Robert Reich: Sunday Thought: Why Trump Is Doomed

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-reich/114773/sunday-thought-why-trump-is-doomed

Sunday Thought: Why Trump Is Doomed
by Robert Reich | August 31, 2025 - 5:48am

— from Robert Reich's Substack

Friends,

snip//

Rest assured. The seeds of Trump’s destruction have already been sown. He will overreach. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of birthright citizenship, for example, and Trump announces he’s not bound by the Supreme Court, the uproar will be deafening.

Or the economy will bite him in the butt. As prices continue to rise and job growth continues to slow — due to Trump’s bonkers import taxes (tariffs), his attempt to take over the Fed, and his attacks on immigrants — America will fall into the dread trap of “stagflation”: stagnation and inflation. After months of this, his base is likely to turn on him — remember, many voted for him because he promised to bring prices down — and he and his Republican lackeys in Congress will be toast in the 2026 midterms.

Or his brazen corruption will do him in (he’s personally raking in hundreds of millions from crypto, for example). Or Putin will do him in (if Ukraine falls to Russia or an emboldened Russia strikes Lithuania). Or the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

He no longer has any truth-tellers to advise him — he has purged all of them. And a president who’s flying blind, without anyone around him to tell him he’s about to crash, will inevitably crash. Many innocent people will likely suffer “collateral” damage. But at least the nation will see him for who he is and consign him to the dustbin of history.

None of this argues for complacency. We must continue to fight — demonstrate, phone your representatives and senators, boycott corporations and organizations that are caving in to tyranny, protect the vulnerable, make good trouble.

But please do not fall into denial or despair, and don’t let anyone else.

[GoCubsGo]

1. Everything Trump touches dies.

Including his own Presidency, eventually. And, judging by the rate at which he is physically and mentally decaying, it looks like a lifetime of touching himself is catching up with him, too.

[Joinfortmill]

13. Yup. Stay strong.

[peggysue2]

18. ETTD

Rick Wilson coined the term and it has proven incredibly prescient.

Trump is The Destroyer. Of the US.

This is something Putin and his fellow gangsters recognized long before Trump was injected into the American political system. We were ripe with political discord and discontent. A shot of poison into the veins of American culture has brought the country to this moment: citizens against citizens, hate, bigotry, misogyny, all the rest.

Donald Trump is the cherry-on-top of this wicked recipe carefully curated, crafted by the enemies of democracy and carried out by domestic traitors.

This really is the fight of our lives.

Agent Orange, however, is a weak sister. He has fumbled and bumbled everything he's touched throughout his lifetime. His overreach is monumental and the incursion into American cities, the strongman's melody, is about to reach its crescendo. The economy sucks, he's threatening and preparing for war with Venezuela, attempting influence operations in Canada and Greenland while the man is rotting from the inside out. The Europeans have come out and flatly stated: Trump is operating at Russia's behest, an agent provocateur. The through-line is chaos, chaos, chaos, 24/7.

Never forget, never forgive.

Resist every day, everywhere, then all at once.

[tinrobot]

21. True. I guess we should hope that he touches himself more.

Please excuse me while I wash that image out of my brain.

Ew.

[Walleye]

2. He still believes that people voted for Trump because they thought he would lower prices?

We will never deal with this if we don’t quit lying to ourselves. We know why they voted for him. They hate women and POC. As far as exposing him for who he really is, we’ve known that for 10 years. Apparently many Americans like it.

[sop]

3. On those two metrics, misogyny and racism, Trump is doing quite well with his supporters.

[Walleye]

4. Yes. And I don't see what kind of Democratic "messaging" will undo this.

[betsuni]

17. Like saying Democrats need health care as a right not privilege policy and when informed it's been in the party

platform since 1992, dismiss it with a snarky well, why didn't they do it then. Saw that here yesterday.

Clinton and Obama, Ted Kennedy's '70s fiery speeches demanding health care as a right not a privilege on YouTube, Democrats like John Conyers' Medicare for All bills introduced from 2003 on, 100 years of universal health care as a Democratic goal, all history erased.

Replaced by fiction that corrupt same-as-Republican Democrats are shocked by the idea of universal health care, never heard of it or any policies to fix inequality in the United States. So all you have to do is get a True Progressive with the right message. Easy!

[underpants]

5. "flying blind" indeed. In his inner circle of sycophants he IS "The State"

No one dare even say, “Sir (of course) have you considered….” if he takes any advice at all.

There are the flippant childlike tantrums and crazy overreaching EO’s then there are the face plant embarrassing stunts:
Turning the White House into a car dealership
The California water “valve”
The gotcha document with Powell at the Fed.

No one can stop him and he often circles back (as he does) to punch down after these WINS!

[MadameButterfly]

6. I was hoping to be more comforted by this post

But I don't know what to do with my despair over how baad things must get for Trump to lose popularity.
Yes, I agree that his popularity will continue to fall.
Yes, he will over-reach as despots tend to do.
I need some help in believing that this will matter. That there will be another free and fair election.

I need to understand the mechanism by which this will turn around. People in government who will stop doing his bidding? Republicans lawmakers who wont always vote his way? Even SCOTUS gets alarmed and won't sign the death warrant on democracy? Corporations figure out that democracy is more profitable than tax cuts? Soldiers who won't follow his illegal orders? States able to protect their voting systems despite dissolution of the agencies created to protect elections?

Please help me here, i want to be convinced.

[PJMcK]

7. We've heard all this before

Trump always escapes.

It’s tiresome to hear a litany of Trump’s latest scandals under the click-bait headline, “This Time Trump Won’t Get Away.”

We’ve heard this same thing since 2015.

[OldBaldy1701E]

8. Bingo.

The system is set up for people like him to get away with it every time.

You know, those who are so rich that they get away with everything while the rest of us are routinely arrested and/or mistreated by the elite because we are not 'like them'.

NOTHING has ever made me feel so good about myself as the one time I heard some rich prick tell another that very statement.

I don't WANT to be like you, you soulless, brain-dead animal.

[Orrex]

10. I concur

We're always told that this is the thing that will finally turn his KKKult against him, yet here we are.

It's reminiscent of the tales we've heard for decades about the implosion of the Republican party, or how the GOP is perpetually "on the ropes" while somehow controlling all three branches of government at the local, state and federal level, along with the military and much large industry.

I'd rather forgo these predictions of Trump's doom in favor of reading his good old-fashioned obituary.

[Miles Archer]

15. He literally got away with 100% of EVERYTHING that dogged him in his first term.

EVERYTHING.

Not 95%.

100%...of...EVERYTHING, and John Roberts anointing as the new Christ Child isn't going to rein Trump in any time soon.

[wolfie001]

9. His 6 POS on the SC will maintain his legacy of hate and racism for generations

[roscoeroscoe]

11. Not a secure website?

Why do they run that site that way?

[hunter]

16. "Security" is not for you...

... it's for those who own you.

[Joinfortmill]

12. This makes sense and offers some hope. But, it's scary out there. VOTE like your life depended on it, because it does.

[samplegirl]

14. He completely ruined the state of Ohio

I never see us being blue again and didn't do a damn thing but destroy us in two visits!

[MadameButterfly]

20. Sherrod Brown will win the next Senate race

[AnnaLee]

19. The hidden taxation

Tariff talk really targets ignorance in people. I cannot see how I could get my Texas brother in law, who is actually smart enough, to drop his worship of Trump and hatred of Peloski long enough to figure this out or even listen to someone making the point.

All of us know that tariff is just another name for federal sales tax and that it is highly regressive. In states we know we pay some percent of spending, with known exceptions, in sales tax. This federal sales tax seems intractable to me. You know prices around you are going up but parcing out what percent is due to tariffs seems impossible.

Also, the tax introduction comes in slowly, and, at some point should level out IF the before import price remains the same. If not, you pay tax on the added price too but still don't know how much. It leveled off but, like all sales taxes, never became constant. (If import price goes down, it goes down. Works both ways but you never can actually enumerate it in your life.) I know that you know Canada's current tariff on cars is 25%, but, how do you know if the pass through embedded in the price is more than, equal to, or less than the tariff?

At any rate, it isn't itemized on your sales receipt like other sales taxes but, like all federal taxes, it goes to the government and you never saw the amount of tax you paid enumerated. For lower and middle class Americans, most income taxes didn't change to compensate and those that did weren't permanent. That is not good if the tariff, via stolen elections, never goes down.

Indeed, at some point, they might just drop the tariff language and enact the equivalent sales tax directly. In an authoritarian regime, the winners don't need to worry about the losers any more. The only thing that holds poor people's tax down is not having enough money to spend in the first place.

[LudwigPastorius]

22. "Rest assured. The seeds of Trump's destruction have already been sown. He will overreach."

Hmm...Where have I heard that before?