Matt Bai
View all posts by Matt Bai April 12, 2026
Illustrtaion by VICTOR JUHASZ It was the first week of September in 2005, about a week after Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans, when George W. Bush uttered the line that would come to define his second term, if not his entire presidency: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” It was a throwaway comment, a plainspoken president telling his aide, FEMA Director Michael Brown, that he appreciated the effort. But the effort wasn’t nearly adequate, the federal response pitiful, and Bush’s ad-lib became the slogan for an out-of-touch administration that either couldn’t run the government or, worse, didn’t care. For the rest of Bush’s dismal time in office, every new failing would be met with the same sardonic response from his critics. Heckuva job, Brownie.
Donald Trump’s “great job” to Marco Rubio, tossed out during his State of the Union speech in February, didn’t have quite the same staying power. (“I think he’ll go down as the best ever,” Trump told his secretary of state, causing Henry Kissinger to bolt upright in his grave and laugh out loud.) But however much he may try to distract us with outrageous posts and circus-like spectacle, it’s becoming clear that second-term Trump is sinking faster and deeper than Bush ever did, and the dead weight on his back is pretty much the same.
It’s really not ideology that’s tanking Trump right now. I mean, yes, his administration is the meanest, most xenophobic, and most imperialist in at least the past century. And I’d like to think that would be a deal-breaker for the vast majority of middle-ground American voters, but if we’re being real, it probably isn’t. Independent and moderate voters have been with Trump on immigration, broadly speaking, since he first started doing his nativist routine a decade ago. And even a lot of populist leftists can get behind an “America First” foreign policy and protectionism for American manufacturers. Maybe Trump should be flailing politically because he’s brazenly profiting off the presidency and renaming half of Washington after himself, but near as I can tell, that part doesn’t especially trouble people, either.
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No, what’s killing Trump right now isn’t the extremist agenda — it’s the mind-blowing incompetence. Deporting immigrants is one thing; masked agents executing American citizens on Midwestern boulevards is another. Ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions might get majority support on paper, but launching a war without any clear rationale, without having thought through even the most basic consequences, is how you lose the electorate in a hurry. (About six in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump’s wartime performance, according to Pew Research, and that number isn’t going down anytime soon.) Gas prices are spiking, mortgage rates are soaring, financial markets are lurching back and forth. Airport terminals look like Disneyland in July.
Competence — and by that I mean the most fundamental, entry-level, don’t-blow-up-the-world kind of competence — was more of a thing in the first Trump term, when the president cycled through a series of senior aides, old-line party and military types, who saw themselves as buffers between Trump and the various agencies. Four years in exile liberated Trump from all of that. His second-term team comprises mainly fringe players and pugnacious pundits, people more comfortable with pancake makeup than managing complex bureaucracies, for which they have nothing but contempt anyway. It’s a bold experiment, but one that seemed ill-fated from the start.
I could waste the rest of this column dredging up examples, I guess — the Homeland Security secretary spending $220 million on ads that showed her on horseback at Mount Rushmore; the FBI director shuttling his girlfriend around with a security detail and chugging beers with hockey players while there are actual crimes to solve; the defense secretary who thinks it’s fine for Apache helicopters to buzz the backyards of washed-up rock stars; the attorney general installing U.S. attorneys who really ought to be doing wills and closings (if that). Better if we just stipulate to staggering daily malfeasance and enter it into the record.
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Put it this way: When Trump finally replaced Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin, a former plumber and MMA fighter who keeps intimating that he’s been some kind of secret military agent but can’t talk about it, every sane person in Washington applauded as if this were the second coming of James Baker in his prime. That tells you all you need to know.
I’ve long advanced a theory, probably stemming from my childhood in the Carter years, that voters can abide almost anything from a president — as long as it isn’t a descent into chaos. (Nothing says chaos like getting attacked by a rabbit.) Fairly or not, we like the illusion of a president who is at least mostly in control of events, because otherwise it’s just too hard to sleep. I will admit that Trump has given me doubts about this theory; there were moments, especially in his first term, where it seemed like destructive chaos really worked for Trump, perhaps because it was the most predictable thing about him. It’s not working now.
Trump’s economy — and, more to the point, the impression that he always seems focused on something that isn’t the economy, like this obsession with election fraud that no one outside his Truth Social feed actually believes or cares about — has driven away a legion of independents who voted for him, while his Napoleonic foreign policy has opened a bitter and widening rift in his own base. You could walk from the Jefferson Memorial to K Street (farther than it looks, believe me) and not run into a human being who thinks Republicans are going to keep the House after November. And count me among those who think Democrats now have a reasonable shot at taking back the Senate, too, by putting in play Republican seats in Texas, North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska. MAGA may yet have some currency as a movement, but as a governing entity, it is now presiding over a failed state.
IT’S OFTEN SAID that people just become more who they are as they reach the final stage of life, and you can already see how Trump will probably spend the last two years of his paralyzed presidency — as a builder, obsessed with his ballroom and his arts center and his silly Arc d’Trump, railing at architects and racing to leave behind a legacy in gold leaf. What happens to his movement is a more complicated question. What does Trumpism become once the voters have rejected Trump?
Already, the contours of factions are taking shape. One is what you might call the “True MAGA” wing — Trump followers who will argue that Trump abandoned his own “America First” ideology, because he was corrupted by insiders, or maybe because he lost his mental grip. The way forward, then, isn’t to abandon MAGA, but rather to return to its nativist, anti-globalist roots. (Maybe even ease up on the white nationalism, indulge a little antisemitism instead.)
Marjorie Taylor Greene has very shrewdly set herself up as the heir to authentic Trumpism. So has Tucker Carlson, who should not be dismissed. Even J.D. Vance could stake a claim to this faction, having cleverly made it known that he opposed the Iran war while simultaneously demonstrating, again, his slavish loyalty.
Then there’s what I’d call the “Trump But” crowd, as in: “I’m just like Trump, but maybe better.” After a late and zealous conversion to MAGA, Marco Rubio seems to be setting himself up as the softer-edged, more experienced, more broadly appealing version of Trump. Senators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz might position themselves as more cerebral Trumpian successors — ideologically aligned in all the right ways, but also more focused on economic fairness. Robert Kennedy Jr. wouldn’t be crazy for thinking he could merge what’s left of MAGA with his own anti-corporate following. (He’d be crazy for other reasons, but not that one.)
The posturing among these factions might be fun to watch — and perhaps even substantive in a weird way. But if I were a Republican politician looking to salvage the remains of MAGA right now, I’d give some thought to the governing part, too, and how I might convey a grasp on it. Competence by itself has never been a compelling theme in presidential politics; just ask President Dukakis or President Romney. But stupefying incompetence isn’t much of a calling card, either.
