Column: Misery has plenty of company in Trump’s second term

If you wake each morning already angry at news of some latest outrage from President Trump or some unhinged, malevolent message he posted online overnight, and if you then go to bed already burdened by nightmares from the headlines of the day, there’s good news: You’re not alone.

Being social animals, humans find comfort in company. Except, in this case, for Republicans nationwide who will face voters in November. And that’s another thought that should be comforting: that those Trump-enabling Republicans are discomfited.

Those were my reflections this week as I read the Wall Street Journal’s report on a Texas Democrat’s 14-point victory on Saturday in a special state Senate election to represent a Fort Worth-area district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024. That’s a 31-point swing from red to blue. So sure, consider all the caveats about special elections being low-turnout affairs that aren’t exactly representative of the larger electorate that comes out in a general November election. But 31 points?

What struck me even more, however, was independent voter Shanna Abbott’s explanation to the Journal for why she supported Democrat Taylor Rehmet in that race:

“Every day there’s something insane happening.”

See? You’re not alone in thinking that same thing. Misery loves company: an adage for our Trumpian times. And from solidarity comes action.

That’s what has Republicans quaking in this midterm election year. They’re especially unnerved because they also know that every day Trump will say something, do something or do nothing — say, to rein in the brutal, even murderous thugs masquerading as federal law enforcement agents on U.S. streets or to lower prices as he promised (instead of ultimately raising them with tariffs) — and keep alive the disgust that so many Americans share. It’s a growing majority, polls show.

For more than a decade this “flood[ing] the zone with s—,” as Trump high priest Stephen K. Bannon put it years ago, has been not just Trump’s proclivity but also a purposeful strategy to disorient and overwhelm the media as well as the public. Trump’s fire hose was the weaponry of his superpower. No sooner did he say or do something that in past times would have undone another president — or at least provoked a consuming controversy — then Trump would spawn another rhubarb, and then another.

Discombobulated, Trump’s political foes as well as Americans generally just threw up their collective arms in surrender: It’s just Trump being Trump.

What’s more, at Trump’s debut on the national political stage, back when then-rival Jeb Bush presciently predicted during the 2016 campaign that Trump would be “a chaos president,” many Americans heard those words with welcoming ears and not as the warning that Bush intended.

Many voters wanted a chaos agent to shake up Washington, a disruptor to “drain the swamp” and to stick it to the elites. (Never mind that billionaire Trump was one of those elites, as he’s lately illustrating in spades with word of every self-enriching crypto deal and each new black redaction from the tranche of criminality known as the Epstein files that might be protecting him or his predatory pals from infamy.)

Yet in his second term, with Trump unrestrained by the kind of normie advisors who checked him in his first term, and in fact encouraged in his worst authoritarian instincts by current aides (looking at you, Stephen Miller), the president has surpassed the limits of Americans’ appetites for his rhubarbs. They’re choking on his chaos, a revulsion that’s exacerbated when they see every day that Trump isn’t making their lives more affordable — he rejects the very word “affordability” as a Democratic “con job.” He instead seems preoccupied with erecting gold and marble monuments to himself in Washington and partying at his sumptuous Mar-a-Lago with, yes, the elites.

Even some elites are hedging. A headline in the Washington Post this week: “Trump’s chaotic governing style is hurting the value of the U.S. dollar.” A weaker dollar, in turn, further raises ordinary Americans’ costs for imports including autos, electronics, clothes, food and more.

The year is only five weeks old and already Americans have stomached a lot.

They watched witness video of armed immigration agents shooting to death two citizens protesting in Minneapolis, only to hear Trump and his mooks slime and blame the victims. Americans saw 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and 2-year-old Chloe Renata Tipan Villacis taken by agents and sent 1,300 miles from Minneapolis to a detention center in Texas — just two among the thousands of children nabbed by immigration agents nationwide during Trump 2.0, independent studies and data show. (Reminder: Nearly a third of the estimated 4,600 children victimized by first-term Trump’s abhorrent family separation policy still had not been reunited with their families when he regained office.)

Local news carries horror stories in other cities coast-to-coast about the abuses of Trump’s mass deportation operations. Beyond U.S. borders, Trump took over a country, Venezuela, after the U.S. military abducted its leader without notice to Congress, then threatened to take Greenland from longtime ally Denmark, alienating Europe and threatening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s continued existence.

Measles are back. On Sunday night, Trump announced he would close the Kennedy Center two years for reconstruction. His administration’s cover-up of the Epstein files continues. And the Wall Street Journal reported a blockbuster on yet another Mideast deal benefiting the Trump family.

Americans raise their kids to be good losers, and tell them that elections are the foundation of democracy. Yet Trump continues to insist the 2020 election was stolen from him, last week had federal agents seize ballots from Fulton County, Ga., to try to make his case, yet again, and twice this week said Republicans should nationalize voting in at least 15 states. (You can guess which ones, starting with California.)

He’s fearful, as he should be, about the midterm elections. Company’s coming.

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