Demand.

And supply.

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As you have heard, repeatedly, the Trump White House is a juggernaut; “flooding the zone”, playing 3-dimensional chess while Democrats and their media allies play checkers, realigning American politics, laying waste to a corrupt, arrogant, elitist establishment or “deep state”, as it is known.

Managing the juggernaut are a group of super-savvy, ruthless political wizards, led by the savviest and most ruthless political wizard of all time, Donald Trump. He owns the attention economy, feeding it relentlessly, night and day, leaving no time or space for anything else. The only subject is Trump, the only story is Trump, everything else is reaction to Trump. Never has there been a president so politically dominant.

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So how is it going? How is all that 3-D chess working? Let’s see:

• Trump’s approval rating, never more than 51% or 52%, now sits between 40% (Pew Research) and 44% (Fox News) The most recent New York Times/Sienna College poll has Trump’s approval rating at 42%.

• For the first time in several years, recent polling shows that Democrats are now more trusted than Republicans to manage the U.S. economy. This is an especially impressive (and nearly impossible) achievement, brought about in record time by Team Trump.

• Asked to describe the Trump administration’s 3-D chess, the following words were used by the following percentages of voters:

Here’s the rest from The New York Times’ write-up of its recent poll:

Mr. Trump’s approval rating sits at 42 percent. His standing is historically low for a president this early in a term, but it is in line with his stubborn unpopularity, which did not prevent him from sweeping the battleground states in last year’s election.

Now, however, voters express dimming confidence about Mr. Trump’s handling of some of the top issues that propelled him back to the White House, including the economy and immigration, even as most Americans support deportations. Only 43 percent said they approved of how he has managed the economy this term, a serious erosion on an issue long seen as a strength.

The president’s pursuit of widespread tariffs — which has caused stock-market drops and gyrations — was opposed by 55 percent of voters, including 63 percent of independents.

Taken together, the survey’s findings show that any second-term honeymoon for Mr. Trump is over. His approval rating among crucial independent voters is now at a woeful 29 percent.

Voters said he had “gone too far” on issue after issue — his tariffs, his immigration enforcement, his cuts to the federal work force. Broad numbers of independent voters sided with Democrats in believing that he had overreached.

Overall, a 54 percent majority said that Mr. Trump was “exceeding the powers available to him,” including 16 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of independent voters. (Ed. Note: italics mine)

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Here’s a chart:

You get the idea. The wizards and the Grand Wizard are making a hash of their first 100 days. Their signature accomplishment is building demand for something else.

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It’s important to note that building demand for something else does not mean building demand for Democrats. That would be a “no”. This from CNN:

Among the American public overall, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating stands at just 29% – a record low in CNN’s polling dating back to 1992 and a drop of 20 points since January 2021, when Trump exited his first term under the shadow of the January 6 attack at on Capitol. The Republican Party’s rating currently stands at 36%.

That’s driven in part by relatively high levels of dissatisfaction within the Democratic Party. Just 63% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents report a favorable view of their own party, a dip from 72% in January and 81% at the start of President Joe Biden’s administration. The decline comes across ideological wings, with favorability ratings for the Democratic Party falling by 18 points among liberals and moderates alike since the start of 2021. (Source: cnn.com, italics mine)

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My podcast partner Joe Klein captured, in one paragraph, some of the reasons why the Democrats find themselves in the condition they are in. As follows:

Trump won because he was strong and Kamala Harris was perceived as weak. But the subsequent lethargy of the Democrats—the utter lack of anything interesting to say or propose—has been a surprise. It shouldn’t have been. The Democrats have been hamstrung by their conflicting sensitivities for the past decade. They won major cultural victories—on race, on gender, on sexuality—over the past 50 years and never took credit for them. Indeed, they denied the victories had been won. They refused to admit, against all evidence, that any progress had been made; they caved to their “activist” supporters. They didn’t understand the tenuous relationship of those activists to the communities they supposedly represented. They didn’t, for example, understand that black voters were far more concerned about crime than white liberals were. They didn’t understand that Latinos didn’t want to lumped into the “people of color” basket; they wanted to assimilate. The Democrats’ default position was pessimism about America; Trump joined them in that—one of the myriad of reasons he’s loathsome, but he was smart enough to link it to patriotism. Too many Democrats seemed to hate this country; they ignored its brilliant entrepreneurial spirit, the essentially benign—if sometimes stupidly kinetic—nature of its foreign policy. They fixed on grievances, which they took to ridiculous extremes, rather than celebrating the multifarious cultural explosion that was taking place. They made Trump inevitable. (Source: josephklein.substack.com)

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So if it’s not going to be the Democrats, what or who is it going to be? The answer, of course, is: we don’t know. What we do know is that demand creates supply, as surely as supply must create demand. Demand for something else, something other than MAGA chaos and Democratic dysphoria, is substantial and pervasive. And growing.

It will continue to grow. Is there a single person in the world who thinks that President Trump is going to chill out and become Gerry Ford? Is there a single person in the world who thinks the Democratic Party’s leadership will have anything. interesting to say about anything? Is there a single person in the world who thinks that those leading lights will even have anything interesting to say about Trump? The answer to each of those questions is almost certainly “no”.

Here’s a test: Jonathan Bush, founder of Athena Health, nephew of former President George H.W. Bush and first cousin to former President George W. Bush, smart as a whip and a bundle of energy, is thinking about running for governor in Maine. Almost automatically, you would say he’ll run as a Republican, for obvious reasons. And he probably will.

What’s interesting is this: that might be a mistake. He might (I would argue he would) have a better chance of winning if he ran as an independent and framed his campaign with the following message: “We can do a lot better than this. And here’s how.”

The demand is there. What it needs is supply.