By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
In the spirit of peace and mutual understanding ahead of
this week’s big summit in Beijing, let’s open today with a topic on
which the American people and the Chinese leadership broadly agree:
China is gaining on the United States in our ongoing
great-power competition.
Earlier this year Pew Research conducted a poll in which it listed 12 nations
and asked respondents whether each had gotten stronger or weaker in global
influence “in recent years.” China ran away with the top spot, with 62 percent
of Americans believing it’s grown stronger versus 9 percent thinking it’s grown
weaker.
Asked about their own country, 34 percent said the United
States had grown stronger while 41 percent estimated that it had gotten weaker.
The Chinese Communist Party agrees. “China increasingly
casts itself not as a fading civilization trying to catch up to the West but as
a superpower poised to surpass it,” the New York Times observed today of the mood in Beijing
before the summit. “Chinese nationalists and state-linked commentators say they
have [Donald] Trump to thank.”
One analysis published by a Chinese think tank in January
argued that the president’s “tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration
policies, and assaults on the American political establishment had
inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States.” That
analysis—literally titled “Thank Trump”—described him as an “accelerator of
American political decay” who, in the Times’ words, had led the U.S.
“toward polarization, institutional dysfunction, and even ‘Latin American-style
instability.’”
Well … yes.
You don’t need to be a regular reader of this newsletter
to know that that ain’t just CCP propaganda. A Gallup global survey published last month found that
approval of China’s leadership is now five points higher than approval of
America’s, the largest such gap in nearly 20 years of testing. A Politico poll taken in Great Britain, France,
Germany, and Canada in February asked locals whether they’d rather depend on
China or the United States, their longtime ally, under Trump. Beijing was the
preference in all four countries.
A third survey conducted in March and April by a Danish
organization measured perceptions of various nations across a sample spanning 85
countries. China scored +7. The U.S. scored -16, down from +22 two years ago.
Russia scored -11 by comparison.
I mention all of this not as a QED about the cancer of
postliberalism (although it certainly is that) but because of how squarely the
data contradicts one of the president’s core priorities dating back to 2016. In
theory, the entire point of a nationalist foreign policy is to contain China,
the one country on Earth that poses a meaningful threat to us economically and
militarily. To make America great again and secure the continued primacy of the
United States in global relations, one would think we should be doing
everything possible to encourage other nations to join us in isolating Beijing.
Trump has done the opposite. He’s bungled the task of
taming the dragon about as thoroughly as it can be bungled, most recently by
burning through weapons stockpiles in Iran that were supposed to keep China
honest in the Far East. And the Chinese have noticed.
That’s the story of his second term across the board.
Increasingly the Trump presidency feels like an experiment in how
comprehensively an elected official can betray the ethos of the platform he ran
on without his support collapsing. The engine of suspense surrounding the
coming midterm elections boils down to this: In a hyperpolarized country, can
an incumbent do more or less the opposite of everything he promised to
do as a candidate and still turn out enough tribalist partisans to hold down
losses?
Opposite day.
Yesterday the president told Fox News that he was
“seriously considering” making Venezuela the 51st state, pointing to
what he claimed was $40 trillion in oil reserves under that country’s soil.
Lay aside the obvious objections. No, he can’t create new
U.S. states without congressional approval. No, Venezuela’s leaders don’t want to join the union, as doing so would deprive
them of their power. No, Venezuela can’t be the 51st state when that
honor has already been reserved for Canada. (Or Greenland?) No, Trump probably
wasn’t totally serious in floating the idea—although he likely wasn’t
entirely kidding either.
What’s interesting about him bringing it up is how
utterly it contradicts his movement’s thinking on immigration.
Immigration is the one area of policy in which he really
has delivered for his base, tightening the border since returning to office and
ramping up deportations. The deepest conviction of tribal nationalism is that
national greatness can only be restored by restoring the demographics of the
era(s) in which that nation achieved greatness. That means kicking out
Hispanics—and maybe not just those here illegally—and rebalancing political
power as much as possible to favor whites, Christians, and men.
It emphatically does not mean turning a country of
almost 30 million Hispanics into a U.S. state, particularly a country that’s
famously impoverished. Doing so would place Uncle Sam on the hook
for providing Social Security and Medicare to millions more people when our
entitlement programs are already unsustainable. (That might or might not pay
for itself depending on how fast Venezuela’s oil could be extracted and sold.)
It would also entitle Venezuelans to travel to, and reside in, the continental
United States if they chose, and I’m guessing many of them—including those gang members that the president is always so worried
about—would take advantage.
There’s no way to reconcile making Venezuela a state with
Trumpists’ antipathy to “importing the third world.” That the president would
entertain it even hypothetically proves that he’s open to betraying the most
devout beliefs of his own movement, at least if you put a big enough dollar
sign in front of him.
But that’s par for the course. Practically everywhere you
look over the past 16 months, you’ll find Trump breaking one of the promises
that got him elected. Failing to contain China is the least of it.
Some of his broken promises are momentous, like pitching
himself in 2024 as the candidate who’d keep America out of another one of those
endless Middle East conflicts that warmongering Democrats are supposedly ever
eager to fight. The Iran war may be the most consequential ideological betrayal
by any president in my lifetime, poisonous to everyone except his core base.
It’s now polling at 36-61, on par with public disapproval during the Vietnam
and Iraq eras.
Other broken promises matter less to voters but are no
less egregious for their lower salience. If you’re one of the three or four
people in America who took Trump at his word when he promised to end the
weaponization of government, you’ve been rewarded by getting to watch him turn
the Justice Department into a menagerie
of vengeful hacks and henchmen whose headquarters now bears his photo over the front entrance. If you believed him when he
and his party complained about the so-called Biden crime family, you’ve had to
endure the Trump clan turning the presidency into a full-time influence racket
worth many billions of dollars in plain sight.
Still, no betrayal has been grander than his disinterest
toward the problem that got him elected.
His polling on handling the economy has declined more or less steadily throughout his second term,
driven by frustration over the lingering high cost of living and the
president’s insistence
on making it worse with tariffs. He’s at 35.6 percent approval on the issue
today in Nate Silver’s tracker, down from 48.8 percent near the start of his
term. But things can, and probably soon will, get much worse due to the ongoing
oil shocks caused by his war of choice with Iran: A new CNN survey has his
disapproval on the economy at 70
percent.
And that poll was taken before this morning’s news about
inflation jumping in April by the highest rate in nearly two years, another casualty
of the bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump occasionally makes gestures toward easing the pain,
like when he told reporters yesterday that he’d like to suspend the federal gas tax. But you’re far more
likely to hear him chattering excitedly about his billion-dollar ballroom or
his work on the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial than you are about
affordability.
If you’re the sort of chump who set aside your qualms
about January 6 and the president’s basic fitness for office and voted to
reelect him because you hoped he’d stabilize your family’s finances, his
negligence toward the cost of living is the ultimate electoral bait-and-switch.
You thought you were getting a president who would prioritize helping Americans
make ends meet, avoid the usual military misadventures, and halt the rising
tide of Chinese influence abroad.
You got the stone-cold opposite instead. How dire will
the electoral consequences be this fall?
Less dire than they should be, assuredly.
An inefficient market.
We’ve had presidents who’ve broken a major campaign
promise to voters—George H.W. Bush’s “no new taxes” pledge comes to mind—and
paid for it. We have not, to my knowledge, had a president who broke most
of his major campaign promises by governing on an agenda that contradicted much
of what he ran on.
There’s no historical analogy. And the reason there’s no
historical analogy is because, unlike his predecessors, Trump’s movement is
engineered to assure loyalty to the man, not the cause. You don’t support his
program, you support him—to the point where, more than once over the past year,
he’s claimed the power to redefine policy orthodoxy for MAGA Republicans even
if his new orthodoxy conflicts with his prior orthodoxy.
For instance, here’s how he answered isolationist critics on the right who accused him
of betraying the “America First” ethos after he first attacked Iran last
summer: “Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and
considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one
that decides that.” More recently, after the current war began, he condemned
attacks on Iran hawk Mark Levin by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly
with this pronouncement: “THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM, and MAGA includes
not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a
Nuclear Weapon.”
For much of the Republican base, there’s no such thing as
a “broken” Trump promise. His only truly consequential pledge is to make
America great again, and belonging to his movement requires faith that his
policy preferences at any given moment will produce that outcome.
That’s one of the ways in which Trumpism has hacked
American democracy. When you’ve got evangelical supporters worshiping the
equivalent of a golden calf, you don’t need to worry about being consistent
on policy to keep them in the fold.
The president’s boldest electoral gambits this year are
all forms of “hacking” democracy, not coincidentally, attempting to maximize
his ability to govern as he likes by reducing voters’ ability to punish him and
his party for his policies. The redistricting push is the most obvious example,
with more
than a dozen safe-ish red House seats now set to fall into the GOP’s lap
via some creative map-making facilitated by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling
on majority-minority districts. But White House scheming on how to seize more control over federal elections is still
ongoing behind the scenes, just in case ruthless gerrymandering isn’t enough to
fully contain a blue wave propelled by public discontent.
If it’s true that democracy is a sort of market, with
shareholders “buying” and “selling” parties as they glean new information about
the two sides’ policies, one way to understand the goal of Trump’s
authoritarian project is to make that market as inefficient as possible.
Investors in the “business” he’s created are expected to value their shares not
based on profits but simply on whether he remains CEO. If evidence emerges that
the business is being mismanaged, they’re encouraged to dismiss it as “fake news.”
And if their shares look set to dive in value due to a
mass sell-off, they can rest assured that extraordinary action—like
gerrymandering or direct election interference—will be taken to limit their
losses.
A market whose highest priority is insulating managers
from accountability to their stakeholders is a liberal’s nightmare and a
postliberal’s dream. There is no way around this: By making that sort of market
possible in America, devout Trumpers have become the architects of their own
serial betrayal on policy.
And probably the midwives of their own defeat. Needless
to say, the president would be more nimble about ending unpopular policies like
tariffs and more cautious about not pursuing unpopular initiatives like war
with Iran if his base were more willing to withhold its support from him in
response. Markets incentivize businesses to perform well by rewarding them with
higher value when they do and penalizing them with lower value when they don’t;
the American right understands that principle vis-à-vis finance and private
enterprise, but has allowed it to be demagogued out of them with respect to
politics.
A president who knows he can break (almost) every promise
he’s made and still retain the support of at least 85 percent of his base, no
questions asked, is a president who’s going to do stupid and pernicious things
that will inevitably alienate most of the rest of the electorate.
So when Democrats take back the House this fall—and they
probably will despite the GOP’s best “hacking” efforts, as the generic ballot
has begun to widen in their favor and now looks downright
gruesome in some polling—don’t blame the president or his cronies in
government for the party’s failure. Blame the enablers, the right-wing
rank-and-file. They’ve been the problem since June 2015, and they’ll continue
to be the problem after Trump is gone.
