Trump Is His Own Worst Enemy

Mr. Edsall, a contributing Opinion writer, comments weekly from Washington on politics and demographics.

President Trump appears determined to prevent his party from achieving a durable majority coalition anchored by a multiracial working-class base.

Trump’s posting of a video portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes is one of his more glaring miscalculations, which have given Democrats an opening to halt a steady erosion of support among minority voters crucial to their party’s chances for success.

In 2024, Trump demonstrated that a conservative Republican could make a dent in a seemingly immovable Black Democratic monolith while winning levels of Hispanic support unseen in decades. The moment seemed ripe for a realigned Republican coalition joining a base of working-class white voters with growing numbers of Black, Latino and Asian American defectors from the Democratic Party.

“The realignment is here,” Patrick Ruffini, a Republican political analyst, declared on Nov. 15, 2024, 10 days after the election. “The first G.O.P. popular vote win in 20 years; the red wave hit everywhere; 2024 realigned the electorate as much as 2016; less secure voters moved towards Trump; everything got more correlated.”

Since then, however, Trump — with the brutality of his drive to deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants and the counterproductivity of his economic policies — is doing everything in his power to destroy the opportunity he had to secure and strengthen the Republican coalition.

Now the conventional wisdom, including on the right, is that Trump has undercut his own ambitions.

On April 25, 2025, three months into Trump’s second term, Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review, wrote in “Trump Shifts His Own Vibe”:

The president entered office with a bit of a wind at his back. His polling was better than the first time around, protesters weren’t in the streets, and federal investigators weren’t after him. The G.O.P. was more united than in 2016, and business leaders wanted to work with him, while the culture was generally heading in an anti-woke direction.

The president entered office with a bit of a wind at his back. His polling was better than the first time around, protesters weren’t in the streets, and federal investigators weren’t after him. The G.O.P. was more united than in 2016, and business leaders wanted to work with him, while the culture was generally heading in an anti-woke direction.

Since those halcyon days, what happened?

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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.

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