The cult of Trump is waning. Now beware the death throes

The last time any poll showed Donald Trump’s approval rating higher than his disapproval was in the final week of October 2025.

Since then, the property mogul and reality TV star who personally transformed American politics has increasingly become a liability for his own party, at least as much as he remains a motivating force.

The human brain is not wired to deal well with that kind of fall from grace. Watching him rehash his threats in recent days to take a third term has been like watching a washed-up comedian tell the same joke that wasn’t funny to a diminishing audience.

Except this comedian has the nuclear codes.

Rather than ending his unpopular tariff regime or war in Iran, which sparked a cost-of-living crisis, Trump has spent a year trying to re-engineer the poll in his favour. He has tried to redraw the political map to favour Republicans, and limit mail-in voting, which he sees as helping Democrats. He personally votes by mail.

Despite these efforts, voters are expected to pummel Trump’s party at next week’s midterm election and leave his power diminished for the remainder of his presidency.

It used to be that Trump was dangerous because of how he used his presidency – sending the paramilitary immigration force of ICE to terrify communities and kill innocent people or selling off America’s public lands for oil drilling. Now the tide has turned against him, the threat has changed.

Trump is still attempting to dismantle institutions for his own benefit, including his efforts this year to bully critics off national TV by threatening to revoke those stations’ licences, but his weakening power is limiting his ability to compel others to help him.

While he was successful at shifting the narrative away from the Epstein files, he was eventually forced to release millions of files when public pressure mounted on Congressional Republicans. And after deadly ICE raids caused Republican governors to panic, Trump rolled back the brutal spectacle.

Watching members of his own party distancing themselves from him, spending a fraction of their billion-dollar ad budget on the party’s long-time figurehead, he is freed toward his more dangerous impulses.

Trump shocked the country last week by instructing the Department of Justice to file lawsuits in Alaska, calling foul ahead of time if his preferred candidate doesn’t win on Tuesday.

Legal experts have reassured us that this effort is fruitless, but it feels like 2020 all over again. While many seem to have forgotten the scale of the January 6 insurrection, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election only failed because the people he needed to co-operate refused, including Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, or his own vice president who refused to participate in the mutiny on Capitol Hill.

The threat Trump has posed for a decade has always required others to bend or break the rules to accommodate his whims.

He has achieved many of the longstanding goals of the conservative moment. The Supreme Court, a third of which he appointed, has gutted abortion rights and the Voting Rights Act, effectively ending the possibility that black Americans have equal representation in Congress, particularly in the South. But they have consistently refused to grant Trump himself the extraordinary powers he seeks.

The cult of Trump has depended upon legions of oligarchs, politicians, and functionaries who all owe their position to him. His comments about seeking a third term have, for a long time, felt dangerous. The fear was that Republican leaders might distort the election process by allowing ballots with his name on them in 2028, and that courts to which he has appointed hundreds of judges would uphold them.

Those threats now ring hollow as it becomes more apparent that those same people once relied upon now see the end of his moment in the sun – even if he does not. They are already having to grapple with a political world in which Trump no longer commands the electorate at his will.

Trump has come up against one of the great strengths of America’s voting system – its decentralisation. Each state sets its own rules, and each of America’s 3144 counties administers it slightly differently. That makes broadscale interference – foreign or domestic – difficult.

Trump has tried to nationalise the voting process to give himself greater control: to introduce voter ID laws, and to change how ballots are cast. These efforts were largely blocked by federal judges, who noted that these powers lie with individual states.

While Trump’s Republicans have successfully redrawn Congressional electorates in several states, many Republican-controlled legislatures refused to participate in the circus, knowing that they would be punished by their own voters for making a fool of America’s democracy for the benefit of a man whose popularity was waning.

Most of the districts redrawn to benefit Republicans are now rated as tossups or favour Democrats.

Trump still holds significant power as president, in a role where so much authority has coagulated over the years.

But his domestic power is waning. He no longer has singular control over the party that once afforded him unchecked power.

The danger now comes from the thrashing that will ensue.

Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris administration.

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