There is a powerful force that affects politics as much as it affects individual lives. It is fatigue.
We just get darn tired of something, be it a job, a relationship, a hobby or a routine. We have been devoted to it for years, and suddenly we want out; we want to do something else. What we loved doing has become boring and tedious. More work than fun.
A kind of national fatigue played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union: People were tired of the system and its oppressiveness. Likewise, South Africa.
I was in and out of that country just before apartheid came to its timely death. Ordinary White people, including Afrikaners, said they had had enough; they were tired of the whole complex, cruel structure.
It is my contention that President Trump wants out — that for him, the fun is over. The old stimuli — his daily television domination, the adulation, the global recognition — once so important to him, are ebbing.
Michael Wolff, Trump’s biographer, and James Carville, the picaresque Democratic activist, have both speculated, along with several commentators, that Trump may not finish out his term. They imply that some external force, like illness, will cause him to leave office.
But I think he would like to do it by choice because he isn’t enjoying it anymore. The music has stopped.
Trump said during his first term that he had left a good life — by implication, a better life — before he became president. The first year of his second term was more to his liking than his whole first term. He roared back into office in 2025 with advantages he didn’t have in 2017.
Now he was the man, admired by some, feared by many. His whims or idiosyncrasies became policy. He took over America as though he had bought an apartment building and was knocking down walls and digging a swimming pool.
Trump had a palpable majority, and his base, which had developed a kind of religious commitment behind the slogan “Make America Great Again,” was solid.
In Congress, he had a majority, thin but blindly loyal.
The transformation was complete. The Republican Party had morphed into the Trump Party, faithful and unquestioning. He was careful to staff this second administration with men and women who accepted his liege. Additionally, he came in with a kind of manifesto in the form of the sweeping Project 2025, crafted by the sycophantic Heritage Foundation.
Trump bulldozed his way through his first 100 days, signing nearly 40 executive orders on his first day back in the White House. He made Elon Musk the foreman of an unconstitutional entity: the Department of Government Efficiency. It battered the bureaucracy but also established, from the start, Trump’s unbridled power.
“You’re fired!” moved from the fateful catchphrase on the TV series “The Apprentice,” which had made Trump a national celebrity, to a tool of government and a way of cowering the workforce.
In Congress, the withdrawal of Trump’s favor was feared as a career death sentence. Privately, Republican eyes rolled, but publicly, it was Trump all the way.
This year, the edifice of certainty is beginning to wobble.
Being president isn’t all plaudits, and some Trump voters are looking away, worried about the ravages of his private army in the form of ICE and the loss of America’s global stature. They are also concerned that the rich aren’t just getting richer; they are now an aristocracy, rich beyond measure, akin to the feudal lords.
Then came the Iran war, where miscalculation, aided by hubris and ignorance, has led to the real possibility that we will settle for less than we had before the first U.S. shot was fired.
In short, Trump took up arms against a sea of troubles and made them worse. Governing has proved to be more complicated than he dreamed.
It has long been a tenet of the right wing that there are simple solutions for complex problems. It is also the Trump creed.
I would wager the main thing keeping Trump from declaring victory and adjourning to a life of golf and self-congratulation would be that he desperately wants to finish his two acts of self-adulatory construction: the White House ballroom and the triumphal arch.
Trump has shown every indication that he sees his legacy not in Middle East peace or global security, but in the currency that made him: concrete and rebar.
Trump shows many signs of fatigue, of being tired of the job and its endless crises. Polls suggest many people are fatigued with him, too.
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