of an unelected electric car builder with complete, and seemingly illegal, control over all domestic aspects of the administration and spending, totally by-passing Congress. The pardoning of rioters and insurrectionists including leading members of the far right paramilitary. 

The list of shame and outrage goes on and on.

It all seems bleak. Bleak for the world economy. Bleak for world peace. Bleak for America’s traditional allies.

As John McCain was often fond of saying: “It is always darkest before…it turns pitch black.”

And yet. And yet. Here we see political overreach on an industrial scale. Heady with an election win which they think was a landslide and filled to bursting with the drug Project 2025, a revolutionary fentanyl that destroys sane thinking and induces wild euphoric destruction of hundreds of years of constitutional government, Trump/MAGA range across the administration armed with chainsaws and dismissal notices.

Already the poll numbers are sliding. The economic clouds darkening, with Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta GDPNow stats screaming ‘recession incoming’. Bond yields are down. GOP town hall meetings being cancelled because angry voters are demanding to know what is going on – and asking why eggs are still increasing in price. Court judges starting to process the flurry of ‘stop Musk/Trump’ court cases. Mardi Gras visitors throwing beans at Tesla cars. 

In any other administration there would be a pause for thought, a moment or two to consider whether they are pushing too far, risking losing some of the barely 50% of US voters who put them back in office. They might reflect on the polling. There might even be a meeting where someone other than Trump or Musk is actually listened to.

Not Trump 2.0. Shock and awe is all. Overreach is what real warriors do. Further, faster, harder. Break more.

It is, as David Frum argues in the Atlantic this week, almost as if they don’t care that there are mid-term elections in 2026. 

And maybe that’s right: MAGA GOP has no intention of allowing free and fair elections in 2026 never mind the presidential in 2028. They think they can find a way to either halt them altogether or rig the result through various tricks like voter id, vodka-fueled disinformation and purging Democratic voters off the rolls.

In politics though, as in war, every action has a reaction. 

Here’s a prediction, Trump 2.0’s stupendously stupid and politically naive levels of overreach will soon cause a major reaction: political and economic. Will it be enough to force them somehow to hold fair 2026 elections and risk losing the House? Are there enough Americans left who want to live in democracy who will fight to keep one? Is there anyone remaining in the Republic Party who still has even a fading sense of right and wrong and, perhaps dimly, recalls something they once worshipped called the Constitution?

We shall soon know. The mid-terms are only eighteen months away. There is still time to stop the end of US democracy coming to pass. Every US citizen must now fight for their vote to be counted – fairly and freely.

As Benjamin Franklin left the last day of the original constitutional convention in 1787 he was supposedly asked by one of the awaiting crowd what they had achieved:

 “A republic madam, if you can keep it.”

Rotten Borough