This Was the Moment Donald Trump Lost His Mojo

 

This Was the Moment Donald Trump Lost His Mojo

He’s forgotten the thing that first got him elected.

Jonathan Cohn Apr 5

 

DONALD TRUMP LAST WEEK gave an unexpectedly candid riff on his governing priorities—and, in the process, revealed that he’s losing one of his most important political skills.

It happened on Wednesday, during a private Easter luncheon at the White House.

Here’s what Trump said:

We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of daycare. You’ve got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay—they’ll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them, to make up for—but we—it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [basis]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.¹

 

Typically, Republican leaders try very hard to deny they are starving social programs to fund the military, leaving Democrats to make the case on their own. Yet here was Trump coming right out and saying it. And while the president frequently blurts out statements that have no bearing on reality, in this case his description of how he’d like to rearrange federal spending priorities was pretty much on the nose.

In fact, just two days after he made those remarks, his administration released its budget for fiscal year 2027. It envisions a $1.5 trillion increase for defense, then proposes to offset that cost with a 10 percent reduction in domestic spending. Among the casualties would be a program that helps low-income Americans pay for heating and cooling—yes, right at a time when electricity prices are on the rise.

Not that it takes a new budget to see Trump’s priorities in action. It’s been less than a year since he worked with Republicans to pass historic cuts to Medicaid and food assistance, while refusing to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies holding down insurance premiums for more than 20 million people.

None of this has been popular. Most Americans are opposed to the Iran war, according to polling, just as most Americans opposed the Medicaid cuts and wanted to see those “Obamacare” subsidies stay in place. That’s going to hurt in the midterms, as my Bulwark colleague Catherine Rampell observed last week.

But Wednesday’s riff and the governing record it matches threaten to undermine Trump’s appeal in another, more fundamental way—one that requires thinking back to 2015 when he was first seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

IT’S BEEN A WHILE—more than ten years!—so it’s easy to forget the extent to which Trump presented himself as a different kind of Republican, one who was willing to buck his own party’s establishment.

A lot of this was about trade, war, and immigration—how, as Trump told it, Republican elites had bankrupted the country with foreign interventions and sold out working Americans by shipping jobs over to China, all while allowing the country to be overrun with dangerous immigrants stealing everyday jobs. But Trump went out of his way to say he disagreed with the GOP establishment on matters of the welfare state as well.

“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” he told the Daily Signal in 2015, making a promise he’d repeat many times over the course of the campaign.

And while Trump from day one was pledging to repeal the Affordable Care Act, he repeatedly told audiences, interviewers, and anybody else who would listen that he would replace it with something better, so nobody had to go without health care.

“Everybody’s got to be covered,” Trump told 60 Minutes in 2015, adding, “This is an un-Republican thing for me.”

Trump, in making this pitch, sounded a lot like a political archetype familiar in Europe, where some right-leaning parties have long opposed immigration while supporting government programs that provide generous health care, childcare, and other benefits. There’s even a term in the political science literature for this type of appeal: “welfare chauvinism.”

 

But anybody following Trump closely had good reason to question whether his pledges would translate to actual policy. His campaign rarely released formal policy proposals, and when they did they were comically devoid of details. During debates, he served up gobbledygook. Word got around that (as Trump more or less admitted) he strongly preferred memos keep to no more than a single page, preferably with graphs and visual cues, suggesting he was either uninterested or uninformed or both—and that, in office, he’d defer to congressional leaders who were precisely the old-style Republicans he said he was rejecting.

 

Which is just what happened, especially during his first year in office. Trump embraced congressional plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act that would have wreaked havoc with coverage for tens of millions of people, slashing Medicaid and private insurance subsidies to pay for tax cuts that disproportionately benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans. And while he didn’t succeed on repeal, he did get the tax cut.

 

Through it all, however, Trump talked a good game on standing by the welfare state, including during the 2018 midterm campaign when he accused Democrats of attacking the big entitlement programs. “They’re going to hurt your Social Security so badly, and they’re killing you on Medicare,” he declared at one rally. “Just remember that. I’m going to protect your Social Security.”

 

Trump also made a high-profile effort to show he was prepared to help families dealing with the strains of work and raising children, most memorably in 2019 when he convened a White House summit on the subject. “With more women working today than ever before, we now have a historic opportunity to enact long-overdue reforms,” Trump said. “It’s time to pass paid family leave and expand access to quality childcare.”

 

THAT CHILDCARE AND PAID LEAVE EFFORT was supposed to be led by Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka, who back then was both a visible administration spokesperson and a regular presence in the West Wing. But it never got a real push from the White House.

 

Ivanka isn’t part of this new Trump administration, and neither is warm presidential rhetoric about providing struggling parents with help getting time off or paying for childcare. In fact, it’s hard to think of a single meaningful thing Trump has said on the subject—except those comments this past Wednesday, when Trump said the federal government couldn’t afford it.

Probably the closest Trump has come to channeling his first-term self on social welfare has been when he talks about prescription drug prices. He has put a lot of energy into negotiating deals with pharmaceutical manufacturers that—in the White House’s telling—are right now producing dramatic drops in the prices of prescription drugs.² But the savings are mostly illusory, and hardly enough to offset the big price hikes for the more than 20 million Americans who had been getting assistance from those lapsed Affordable Care Act subsidies.

 

And that effect is hitting already. New data compiled from HealthInsurance.org shows that 10 percent of people who bought insurance this year shifted from “silver” to less generous “bronze” plans, almost certainly because they couldn’t keep up with rising premiums. That’s on top of people who are just eating the cost increases, or going uninsured altogether.

 

Whether that registers politically is a separate question. It depends on whether voters link their hardship to decisions that Trump and his Republican allies have made, which depends in part on whether Democrats can show the link exists. But Trump’s daycare riff on Wednesday makes that easy. Democrats can just run ads playing his remarks, verbatim.

The president gave them a gift. The one who occupied the Oval Office ten years ago never would have made that mistake.

1.      Although snippets of video from Trump’s comments are easy to find online, the full video of the event he was speaking at does not appear on the White House homepage or YouTube channel. It turns out that Trump’s staff took down the video—reportedly because at one point Paula White, his spiritual adviser, compared him to Jesus.

2.      Trump on Thursday announced new tariffs that would apply to the drug companies yet to reach deals with the administration. But it’s not clear what impact they will have. You can read more about those agreements in STAT News.

Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done

 

Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done

Allied leaders know that any positive gesture they make will count for nothing.

By Anne Applebaum

 

March 17, 2026

 

Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.

He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.

For the past 14 months, few foreign leaders have been able to acknowledge that someone without any strategy can actually be president of the United States. Surely, the foreign-policy analysts murmured, Trump thinks beyond the current moment. Surely, foreign statesmen whispered, he adheres to some ideology, some pattern, some plan. Words were thrown around—isolationism, imperialism—in an attempt to place Trump’s actions into a historical context. Solemn articles were written about the supposed significance of Greenland, for example, as if Trump’s interest in the Arctic island were not entirely derived from the fact that it looks very large on a Mercator projection.

This week, something broke. Maybe Trump does not understand the link between the past and the present, but other people do. They can see that, as a result of decisions that Trump made but cannot explain, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked by Iranian mines and drones. They can see oil prices rising around the world and they understand that it is difficult and dangerous for the U.S. Navy to solve this problem. They can also hear the president lashing out, as he has done so many times before, trying to get other people to take responsibility, threatening them if they don’t.

From the March 2026 issue: America vs. the world

NATO faces a “very bad” future if it doesn’t help clear the strait, Trump told the Financial Times, apparently forgetting that the United States founded the organization and has led it since its creation in 1949. He has also said he is not asking but ordering seven countries to help. He did not specify which ones. “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way from Florida to Washington. “It’s the place from which they get their energy.” Actually it isn’t their territory, and it’s his fault that their energy is blocked.

But in Trump’s mind, these threats are justified: He has a problem right now, so he wants other countries to solve it. He doesn’t seem to remember or care what he said to their leaders last month or last year, nor does he know how his previous decisions shaped public opinion in their countries or harmed their interests. But they remember, they care, and they know.

Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European officials that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In February 2025, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had no right to expect support either, because “you don’t have any cards.” Trump ridiculed Canada as the “51st state” and referred to both the present and previous Canadian prime ministers as “governor.” He claimed, incorrectly, that allied troops in Afghanistan “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines,” causing huge offense to the families of soldiers who died fighting after NATO invoked Article 5 of the organization’s treaty, on behalf of the United States, the only time it has done so. He called the British “our once-great ally,” after they refused to participate in the initial assault on Iran; when they discussed sending some aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf conflict earlier this month, he ridiculed the idea on social media: “We don’t need people that join Wars after ​we’ve already won!"

At times, the ugly talk changed into something worse. Before his second inauguration, Trump began hinting that he wouldn’t rule out using force to annex Greenland, a territory of Denmark, a close NATO ally. At first this seemed like a troll or a joke; by January 2026, his public and private comments persuaded the Danes to prepare for an American invasion. Danish leaders had to think about whether their military would shoot down American planes, kill American soldiers, and be killed by them, an exercise so wrenching that some still haven’t recovered. In Copenhagen a few weeks ago, I was shown a Danish app that tells users which products are American, so that they know not to buy them. At the time it was the most popular app in the country.

The economic damage is no troll either. Over the course of 2025, Trump placed tariffs on Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea, often randomly—or again, whimsically—and with no thought to the impact. He raised tariffs on Switzerland because he didn’t like the Swiss president, then lowered them after a Swiss business delegation brought him presents, including a gold bar and a Rolex watch. He threatened to place 100 percent tariffs on Canada should Canada dare to make a trading agreement with China. Unbothered by possible conflicts of interest, he conducted trade negotiations with Vietnam, even as his son Eric Trump was breaking ground on a $1.5 billion golf-course deal in that country.

From the April 2025 issue: The Trump world order

Europeans might have tolerated the invective and even the trade damage had it not been for the real threat that Trump now poses to their security. Over the course of 14 months, he has, despite talking of peace, encouraged Russian aggression. He stopped sending military and financial aid to Ukraine, thereby giving Vladimir Putin renewed hope of victory. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, began openly negotiating business deals between the United States and Russia, although the war has not ended and the Russians have never agreed to a cease-fire. Witkoff presents himself to European leaders as a neutral figure, somewhere between NATO and Russia—as if, again, the United States were not the founder and leader of NATO, and as if European security were of no special concern to Americans. Trump himself continues to lash out at Zelensky and to lie about American support for Ukraine, which he repeatedly describes as worth $300 billion or more. The real number is closer to $50 billion, over three years. At current rates, Trump will spend that much in three months in the Middle East, in the course of starting a war rather than trying to stop one.

The result: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared that Canada will not participate in the “offensive operations of Israel and the U.S., and it never will.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius says, “This is not our war, and we didn’t start it.” The Spanish prime minister refused to let the United States use bases for the beginning of the war. The U.K. and France might send some ships to protect their own bases or allies in the Gulf, but neither will send their soldiers or sailors into offensive operations started without their assent.

This isn’t cowardice. It’s a calculation: If allied leaders thought that their sacrifice might count for something in Washington, they might choose differently. But most of them have stopped trying to find the hidden logic behind Trump’s actions, and they understand that any contribution they make will count for nothing. A few days or weeks later, Trump will not even remember that it happened.

TRUMP'S LEGAL AND ETHICAL RECORD

 

How to AI

 

Axios Finish Line: How to AI

• Jim VandeHei,
• Dan Cox

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei and Axios chief technology officer Dan Cox were chatting about how to share the basics of AI, and this prompting primer was born:

The No. 1 pushback we get from AI skeptics or newbies is: "It's overhyped. I asked it something and it spit out an unimpressive answer!"

• Truth bomb: It's not the AI. It's you.

Why it matters: Ask top large language models like ChatGPT something simple or generic, and you will get a simple or generic answer. Ask the right questions the right way, and you will often get magic.

Jim asked Dan Cox, our CTO and AI leader, to help him craft six ways for ordinary users to get more extraordinary answers. It starts with prompts — the very questions you pose to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok or Perplexity.

• Just in time for performance-review season, here are six tips (for both reviewers & reviewees):

1. It's a conversation, not a search engine. The biggest mistake newbies make is treating AI like Google — one question, one answer, done. The magic happens in the back-and-forth. Ask a question. Read the answer. Then push: "Make it shorter ... Give me three alternatives ... That's too formal ... What am I missing?" The best outputs come from the fifth or sixth exchange.

• Example: You ask for help requesting a raise. The first draft is generic. You say: "Too corporate. I've been here six years and my boss is informal — make it sound like a real conversation." Now it's useful.

2. Nail the Who. Start by explaining who you are — your role, experience, anything relevant — and who you want the AI to think like when answering. Be specific.

• Example: "I'm a senior account manager at a midsized software company. I've been here six years, consistently hit my numbers, and just took on two new direct reports. I want you to think like a brutally honest executive coach who has helped hundreds of people negotiate compensation."

3. Context matters most. Give detailed, real-world framing upfront. The AI doesn't know your situation, your audience, or what you're trying to avoid unless you tell it. Specificity is everything.

• Example (building on the Who): "My annual review is in two weeks. I haven't had a raise in 18 months despite a promotion in title. I know the company had a rough Q3, but my division exceeded targets. My boss is supportive, but not the final decision-maker — he has to pitch it to the VP. What's the smartest approach?"

4. Just say no. Tell it what not to do. This sharpens output dramatically.

• Example (adding constraints): "Don't give me generic advice like 'know your worth.' Don't suggest ultimatums — I'm not bluffing. And don't make it sound like a script I'd read verbatim."

5. Say: "Think step by step." When you're dealing with anything complex — a negotiation, a decision with trade-offs, a strategy with multiple variables — ask the AI to reason through it explicitly. This simple phrase dramatically improves output quality.

• Example: "Think step by step about how my boss will react and what objections he might raise when pitching this to the VP."

6. Just dump the image in. The models are extraordinary at instantly understanding screenshots, documents or files. Stop wasting time explaining what you're looking at — the AI can just see it.

• Example: Screenshot your company's salary bands from the internal HR portal. Paste it into ChatGPT alongside your title and tenure. Ask: "Based on this, where should I be? What's a reasonable ask?"

⚠️ Trust but verify. AI can hallucinate confidently — inventing facts, statistics, even citations that don't exist. The more specific the claim, the more you should double-check. Use it to think, draft and strategize. But if it spits out a number or a name, verify it before you repeat it.

The bottom line: AI is a power tool. It rewards users who treat it like a sharp colleague rather than a magic box. Be specific. Be demanding. Keep pushing.

• How'd you do? How'd we do? What's your power prompt? Let us know: finishline@axios.com.

Go deeper: Jim's video, "Blunt AI advice."