This commentary originally appeared in “Notes from the Middleground”

Every week since January 20, 2025 has felt like it’s been jam-packed with news, as Donald Trump and his team have acted on multiple fronts to seize unprecedented powers, attack the president’s myriad enemies, fundamentally shift the country’s geopolitical orientation, and establish a much harsher and more personalistic form of rule.

But with the “Liberation Day” announcement on last Wednesday afternoon, something shifted. Up until that point, the unfolding trajectory of the second Trump administration seemed pretty clear, despite how destabilizing it’s felt. The president wants to govern by decree and to establish the primacy of the executive branch in the federal government—and those authoritarian impulses have been aided by his relative popularity. Not only did he win an outright plurality of the vote last November, but his aggregate approval rating remained in the respectable 47 to 48 percent range through weeks of extraordinary activity and turbulence radiating from the White House. That seemed to indicate broad-based tolerance for or deference toward Trump’s alarming actions that has been reflected in the nearly nonexistent opposition the president has faced from Republicans in Congress.

But the enormous scale of the so-called reciprocal tariffs Trump announced on Wednesday, far surpassing what even the most protectionist-oriented members of the administration had been advocating, signal the start of a new phase of the Trump presidency. In addition to convulsing markets around the world, the Trump tariffs directly caused a stock-market crash in the United States, with trillions of dollars incinerated in the two days following the tariff announcement. Most analysts now think a recession, possibly a deep and painful one, is more likely than not.

At the moment, the MAGA faction of the GOP is dominant in the party and maximally inclined to stick by Trump’s side no matter what happens. But it’s unclear whether that will persist through painful job losses, a sharp decline in the value of retirement accounts, and other signs of economic contraction. Even if it does, the coalition that elected Trump the second time included many people who can hardly be described as MAGA. They’re transactional Trump voters, both Republicans and independents, willing to vote for him in the hope of returning to the economic boom that coincided with the first three years of his first presidency (prior to the massive exogenous shock of the COVID-19 pandemic), but also ready and willing to walk away from him at the first sign of economic trouble.

We’re already seeing a tentative negative turn in the polling that is highly likely to worsen as the American economy responds further to the massive exogenous shock delivered by Trump’s own trade policies. That means we’re facing a very different reality than the one we seemed to be confronting as recently as a week ago. Before long we may be a country with a president actively seeking to govern as an authoritarian while his own popular support is declining. That points to two possible paths forward, one better than what seemed likely prior to “Liberation Day,” and the other notably worse.

The optimistic scenario

In a functional democracy, where officeholders are responsive to public opinion, elected officials gain power and leverage when they are popular and decline in power and leverage when their popularity sinks. If the United States remains a functional democracy, one would therefore expect to see an increasingly unpopular Trump facing rising opposition from Congress—and not just from the Democrats who already strongly oppose him but also from enough members of his own party to make it possible to stymie his agenda.

Up until now, we’ve seen very little of such opposition. Trump’s nominees, even highly unorthodox picks, sailed through their Senate confirmation votes (perhaps because the president insinuated he would respond to resistance by circumventing the advise-and-consent process to make unilateral recess appointments). Criticism of the president’s many power grabs and acts of defiance against judges has been muted. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has even gone so far as to preemptively relinquish its constitutional power to overrule the president’s sweeping tariff policy.

This has been a function of the unwillingness of Republican officeholders to risk running afoul of the president’s intense popularity with the most engaged faction of the GOP’s voters. But this reluctance to cross the president will presumably weaken if and when his popularity begins to slide as a result of his sharply protectionist policies and their dire economic consequences. With more voters angry at Trump, members of Congress may finally reassert the authority of the legislative branch of government to stand up to and check the powers of the president.

They might do that because waning public support for the president would embolden them to do what they’ve always known is right—including defending judges Trump has defied, pushing back harder against unconstitutional power grabs, and making clear to the administration that Congress considers certain actions beyond the pale. But the motives of officeholders could well be more narrowly self-interested as well, since the only hope for Republicans holding onto majority control of the House and Senate through an economic downturn caused by the president’s policies would involve actively distancing themselves from them both.

Imagine a second Trump administration that comes to be defined by judicial and legislative efforts to restrain a would-be authoritarian president after his trade policy made him toxically unpopular. That’s the optimistic path forward the events of the past week has opened up.

The pessimistic scenario

But unfortunately, that’s not the only possible path forward from the events of the past week. There is another in which the president and members of his administration stand their ground in the face of softening polls, threaten wavering members of Congress who dare to criticize Trump’s policies, and simply disregard or dismiss evidence of rising popular discontent.

This is a scenario in which the United States demonstrates that, by the standard I articulated above, it is no longer a functional democracy—that is, a system in which those in office are responsive to public opinion. It’s a scenario in which Trump and his team say, We are going to push ahead without regard for the fake polls published by fake news outlets, and Republicans in Congress keep their heads down, avoid public events, express blind support for their commander in chief, and just hope for the best.

I’m sure there are some, maybe many, Democrats who would view this as a good thing, since it would seem to place the GOP on a path toward obliteration in the midterm elections and possibly beyond. But I’m not so sure any American should be cheered by such a scenario.

There are several reasons why.

For one thing, a scenario in which an increasingly unpopular president refuses to break from unpopular policies is one in which social unrest in the form of street protests could become common and widespread—and that’s a path that could easily lead to looting, rioting, and other forms of violence, providing Trump with a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and thereby tighten his grip on power much further.

Wouldn’t that make Trump even more unpopular? Quite possibly—though it could also generate renewed support for him on the right in the name of upholding law and order.

But even short of such a nightmarish turn of events, this is a president who has already signed an executive order asserting unprecedented federal control of elections (in the name of preserving and protecting their integrity). Are we really so sure a deeply unpopular Trump would permit himself to be humiliated by a midterm-election wipeout? There’s reason to believe a path toward a sharp decline in the integrity of elections in the United States runs through a circumstance in which the president refuses to accept election results that amount to an undeniable repudiation at the polls.

If an overwhelming majority of the country has turned against him by that point, he might not be able to pull off such a brazen move. But if most of the MAGA faction of the GOP has stayed with him, prompting Republican officeholders to remain unwavering in their support, then we will have an ideal occasion for Trump and his minions to shift the country in the direction of competitive authoritarianism—a system in which elections are mostly free but much less fair than they once were.

The wounds of an aspiring tyrant

My point in thinking through these two broad paths forward from the disastrous rollout of Trump’s trade policy last week is to suggest that a significantly more unpopular Trump presents renewed political opportunities but also heightened risks.

There’s nothing more dangerous in the wilderness than a wounded animal—and maybe nothing more dangerous in the political world than a wounded aspiring tyrant. That the wounds in this case would be largely self-inflicted, tied directly to Trump’s reckless insistence on imposing unjustifiably massive tariffs, could even make his desperation worse.

Wounded pride can be the most painful and deranging wound of all.