A Perfect Storm Is Brewing

 

A Perfect Storm Is Brewing The long-range forecast. Rick Wilson Mar 31 Trump is killing jobs. Trump is killing your retirement. Trump is raising prices. Trump is causing inflation. Trump is causing a recession. Trump is causing a trade war. Trump is hurting kids. Trump is hurting seniors. Trump is hurting veterans. What is it about those messages that cuts politically? What is it about them that spells trouble ahead? Why do those messages matter going in to 2026? Because they’re the truth. Trump’s Administration is cruel, corrupt, and destructive, and for the first time in January 6, 2021, Trump himself knows that the damage he’s causing isn’t just reflecting the Woke DEI Wiccan Soros Lesbian Drum Circle Blue State Antifa Vermin. No, Trump is realizing, slowly, that he and the DOGE maniacs are fucking over his own people. Steve Bannon (R-Broken Clock) was right: a lot of the DOGE cuts are hitting Trump’s MAGA base. The markets tried repeatedly to rationalize and justify the trade war, hoping for some sign of coherence or strategy, and found none. They simply ran out of excuses in the past week, and now the economy is teetering, the markets are crashing, and it’s all Trump’s fault. Try blaming that on Joe Biden, even if you’re one of the most diehard MAGAe, and you’ll get laughed out of the room. “Don’t look at your 401k” is the new “Don’t look up.” Since the kickoff of Signalghazi (or Signalgate, if you prefer), Donald Trump’s once-formidable White House/MAGA media machine looks lost, flailing, and growing shriller by the day. Karoline Levitt (R-Pink Hanbok) is getting more shrill and wild-eyed. Susie Wiles is dreaming of the end. Everything is falling apart. His vaunted Russia deal is a burning wreck. Europe and Canada have become fiesty and aren’t playing his game. His trade wars are an economic nuke in the American heartland. His outsourced DOGE plan to kill seniors and veterans — they’re cheaper to bury than to care for, don’t you know? — is wildly unpopular and growing less so by the day. His team is a clusterfuck clownshow with no hope of redemption or performance, QED everything. Meanwhile, out in the warming Spring waters of the political Atlantic, we’re seeing the early swirl of a perfect storm: a potential Category 5 hurricane forming. Nothing is certain yet; maybe it shifts north or south, fizzles out, or blows inland over empty territory. But storms this big have a way of finding land, and the signs are all there. I’m an empiricist, and could make the case with the data, but sometimes, you can just feel it. Any one of the predicates below could lead to a very strong 2026 election. Almost all of them are cutting into the national consciousness, and some of them are already baked in the political cake: Imagine an election where the damaging ripple effects of Trump’s spectacularly ill-conceived trade war have six full months to radiate through the economy—hitting the very voters Trump once claimed to champion: rural farmers, non-college whites, and blue-collar workers. Watch those golden promises melt into a haze of retaliatory tariffs and mass layoffs. Imagine an election where the DOGE cuts Social Security, Medicare, and veteran programs and benefit cuts—all accompanied by brazen breakages of the systems that deliver real care—send seniors to the streets in anger. The Third Rail is very real, and it can be fatal for any politician who grabs it. Imagine an election where Democrats almost ignore Trump in their attack ads and instead substitute Elon Musk. You should. He’s less popular, and doesn’t invoke the MAGA/GOP immune response to any critique of Trump. Imagine an election where Trump’s random obsessions—Greenland, Canada, the Kennedy Center—stop being nod-and-wink Republicans inside jokes about “owning the libs” in the D.C. bubble and become concrete anchors, dragging down every Republican clinging to his coattails. Imagine trying to defend invading Greenland when Michigan and Wisconsin are in an economic collapse because of auto tariffs. Imagine an election where Trump’s mumblecore ramblings and perpetual retcons—excused by the compliant Washington press corps for years—get harder and harder to spin. Remember the “Did the White House cover for Joe Biden’s decline?” obsession of a few weeks ago? That’s fluff compared to ignoring Donald Trump’s daily bouts of dimwit glossolalia. Imagine an election where America’s institutions, long asleep under normalcy bias, finally snap awake. We’ve seen some small and limited pushback against Team Trump’s ceaseless demands for total compliance. Some of the law firms he’s extorted and punished who complied — Paul, Weiss and Skadden — have poisoned their brands. The ones standing up — Wilmer Hale, Jenner and Block, Perkins Coie — will in the end of this be seen as fierce fighters for their clients and the country. Imagine an election where Trump’s casual betrayals of Wall Street and Silicon Valley—after they showered him with billions—start to sting. The “number go up” dream gets deflated by his random policy whiplash. Trump just floated that he’s going to screw them on the promised Musk-Zuck-Bezos-Blackrock tax cut. The number of Wall Street donors who’ve told me, “Yeah, I hate him, but for my firm I need support him because of the tax cut and economic growth.” Imagine an election where Democrats pivot to one simple message: “This is madness. He’s hurting you. We’ll stop it.” Imagine an election where Democrats own up to past failures to listen and understand working-class voters and tell them plainly, “We fucked up. We hear you. More jobs and a stronger economy, fewer 900-page dissertations on how brilliant we are.” That moment is already dawning, with some distance to go, but the signs are good. Imagine an election where Democrats never, ever take the culture war bait on trans or guns or Hamas or the rest of the things that make them feel good but give the GOP a key to unlock voters they ought not have. This one is going to take work, but if Democrats remember that culture wars are where they go to die, we might avoid disaster. Absurdities like “What about USAID funding trans opera singers in Ecuador?” should only get the response of, “That’s all you got? What about jobs, motherfucker?” Imagine an election where Democrats recruit candidates who fit their districts, even if they’re more conservative than the coastal donor class would prefer. We saw it work in 2018 with Nancy Pelosi’s DCCC netting 41 seats by letting local candidates be themselves. Imagine an election where the anti-Trump forces beat the MAGA crew at their own attention-economy game—outmaneuvering Fox News, Elon’s troll-laden social media platform, and every right-wing echo chamber. It’s not easy, but the pieces are sliding into place. I am not, famously, a ray of sunshine. I have seen the Democrats snatch more defeats from the jaw of more victories than I can possibly count. This political zombie apocalypse has taught me to plan for the worst. (“How much ammo do you need?” “How much is there?”) But you can feel it brewing. Like a long-range weather forecast, the direction and trending of both the polls and economic indicators is making MAGA wary and Democrats feisty. Watch for the — and the ghost of William Safire will strike me down for saying this — vibe shift. Pay attention to those town halls, and watch Democrats—who, for once in the last few years, seem to sense a real opening— and are moving with speed and purpose.