Heather Cox Richardson is a fantastic political/historical analyst who I listen to on the regular, but this particular prediction seems pretty widespread right now among everyone paying attention.

I think things accelerated when Zohran Mamdani and many other leftist/progressive local political leaders swept the country. It was a confirmation of what the administration feared was coming, a mid-term wipe-out. That alongside the very real possibility that Trump could literally die at any moment, and they don’t have remotely the political capital secured behind JD Vance to keep the flame of kayfabe alive, it’s making them move recklessly and plow through rules and regulations to a degree that will cost them a lot later. After Trump is gone, they’re all going to blame him for all the laws they broke and all the terrors they inflicted, but it won’t stick if they go too far and they already have gone too far, so it’s panic-mode.

The conservative base is, at best, tepid or ambivalent about Vance, at worst they hate his pasty ass. He certainly doesn’t hold anyone’s attention, he represents everything that Trump defied, he talks like a politician and doesn’t ooze with the hate and contempt that makes Trump weirdly human to a lot of people. They try so hard it’s hilarious, like that “I hate turkey” fiasco that fell to crickets and tumbleweeds. I think they thought they would have made more progress in securing a new right-wing leader by now, but events like Charlie Kirk and other high-profile divisions in the party have only eroded things worse for them.

Without that kind of raw political capital that Trump had, in terms of a fervorous, nationalist, dumb-as-fuck band of millions of armed nutcases who will support literally anything their leader says, the current administration and on through house and the judicial branch are royally fucked.