Is Trump Just Full On Sabotaging The Republican Party Now?
All signs point to Trump subconsciously working to set his party up for failure in 2026 and beyond.
Donald Trump may be adept at building winning political coalitions to elect Republicans, but he is notorious for undermining them in office. At times, he seems like the best player on the Democrats’ team.
Remember his 2022 slate of endorsed Senate candidates? In what normally should have been a wave election for the party out of power, thanks to Trump’s elevation of candidates such as Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz, Democrats actually gained a seat that year.
Now, during his second term, this tendency to set his own party up for failure has reached a whole new level. Less than two years ago, Trump won the popular vote by increasing his vote share among key constituencies and helped usher in Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress. The vibes and public sentiment were on his side; Democrats were at a low, both in popularity and power; and MAGA was on the ascent.
But now, 16 months since returning to office, inflation is soaring, and Trump’s disapproval numbers, particularly on the economy, have hit historic highs. Democrats smell opportunity and, should current numbers hold, are on the cusp of retaking Congress.
And somehow, this week, Trump managed to make it even worse.
On Tuesday, when asked if he considered Americans’ “financial situation” as he dealt with Iran negotiations, Trump gave an answer that would have ended the career of any other politician who uttered it.
Trump understands optics. He had to know, as he was saying it, that it would become fodder for Democratic attack ads. In fact, it already is.
Yet it still came out of his mouth as he spoke directly into multiple live cameras. We know Trump doesn’t care about the financial pain of the American people. But a politician interested in winning elections normally does not say it out loud, let alone in front of reporters. And particularly for someone who lies so readily, it is telling that Trump chose to tell the absolute truth in this case: that he DGAF about the American people.
So, it bears asking: is Trump sabotaging his own party ahead of the 2026 and 2028 elections?
The Narcissist In Chief
Back in 2024, a group of more than 200 mental health professionals signed an open letter warning that Trump was “grossly unfit” for office due to “his symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder – malignant narcissism.”
As the letter noted,
“Even a non-clinician can see that Trump shows a lifetime pattern of ‘failure to conform to social norms and laws,’ ‘repeated lying,’ ‘reckless disregard for the safety of others,’ ‘irritability,’ ‘impulsivity,’ ‘irresponsibility,’ and ‘lack of remorse.’”
For Donald Trump the narcissist, this is a very fraught time. Because he is legally ineligible to run for office again—which he very well knows, despite his own trolling claims—he will soon no longer be the center of attention. Without another run for office in his future, Trump senses the imminent disruption of what Dr. Melissa Kalt calls his “narcissistic supply,” the lifeblood of every narcissist.
As Kalt puts it,
Narcissists are desperate to hold onto two things — narcissistic supply and their made-up version of reality. They protect both fiercely.
A narcissist will take revenge on anyone who threatens to disrupt either. If you threaten to remove their supply — become indifferent, leave the relationship, expose who they are — they will retaliate.
One of the ways narcissists retaliate against those who “leave the relationship”:
The narcissist will sabotage that which is most important to you.
On the surface, Trump is doing everything in his power to help Republicans win in November. He understands very well that Democratic majorities in Congress mean the functional end of his presidency and perhaps even a third impeachment. The most obvious expression of this understanding is his mid-decade redistricting push that has turned out to be a shrewd way to pad Republicans’ margins in the House this fall.
Despite this, Trump has made moves over the past 16 months that have undermined the very majority he claims to want to maintain. With remarkable speed and efficiency, Trump has lost any gains he made in 2024 among Democratic-leaning voting blocs and completely inverted his approval rating, from +12 net approval on January 21, 2025 to -23 on May 11, 2026. The result: despite the Democratic Party’s own historic unpopularity, they are now even money to take back control of both chambers of Congress, something that was unthinkable just a few months ago.
Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly went on Piers Morgan last month to try to reckon with all the ways Trump has done everything he can to undercut the Republican Party. She made a keen observation about how it is rooted in his personality disorder:
“[Trump] doesn’t care that Republicans are going to lose the midterms. I think he thought that was a foregone conclusion. And I don’t think he cares that JD Vance or Marco Rubio wins the presidency next time around. I think there’s a piece of Trump that would like to say, ‘I’m the only one who could do it. The Republican Party’s nothing without me.’ And the rest of us are going to be around to pick up the pieces.”
Broken Promises As Retaliation
The damage Trump has inflicted on Republican fortunes in just 16 months is a kind of preemptive retaliation. It’s punishment for the inevitable day the party can no longer deliver the “narcissistic supply” he requires.
He’s done this by sabotaging the things that were most important to them. Those include three core promises he made during his reelection campaign:
Release the Epstein files
Bring costs down on Day One
No new wars
Many politicians fail to deliver on promises, but rarely does a president take his most public and popular promises and proceed to do the exact opposite. In a remarkable turn, Trump is now poking his own supporters in the eye while undermining his own political brand. This amounts to jettisoning the entire political coalition that helped get him reelected.
It’s worth taking a deeper dive into each of these promises.
The Epstein Files
In February of 2025, everything appeared to be going to plan. Attorney General Pam Bondi went on Fox News to declare that “the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients” was “on my desk.” The next day, the White House released what it called “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.”
But as PBS reported,
The attempt to showcase transparency soon backfired, once it emerged that the contents largely were already public. Bondi demanded that the FBI give her “the full and complete Epstein files,” and she later said that she’d unearthed a “truckload” of previously withheld material and that “everything is going to come out to the public.”
Months later, the Justice Department declared it “wouldn’t release any more Epstein material” and said there was “no ‘client list.’” Trump himself even urged his supporters to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” That followed his earlier statement urging the country to move on from Epstein and “get onto something else.”
By the fall, Trump was in full obstruction mode as it became clear not only that was he all over the Epstein files, but that he was directing his Justice Department to engage in a cover-up to protect himself and his friends.
Tariffs
Trump’s promise to “lower costs on Day One” was central to his 2024 victory. Inflation had dogged Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and ultimately doomed their reelection. But instead of delivering on that very clear promise, Trump proceeded to sabotage it with his implementation of high global tariffs.
As Council on Foreign Relations recounts,
President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on foreign trade on April 2, 2025. Calling it “Liberation Day,” he announced unprecedented tariff rates for every U.S. trading partner at a level not seen since 1909. The ultimate goal was to reduce the U.S. trade deficit by forcing countries to the negotiating table.
What followed was a shambolic and erratic rollout of tariff stops and starts, with a devastating ruling by the Supreme Court ultimately declaring a good chunk of Trump’s tariff regime illegal. The Court set in motion the Trump treasury’s payback of tariffs to 300,000+ importers to the tune of at least $34 billion. But the damage was already done.
As CFR makes clear:
According to a recent study by New York Federal Reserve Bank economists, Americans bore 94 percent of the tariff cost in August 2025.
According to the Yale Budget Lab, the pass-through of tariff costs to U.S. consumers has increased over time. By the end of 2025, it was about 76 percent, and as high as 100 percent for many consumer durables. At his press conference on March 18, Fed Chair Jay Powell said that tariffs were adding between half a percent and three quarters of a percent to the inflation rate.
There was also a direct line between Trump’s tariffs and grocery prices, resulting in an immediate hit to American consumers.
Following the April 2025 announcement, proposed tariffs drove food prices up 1.6 percent—equivalent to an entire year of prior grocery inflation—while all 2025 tariff actions combined pushed food prices up 2.8 percent and fresh produce up 4 percent.
The War In Iran
Trump rose to power in 2016 railing against Bush’s “stupid wars.” His entire anti-interventionist political ethos was centered around focusing on America and not being the “policemen of the world.”
In his second term, however, Trump has been intervening in other countries’ sovereign affairs. Most of it has been all talk, such as his threat to make Canada the 51st state or to take over Greenland. But then he began ordering strikes on fishing boats off the coast of South America in the name of stopping the deadly drug trade, and he launched a special operation to extract and arrest Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela in a regime change op that largely left the Maduro regime in place.
This began to chip away at his reputation among his MAGA base as a true “America First” champion. But his war in Iran was the last straw for many.
On February 28, the U.S. and Israel launched a military campaign against Iran dubbed Operation Epic Fury. Not only was it an unambiguous betrayal of his promise not to start any new wars, but it had the added effect of sending prices on almost everything higher. The price of gas in particular rose as a result of Iran’s predictable blockage of the Strait of Hormuz.
The impact of Trump’s war on gas prices has been devastating.
And that has followed for energy prices more broadly.
As well as the larger inflation rate, which surged to 3.8% last month in the wake of Trump’s war.
These price shocks are not happening in a vacuum. As Chris Hayes recently noted on All In, usually there is very little a president can do to impact inflation. But in Trump’s case, he actually managed to have a very real impact, through both his tariffs and his war in Iran, the latter of which managed to break two of his core promises in one shot.
It’s not that costs have risen in spite of Trump’s actions. It’s very clearly because of them. And Americans have made the connection.
Harry Enten broke down recent polling data on CNN, noting that the five worst polls on presidential approval on the issue of inflation all belong to Donald Trump in the past month.
Per Enten, the American people “are blaming Donald Trump for the high inflation.” Namely, between April 30-May 4, 77% of Americans said Donald Trump “increased the cost of living in their community.”
In what can only be described as a self-own of epic historic proportions, Trump has managed, in 16 short months, to alienate his base, crumble his winning coalition, and set his party on track to lose the 2026 midterms in a likely blue wave. And it’s hard to see how 2028 doesn’t follow close behind at this point.
Ritual Humiliation
It’s not just his own approval, or even that of his party, that has suffered at the hands of Trump’s sabotage operation.
If Donald Trump perceives that someone has crossed or criticized him, however gently, he will, as Psychology Today describes the classic trait of a narcissist, “berate those who point out their limitations.”
For Trump, that usually takes the form of unleashing a torrent of anger and hate online, no matter how loyal others may have been to him over time. This serves not just as a classic narcissistic assertion of dominance, but also as a warning to anyone else who might consider doing anything so foolish to him in the future. It’s how he keeps his party in line.
Trump seemed to acknowledge as much during an Oval Office event earlier this week, when he issued a veiled threat to Senator Katie Britt:
TRUMP: “Katie Britt -- I hope she always remains loyal to me so I can continue to support her.”
BRITT: “You’ve got it.”
TRUMP: “I would hate to go against her. That will never happen, Katie, right?”
This moment wasn’t just about deterrence. It’s a tactic Trump often deploys against friends and enemies alike: public humiliation.
As Suzy Bliss writes,
Humiliation is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of narcissistic abuse. It’s a calculated attempt to strip away someone’s dignity and self-respect, leaving them feeling powerless and small. The word “humiliation” itself comes from the Latin word for “dirt,” painting a vivid picture of how narcissists aim to make their victims feel — like something to be walked on and discarded.
And one of the narcissist’s classic tools in his toolbox?
Public Shaming: Narcissists often prefer to humiliate their victims in front of others, maximizing the impact and making it harder for the victim to defend themselves.
During Trump’s second term, this has taken many forms, from Trump’s mocking of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as “Governor” of “the 51st State,” to the ambush of President Volodomyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, to his regular televised cabinet meetings during which he demands members prostrate themselves in humiliating praise of Dear Leader.
Bashing JD
The ritual humiliation has one common target lately: JD Vance, the man he hand-picked to be his Vice President and, presumably, his heir apparent.
Over the past several months, Trump has deployed Vance as the regime’s point person on impossible missions, setting him up for failure at each turn.
Trump sent Vance to campaign for Viktor Orban in the closing days of his April reelection campaign, even when Orban’s defeat was a foregone conclusion. There was Vance, nevertheless, front and center stumping for the loser, and arguably even hurting Orban further.
Then, within days, Vance was sent to lead “peace” talks with Iran, also widely seen as doomed from the start. Trump put Vance forward as the face of an inevitable failure, with the added humiliation for Vance as the face of a war he internally had advised against.
The Guardian characterized the position Trump put Vance in as follows:
Vance – who has publicly supported the war effort despite having advised against starting it – is widely seen as having been put in an invidious position by Trump. That impression has been bolstered by comments from the president himself, who said of the peace mission: “If it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance. If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”
And to make matters worse, per The New York Times,
On Saturday evening, as Vice President JD Vance took a podium in Pakistan and said no deal had been reached to end the war in Iran, President Trump was in Miami watching a mixed martial arts fight.
Mr. Trump spent several hours orbited by Secretary of State Marco Rubio…
The accumulation of these very public—and inevitable—failures has led to headlines like this in The Independent:
JD Vance mocked over weekend of failures in Iran and Hungary
As well as online trolling, portraying Vance as a bit of a jinx. As Ron Filipkowski put it,
But Trump wasn’t done with Vance quite yet. There are now regular stories of Trump polling insiders at Mar-a-Lago and in Washington, asking who should be at the top of the next Republican ticket to succeed him. The Atlantic refers to it as “Trump’s parlor game of asking about Rubio and Vance—whom he reportedly calls ‘kids.’”
Recently, Trump even did it publicly, polling gathered White House guests about whom they prefer, Vance or Rubio. Ultimately, the reaction did favor Vance, but it’s clear Trump is publicly knocking him down a peg. It’s also a veiled threat, just like his supposedly playful banter with Katie Britt in the Oval Office: “Don’t get out of line, or else.”
When asked about it, Vance laughed it off, even making an Apprentice joke.
To be fair, according to Axios,
“Vance-Rubio is the president’s dream ticket” for 2028 — “and to be clear, that’s Vance on top,” said a Trump adviser whom the president recently asked to share opinions about the top of the ticket.
Still, in both his words and his actions, Trump is functionally sabotaging Vance at a key time: just a month out from the release of Vance’s new memoir and, presumably, several months out from a presidential campaign launch to succeed his boss.
The damage is showing up in polling. As CNN’s Harry Enten observed last month in the wake of Vance’s Iran and Hungary misadventures,
There’s now even polling that finds Rubio well ahead of Vance in a 2028 Republican primary.
But that really only means one thing: Rubio is likely next on the Trump sabotage docket.
The End Game
Despite all this wreckage, there have been no outward signs that Trump is paying a price among his inner circle.
We saw this week in the aftermath of Trump saying he did not take Americans’ financial situation into account when negotiating with Iran. Everyone followed the pre-approved script: Vance claimed Trump didn’t actually say what he said, while Speaker Mike Johnson claimed not to know the context of the remarks
But how long can that last?
By now, thanks largely to Trump and despite aggressive redistricting by red states, the House is most likely lost and possibly even the Senate. Johnson will move from third in line to the presidency down to mere minority leader of the House (if he’s lucky.) And Majority Leader John Thune may have to get used to playing second fiddle to a Democratic leader in the Senate.
But what about for Vance or Rubio in 2028? Even with Democratic majorities in Congress, Trump will still have two years to continue his sabotage campaign, desperately clinging to relevance even as he sees his narcissist supply draining away.
And if Democrats run the table in November, Trump may find himself on the receiving end of the kind of retaliatory campaign he has waged.
At some point, if things get bad enough, the same naked self-interest that keeps GOP leaders cowering in Trump’s shadow could cause them to turn on him completely, with all options on the table.
But that, of course, would take some courage, which we all have seen is in shorter supply than the adulation that continues to fuel Trump’s narcissism.
You can clearly hear him saying in November “the reason we lost the House and the Senate is because I wasn’t on the ballot”
Trump can’t run again, regardless of whatever idiotic claims to the contrary, so he doesn’t care who he hits on his way out the door. He just wants a cage match fight between Rubio and Vance akin to his planned birthday UFC event. 🙄