Bait and Switch

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 51^st 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 51^st 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.