| | | Recent developments should deeply worry Republicans, starting with those disastrous midterms. The Republican Party may have held on to the Senate, but Democrats now control the House of Representatives because they won more congressional seats than they had since the post-Watergate tsunami of 1974. They gained seven governorships and nearly 350 state legislature seats. According to exit polls, Democrats improved over their 2014 midterm showing by six or more percentage points among men, women, married voters, unmarried voters, whites, Hispanics, Asians, voters under 30, voters over 59, moderates, independents, urbanites and voters with college degrees.
In other words, Republicans lost significant ground among everyone except Mr. Trump’s core base of rural, evangelical and “noncollege” supporters (and even among them, the Republican margin shrank a bit). This happened with unemployment lower than at any time since 1969 and with Republican turnout at its highest level in a century.
Mr. Trump’s hard-core base is large enough to dominate the Republican Party, at least for now, but it is not large enough to dominate the country. In the long run, a third or so of the country cannot effectively govern the other two-thirds with an unpopular agenda and a Twitter account. Mr. Trump will almost surely achieve less legislatively in the second half of his term than he did in the first, when Republicans controlled both branches of Congress — and even then their record was not impressive.
In short, by consolidating behind Mr. Trump, the Republican Party is isolating and alienating itself from the broader public. Indeed, the Trump paradox is that his support deepens among his most persistent admirers even as it erodes everywhere else. As a result, Mr. Trump headed into his third-year State of the Union message with the second-lowest approval rating in history, despite a roaring economy. (Ronald Reagan, who bested Mr. Trump for this dubious honor in 1983, spoke at the nadir of a deep recession.)
Meanwhile, chaos is consuming the Trump administration. The president, cowed by his base, engineered a very unpopular government shutdown for which most people held him (and his party) responsible. He finally agreed to a deal to reopen the government, but only on terms dictated to him by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to the dismay of some of his most prominent right-wing supporters. In December, his mercurial decision-making drove his widely respected defense secretary to quit in protest. Scandals and corruption besiege the president on every side. His administration is being investigated by a special counsel, by the Southern District of New York and soon by House Democrats armed with subpoena power. The president’s behavior is becoming more erratic and bizarre, and his own aides have confided that he is “ unhinged.”
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