Tom Nichols: What Trump’s Been Doing Lately Undermines Him ‘Pulling off’ ‘Authoritarian Moves’ that He’s Been Pressing

EXCERPT:

NICHOLS: “He’s already accomplished the first part of staying out of prison. He’s got a Supreme Court that’s going to make sure that never happens. And, you know, he’s working on the revenge piece and the money is flowing. So the rest of it, I mean, other than making him look bad when countries say, 'Well, we’re not — you know, we’re going to institute reciprocal tariffs or, you know, we’re not going to just eat the cost of your grandstanding,' or, you know, when Putin says, 'I’m not going to stop bombing Ukraine,' those are all things that matter to him only in terms of his image and his popularity. And I will say one thing, though, about it's true they won’t desert him. They might desert some of the people around him in Congress, but also lower approval ratings, even from his base, are a kind of break on some autocratic tendencies. For people to pull off the kind of authoritarian moves that Trump really wants to keep pressing, you need a really high level of popularity. And this — I think the kind of things he’s been doing lately undermines that. So that actually is a kind of second-order effect that I think has at least some positive impact."