Is the Felon's Luck Is Finally Running Out?

Predictions of the Felon's political death have proven false and wishful thinking in the past and despite his unfitness for office - and I mean any office - he has resurrected himself. Not even two full years into his second regime, the chaos he generates is exhausting and his focus remains primarily on his own self-enrichment and benefiting the billionaire class and the fossil fuel industry.  The wants and needs of average Americans is nowhere on the Felon's radar screen and the Felon's tariffs and war of choice have driven fuel costs through the roof, dragging other consumer prices higher - the opposite of what the Felon promised in his disingenuous 2024 campaign. With the mid-term elections a little more than a month away, as a column in the New York Times lays out, the Felon may be at the end of his lucky streak even as he pushes his vanity projects in Washington, D.C., and moves to despoil public lands. More and more voices on the political right are critical of the Felon's misrule even as Republican candidates seek to run from the Felon (see this piece at Salon).  Here are highlights from the Times column:

Trump has been president, on and off, for five years and eight months. We have been waiting a long time, and there have been premature declarations in the past, but this time his string [of luck] is finally running out. The evidence is decisive.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken Sept. 17 to 20, the share of voters who disapprove of Trump (66 percent) is twice as large as the share of those who approve (32 percent).

Trump’s support among Latino voters — a crucial ingredient of his victory in 2024 — is falling rapidly. Pew Research found that Trump’s approval rating among Hispanics who voted for him two years ago fell to 66 percent from 93 percent between February 2025 and April 2026.

The way independents break in the end is often determinative in general elections, and they have turned their backs on Trump. In 2024, independents split among the two candidates, favoring Trump by 3 percentage points. Asked now whether they intend to vote for a Democrat or a Republican for Congress — the generic vote question — independents choose the Democrat over the Republican 57 percent to 32 percent, a 25-point difference.

Trump has lost “ownership” of the issues that put him in the White House. In 2024, voters said Republicans would do a better job dealing with immigration than Democrats, 42 percent to 30 percent. Two weeks ago, the NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll national survey found that voters had shifted to favor Democrats by a modest three points, 41 to 38 percent, but that modest three-point advantage actually represents a 15-point swing.

Voters, in other words, are showing a growing determination to repudiate the Trump presidency. Their most direct opportunity to express this determination is electing Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. At the moment, poll data gives Democrats a strong chance of taking the House and modest but strengthening odds of taking the Senate.

Trump, as we have learned to our detriment, cannot tolerate defeat. Jan. 6 was only the most obvious manifestation of that.  He has already taken or announced actions that amount to expressions of desperation: an offer to pay every adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of both branches of Congress, for example. He also told us, point blank, after he was asked whether he would send National Guard troops or Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations during the midterm elections, that he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections; we have to have honest elections.” The only elections Trump recognizes as “honest,” of course, are the ones Republicans win.

That Trump is going to extremes to avoid responsibility for defeat is unsurprising. He has spent much of his political career blaming others for his mistakes, and few things could be more repellent than the Republican losses on the political battlefield when voting ends on Nov. 3, leaving an indelible stain on Trump’s hands.

Trump remains blissfully ignorant of his political toxicity. On Sept. 9, at the Republican midterm convention that he convened, Trump told loyalists worried about the midterms, “Pretend that I am on the ballot.”

In fact, the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that a strategy to persuade voters that Trump was on the ballot would backfire disastrously

Steve Deace, a right-wing talk show host in Iowa, gave a warning last Wednesday on X about the dangers facing the Republican Party on Election Day: Yesterday, Iowa House Republicans were informed by their own pollsters that if you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006. …

Deace placed the blame for his party’s endangered position on the way “This whatever/kinda/sorta/but not really war has become an existential misuse of political capital. Many of us never thought it was worth it, and more and more it appears voters agree.”  “Out here in the cheap seats,” Deace added, “it feels like another Middle East War quagmire regular folks are paying for on both ends all over again.”

The erosion of support for Trump has been a slow and steady process. Polling by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that over the 13 months from July 2025 to August 2026, the percentage of voters who “strongly disapprove” of Trump rose to 54 percent from 49 percent, while the percentage saying they “strongly approve” fell to 14 percent from 21 percent.

Predicting election outcomes is a fool’s game, but as one of the fools, I think Taylor is too cautious. My own experience is that trends are highly predictive of outcomes — and the trend line now is moving decisively in favor of the Democrats.

Amy Walter, the publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Report, wrote last Tuesday under the headline “Political Gravity Finally Caught Up With Trump. Now the G.O.P. Has to Try to Spend Their Way Out of It”: . . . the economic consequences of his sweeping tariffs and the war in Iran have done the one thing all the controversies of his first term were never able to do: splinter his coalition and sink his approval ratings to all-time lows. . . . Perhaps more damaging, Trump’s inability to pull his candidates across the victory line has become conventional wisdom.

Smarter.Vote, a voter analysis website, currently assesses a 73 percent chance of a Democratic takeover of the House, with a post-election makeup of 228 Democrats to 207 Republicans. Smarter.Vote foresees a much closer and more contested Senate outcome, with Democrats now having a 57 percent chance of taking control, with a 51-to-49 majority.

Most damaging of all for a wannabe autocrat like Trump, who depends on being the center of attention to maintain his power, there are clear signs that the president is losing relevance.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported on its A.I.-based analysis of nearly 70,000 hours of podcasts with a headline that should make even Trump cringe: “MAGA Podcasters Are Tuning Out Trump.”