At Slate today, Ian Prasad Philbrick surveys the field of pundits and prognosticators and wonders: “Where does the chronic impulse to forecast Trump’s imminent downfall come from?” Well, it’s not like there aren’t a million reasons he *should* fall. As Philbirck notes, critics have predicted the end again and again:

It happened after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, when dozens of Republican elected officials rescinded their support over Trump’s comments bragging about grabbing women’s genitals. The end was again nigh in May 2017, when former CBS anchor Dan Rather declared that “the curtain may be coming down on this act of this tragedy” after Robert Mueller started investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. After Trump equivocated over a deadly white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, the journalist Matt Taibbi called it “the final stake through the Grinch-heart of his presidency.” An FBI raid on the office of longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen the following year emboldened then-New Yorker writer Adam Davidson to argue that “we are now in the end stages of the Trump presidency.“ This fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” an “exhilarated” Sen. Mitch McConnell told a New York Times reporter hours after a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol. “Donald Trump is now forever disgraced,” the historian Brenda Wineapple opined in the Times after the House committee investigating Jan. 6 referred him for criminal prosecution. Weeks before Trump won the 2024 election, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz predicted that his debate performance against Kamala Harris would cost the former president the race. 

This is what makes those of us who still believe in the U.S. Constitution — in justice, in principles in fairness, and in morality — so insane. No one should still have popular support after *any* of these episodes, let alone all of them. The world is upside down when a “leader” can do all of this and still get more votes than his opponent and maintain the support of his party and all of the sycophants around him. 

The world is truly upside down when this person can go to war against another country for no reason he or anyone else can identify, spending over a billion dollars per day of our money, killing our fellow Americans, and even aiding this so-called “enemy” by lifting sanctions to allow them to profit from their oil to the tune of $14 billion (which they will certainly spend to attempt to kill more Americans or damage American interests), and still… still, this person maintains his position, the support of his party, and the support of most of the people who voted for him. 

Seriously people, what will it take for this demagogue to be dethroned?