'In 100 days, Donald Trump has Made America Weak Again'

First, the good news: as he nears 100 days into his second term in office with an approval rating of 44%, Donald Trump is NOT the most unpopular president since World War II.

The most unpopular president since WW2 was Donald Trump v1.0, who raked the all-time low of 41% approval ratings at 100 days in. And that guy still had the reins on.

This one has banjaxed the gilt markets, tanked his economy, fired thousands of his own voters, has a Defence Secretary so loose with state secrets he might as well be cc'ing Beijing, and has been so thoroughly ignored by the auld enemy he's been reduced to appealing to Russia's better nature on social media.

If that didn't work for whichever poor female was most recently chosen to incubate new forces for Elon Musk's clone army, chances are it ain't going to fly for Vladimir Putin. Evil Dobby doesn't do Twitter, and he's never been known to do nice.

Being the most unpopular president since the last time he was president is not going to deter Trump from holding a 100-days rally to crow about his successes. The problem is that after three and a half months of untethered, aspartame-fuelled lunacy he has come up against an immovable object in the shape of US public opinion.

Not only have they decided that Trump is their least and second-least favourite president, but some polls are showing he might become less popular still. And if you thought the tantrum he threw on Capitol Hill in 2020 wasn't bad enough, the buffalo dung is really going to hit the fan next time.

Trump is not a man who responds well to failure. He doesn't question, analyse, or try a different tack. He just decides he needs to whack it harder, but like a baseball player who can't connect with the ball all that happens is he fails faster, and with greater risk the bat will connect with someone it shouldn't.

One of the few areas where Trump is polling well is border security. But a big majority of voters, by 2 to 1, want him to bring back those who've been deported wrongly - high-profile cases of people whose visa status was approved by courts, or people who are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing. To do so means admitting he got it wrong, so Trump won't, and the polling gets bleaker by the day.

A sensible politician might blame someone else, and escape that way. But Trump isn't sensible, or a politician - he's a mob boss, whose position relies on the loyalty of his lieutenants. He needs to throw the weakest soldier to the wolves every now and then to maintain discipline, but he has to back the capos. So he won't blame Musk for bringing government to a halt, won't fire Pete Hegseth for sending strike secrets to his wife, and he can't point the finger at anyone else for the tariff fiasco. The whole world knows that one was his idea.

Trump is in the same position as Vladimir Putin. They both have highly-militarised economies which would stagnate without billions being poured into them, they both are or are about to become ex-superpowers, and their jobs depend entirely on making a country believe the rest of the world is out to get it. The only people who seem to have noticed these similarities are Trump, Putin, President Xi of China, and now you.

This is a man who cares about his ratings, but the first by-elections of his presidency saw support swing to his opponents and Republican majorities slashed. Sixty per cent of Americans hate the tariffs, and hate the 'efficiency' cuts which have effectively shuttered huge chunks of vital government agencies. Perhaps surprisingly, even his supporters are not entirely thrilled with deporting people to El Salvador mega-prisons without due legal process, or border officials grabbing visa-holding students in the street. Throw in the Tesla-whoring and tying himself to the increasingly-unpopular Musk, plus Supreme Court battles on his major policies, and you've got a godfather with a life expectancy of about six minutes in the real world.

He's going to react to all this unpopularity by doubling down, like a toddler in a junk food funk. Then he'll hit the Terrible Twos - otherwise known as the mid-term elections - when, if current trends continue, he'll lose his narrow majorities in Congress and will become an enraged, embittered lame duck. He'll still quack and flap, but that'll be it.

In the meantime, the US economy is flatlining with job losses, increased need for state support, and a measles outbreak that unless vaccination rates increase drastically will become a standard household disease once more. On the world stage, his ability to start wars is undimmed but America's 70-year role in ending them is over. There's no peace, no economic hegemony, and no earthly need for China or Russia to pay him any heed. And what does any two-year-old do, when they are ignored, and laughed at, and very definitely to blame?

Most two-year-olds grow up. Trump is 78, with a lifetime of moral and financial bankruptcy behind him that has served only to convince him that he's right. He's right to deport American citizens, Green Card holders, non-gang members, people who happened to get swept in to a Palestine protest. He's right to fire veterans from the Veterans Agency, let Musk falsely declare social security claimants as dead, allow RFK to preside over the resurgence of the world's most infectious disease.

It is that weakness of character - the failure to progress at least into the self-awareness of childhood - which is being transmitted intravenously from the US body politic into the US itself. The world's strongest economy, the most powerful military, all its democratic checks and balances, thrown in to a blender because a billionaire thought it wasn't doing enough to please him.

He has limited US purchasing power. He has pushed Britain back to Europe, and pushed his biggest trading partners Mexico, Canada and China further away. He has made Americans more dependent on an America less able than ever to sustain them, and so next he will have to do what Putin, in much the same position had to do: he will have to wage war. He may target his neighbours, like Russia did, or his opponents and US constitution when they combine to remove him from power. But it is the only way to hide the fact that all he has achieved is to Make America Weak Again; and that's not what was on the hat.