Trump’s Hell Is Warming Up. Burn, Baby, Burn!

by Rick Wilson - Sep 8

Oh, I know, dear readers.

You were ahead of the curve.

You hated Trump before it was cool.

Now, the rest of America is catching up, and the hell of a Donald’s Trump with fewer supporters, less power, less adoration, a portfolio of raging failures, a MAGA movement shattered by his incompetence and greed, and real accountability is about to get very, very hot.

Not so for millions of American normies, who lived in a comfortable world where politics was distant thunder, a swift Autumn storm that swept past every four years and left them to contend with the second- and third-order effects with little more than a shrug. That was always a strange luxury of American citizenship: knowing there was a broad homeostasis in our politics.

We had a system, built on a Constitution, the rule of law, social and political norms, and economic incentives not to blow the tremendous legacy handed to us by generations of sacrifice and blood.

We never slammed too far left or right without a reset, a drift back toward a mushy center that pleased no hard partisan on either side but muddled through. We bent the arc in our clumsy, American way, generally in the correct direction.

The normies are waking up now. And when normies wake up angry, they don’t come with signs and chants. They come with grocery receipts, power bills, and health insurance denials.

Understand this about the moment we’re in: none of Trump’s old magic works anymore. Not one trick. The insult-comic routine, the strongman cosplay, the “only I can fix it” bluster, the reflexive projection of blame onto anyone within arm’s reach. It all lands now like a Reno comedian’s lounge act playing to a room that already saw the show, hated it, and is waiting for the check. His government is still dangerous, but that’s on a shorter clock than he thinks.

His own party knows it. The Financial Times called him a toxic asset, and the ledger of Republican panic keeps filling. Senate Republicans are telling The Hill on background that Trump is a “growing political liability,” which in Senate-speak is a scream of terror.

The Washington Post reports he’s sitting on his super PAC cash while GOP leaders conclude he never intends to spend more than a trivial amount ($10 million in Texas is a rounding error) on anyone but himself. His response? To go on Fox and pre-blame congressional Republicans for the coming wipeout, insisting “some people like me more than they like the party.”

They don’t. He’s 32 points underwater on approval. Trump is the party’s biggest problem, and the party is finally saying so, even if only in the whispered, anonymous quote, that last refuge of the Republican coward.

For fourteen years, NBC sold America a fiction: Donald Trump, master dealmaker, the boardroom sage who could size up a room and close any deal.

Mark Burnett’s editors did more for Trump than any consultant alive, and I say that as a man who spent his life in the trade. That image was cemented into the American mind by sheer repetition. But we now have a decade of counterexamples.

The trade deals that weren’t. The tariffs that were, and that crippled the American household economy. The lie of a manufacturing boom. The devastated farms and factories. The war that was going to be over in a couple of weeks, now grinding into its seventh month with the Strait of Hormuz shut and a fifth of the world’s oil sitting behind an Iranian toll booth. Nothing kills a myth like a track record.

Listen to him: “This is peanuts,” he said of $4.55 gas, while walking reporters around the construction site of his $400 million ballroom. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

And my favorite, from August: “The food, the groceries, it’s all coming down.” Prices are up 4.3 percent since he took office. Gas is up 34 percent. Ground beef is up nearly 12 percent in a year, even with his import of toxic pink-sludge meat-like protein product from unregulated Argentine and Brazilian companies.

He isn’t even bothering to lie to the rubes, exactly. He’s describing the view from inside a gold-leaf senior memory-care facility where nobody has pumped their own gas since the Carter administration and for whom staff attends the weekly trip to Whole Foods.

The numbers are a crime scene. Economist/YouGov has him at 33 approve, 62 disapprove, the most unpopular president in the history of their tracker. Reuters/Ipsos put his economic approval at 29 percent, lower than anything Joe Biden ever posted. Two-thirds of the country says wrong track. The Iran war is at minus 30 and sinking.

And the tell that matters most: among his own 2024 voters, only 44 percent now say the economy is headed the right way, down from 55 in May. When your own people stop believing the story, the story is over.

Now consider the toxic alchemy at work in this election season. The old Trump’s feral cunning over issues and angles is gone, dead, six feet under the polling. What’s left is a Trump who is entirely out of touch, and patently corrupt.

Obsessed with the ballroom, the Arc de Trump, the reflecting pool (he is still publicly at war with his own U.S. Attorney because she wouldn’t charge a contractor’s bad grout as felony vandalism), and every gold geegaw he can bolt to the Oval Office.

Any one of those might be a survivable fillip, a tiny eccentricity. Together, landing on a family that has paid $300 more for gasoline this year, they’re political radioactive waste.

Add the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for his MAGA pals, which even Republican senators admit reads as a way for Trump to fund his own Sturmabteilung. Americans don’t need to parse the Emoluments Clause. They understand a man spending time and taxpayer money on a gold ballroom while telling them their gas bill is peanuts.

Another reason you know he’s lost his touch: Trump picked a side on data centers, and it’s the wrong one. Sixty-one percent of Americans oppose one near them, up twelve points since spring. Forty-seven percent of his own voters say no. The NRSC circulated a private memo warning the issue could cost them Ohio. Trump’s answer was to declare that towns rejecting them will end up “backwards and poor” and that the backlash is 99 percent foreign influence. Data centers are issue with a physical address, calling the neighbors traitors. That’s as poisonous as the effluent spill off his beloved data centers, and every Republican on a ballot has to drink it.

And then there's the posting. Over 1000 posts in August, and this weekend was bonkers: more than ten hours of it, 37 posts that included Trump on horseback beside a George Washington gazing up at him in admiration, Trump's face grafted onto Hulk Hogan's body, Trump commanding a robot army under the caption "they will never sleep again," Trump claiming the moon (as mad kings do from time to time), and New Mexico rechristened "New America."

His feed is an eighty-year-old psychotic’s Pinterest moodboard, machine-generated, of himself as king, commander, rock star, Washington’s equal. Relatability was the one thing his fans always granted him: the guy who talks like you, eats like you, hates who you hate.

Gone. Nobody in Toledo watching Trump gush about his tacky gold decor at one in the morning thinking, “He gets me.”

All of that happened while Trump still controlled the megaphone.

The friendly networks in the Fox, OANN, Newsmax, and RSBN media cluster still obediently, shamelessly echoed his manias. The captured Justice Department, Mike Johnson (R-Born This Way), and the MAGA majority era let him change the subject with one post.

All of it. Wait until the subpoenas start. Wait until a House committee with a Democratic chair and a document stack the height of the Arc de Trump gets going on the ballroom contracts, the compensation fund, the crypto, the jet, the ICE murders.

For ten years he set the terms of every fight because the machinery that should have investigated him was cowed or bought. That ends the day the gavel changes hands. Real investigations don’t care about Truth Social. They produce documents, and documents don’t get discombobulated by AI MAGA memeslop

The hatred of Donald Trump isn’t curdling into fatigue.

It is just now reaching the people who used to shrug. And they aren’t going to hate him the way you did, as a matter of principle. They’re going to hate him the way you hate the guy who wrecked your car and then billed you for the tow.

That’s the kind that lasts.