Trump is just a very unpopular president, not the representative of the American volk
By 
Jamelle Bouie picks up on the theme of Trumpism with Trump being viable because his remarkable ability to mobilize sporadic and first-time voters (in 2024, an unusual number of young voters and voters of color for a Republican candidate), but Trumpism without Trump being a disaster [free link]:
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump is a phenomenally effective vote-winner, capable of turning out millions of otherwise infrequent voters to deliver the White House and Congress to the Republican Party. But as president, Trump has been an albatross around the neck of his party.
Consider his record as party leader. In the 2017 elections, Republicans suffered sharp defeats in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, with Virginia Democrats sweeping all three statewide offices and winning a majority in the state General Assembly. The following year, in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats won a landslide victory in the House of Representatives, their largest since 2006. Trump came close to victory in the 2020 presidential but may have contributed to the Republican Party’s defeat in the Georgia Senate runoff election, handing the Democratic Party full control of Washington for the first time since 2011.
Even 2022, a midterm under President Joe Biden, was less successful than it could have been for the Republican Party because of Trump’s influence in the battle for the Senate, where voters rejected MAGA-aligned candidates in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. With the 2024 presidential election came another strong Trump performance as he brought out the voters who support him and him alone.
Tuesday was the first major election since Trump entered the White House for a second term. And although voters across Virginia, New Jersey and New York City were most concerned with the particulars of their respective states and localities, there was no question that this was also a chance to register their discontent in a way that might send a message to Washington and the rest of America.
The other implication is that the tendency of way too much of the political press and the country’s elite institutions to treat Trump’s narrow plurality victory under extremely favorable structural conditions for the out-party as some sort of permanent mandate for MAGA was obviously wrong at the time and is even more obviously wrong now:
The results, then, are a marked contrast to the accommodation, capitulation and outright surrender of prominent individuals and institutions in the face of Trump’s demands. They also serve to remind us of what ought to be a fundamental maxim of democracy: that there is no singular “people” and there are no permanent majorities.
As I have stressed again and again, it is a profound mistake to treat the 2024 presidential election as a referendum on the ideological direction of the United States or as evidence of a realignment or whatever else you happen to have as your hobbyhorse. (Here, I’ll observe that it is unclear if “realignments” actually exist. Even coalitions as seemingly durable as the one that made Franklin Roosevelt president four times showed signs of strain and fracture within a decade of their arrival.)
For some observers, the 2024 election seemed to show a shift of young people and Latinos to the Republican Party. This was said to herald a “vibe shift” in American politics and perhaps a durable turn to the political right. But the truth of the matter is that voters, and especially those who are new and infrequent participants in the political process, are as driven by events and circumstances as anything else. And the key factor last year was voters’ reaction to the inflation that plagued Biden’s term in office.
And needless to say, Trump and his top advisors were more inclined to believe the 2024 election represented a permanent mandate/realignment than anyone, and have taken most of their newest voters for granted. We can question voters who voted for President Tariffs because of high prices, but a lot of marginal voters did. We can debate about whether low-information voters should have understood Trump’s intentions on immigration, but clearly a crucial block of his voters expected him to focus on deporting violent criminals not hard-working construction workers and line cooks and domestic workers in raids by masked secret police, and they probably also remembered that the latter mostly didn’t happen in his first term despite his rhetoric. The guardrails that Trump was determined to demolish were a major reason why some voters were nostalgic for his administration and didn’t take his most extremist rhetoric seriously. Now that he’s president again, that fiction can’t be sustained, and the newest members of a coalition are also the most likely to exit stage left if they’re not getting what they want and a lot of stuff they don’t.