Wearing Out Your Welcome
June 8, 2025 | 386 words | Politics
Growing up as kids my parents gently warned us about wearing out our welcome, once we were old enough to visit friends’ houses on our own. This was not an easy concept for a young boy to comprehend, and I don’t think I fully grasped it at the time.
But now it’s all I can think about, just five months into Donald Trump’s second term in the Oval Office. I believe the man is finally beginning to wear out his welcome.
The core supporters smitten by the bold and decisive way Mr. Trump is carrying out his mandate as a renegade disrupter may still be legion, but some cracks are starting to show around the edges. Every day a few more people question their allegiance, as our President recklessly decimates federal agencies and undermines cherished institution here at home, while going out of his way to antagonize long-time allies on the world stage.
It’s not that these agencies and institutions and foreign relations didn’t need a recalibration. That’s sort of par-for-the-course; every big organization should be scrutinized and tuned up on a regular basis to maintain effectiveness and efficiency. And some of our country’s larger undertakings are in dire need of a day of reckoning. As Democrat Elissa Slotkin, the newest senator from Michigan put it the other day, “nobody likes the way we do health care; nobody likes the way we do education …”
But “recalibration” is not part of the MAGA movement’s vocabulary. Achieving effectiveness and efficiency across government agencies and within cherished institutions and among foreign relations requires more thought and more effort than simply taking a meat ax to everything.
I’d like to think every new provocation, and every reversal of the previous provocation, is putting a strain on the consensus Mr. Trump has enjoyed since being inaugurated a second time this past January. Consider his latest about-face, this time on the war in Ukraine, where he went from “I’m going to end that war on my first day in office,” to “sometimes it’s better to let two kids fight it out in the playground for a while.”
My bet is his hold on the Republican Party, and on the small plurality who voted him into office again, will have evaporated by the time the congressional mid-term elections roll around in 2026.
Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr.
bobcavjr@gmail.com