THE NEW YORK TIMES: The surprising thing that could be Donald Trump’s undoing

If there are Martian scholars examining the United States right now, they might be puzzling over the great Trump paradox.

It’s that President Donald Trump is doing immense long-term damage to the country by undermining democratic norms, vandalising the Federal Government and siding with alleged war criminals in the Kremlin, yet if support for him falls, I doubt it will have anything to do with all this.

Rather, it may be … egg prices.

American voters have been, to my mind, surprisingly comfortable with a felon who pardons other, violent felons and engages in reckless attacks on our rule of law and the global system that we created in 1945 and that has hugely enriched and empowered us.

Trump doubled down on his, er, “cultural revolution” in his recent speech to Congress, and about three-quarters of those who watched the speech approved of it to some degree (largely because those who watched were disproportionately Republican).

Attacks by Democrats on Trump as undemocratic never got much traction among working-class voters; they cared less about issues at 30,000 feet and more about economic and cultural concerns at 3 feet. So in a strange way, what may impede Trump and preserve American democracy is not popular revulsion at the historic damage that he is doing to the country but rather alarm at the myriad banal impacts on our daily lives because of Trumpian mismanagement.

Trump’s tariffs, even if partly delayed, presumably will raise consumer prices and hurt the financial markets and thus our retirement savings; they will create a mess of supply chains for manufacturing goods. One gauge of what to expect: The latest estimate from the Atlanta Federal Reserve is an astonishing 2.4% decline in American gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2025.

Americans may put up with a president calling journalists enemies of the people, may even accept a president pardoning felons who clubbed police officers while trying to overturn an election. But historically, they’ve not been very forgiving of presidents who preside over recessions.

What’s more, Republicans are now apparently preparing to slash Medicaid to pay for continued tax cuts for the rich. Sure, Trump denies up and down that he will cut Medicaid. Republicans insist that they’re just cutting waste and fat, that they’re simply promoting work requirements and the like, that they’re not cutting Medicaid as such but just the block grants to the states that pay for it.

But the unarguable fact is that the federal government would be providing less money to pay for health care for the roughly 72 million Americans on Medicaid. The essential reality is that the plan appears to cut health care for the poorest Americans so that the richest Americans can get a big tax cut — and this is not just morally outrageous but also politically fraught.

Elon Musk’s critique of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” accompanied by Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the program, accompanied by talk of selling Social Security offices, seems even more likely to worry voters.

More broadly, while many of us would welcome a savvy review of federal staffing and an effort to prune regulations and the bureaucracy, Trump’s attacks on the federal government are being undertaken with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel. Trump and Musk may think that federal employees pushed out of their jobs are faceless bureaucrats who won’t be noticed, but when they are health workers at a VA hospital, patients will notice. When they manage agriculture programs, farmers will notice.

Cuts in the Federal Aviation Administration and in the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will make flying less safe, James Fallows argues persuasively; at a time when extreme weather events are becoming more common, it’s bizarre to reduce our ability to predict hurricanes, tornadoes and heat waves.

In Western states, we’re already fearful of the ways the Trump cuts will hamstring firefighting during the next fire season. It won’t always be evident whether a plane crash or raging fire can be fairly blamed on Trump. But given that Trump and Musk have been exceedingly careless, mixing up millions and billions, and initially cutting programs for Ebola control and nuclear arms management before rushing to try to rectify those problems, they may not get the benefit of the doubt.

In short, Trump-Musk incompetence and recklessness may — just may — discredit the vandals in Washington and rein them in.

Is it actually reasonable to blame Trump for rising egg prices? Perhaps not.

That has more to do with long-running bird flu than with tariffs or anything else he has done.

It’s true that Trump has undercut the surveillance system for bird flu and that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s scepticism about vaccines will make us more vulnerable to bird flu if we face a pandemic. But Trumpian mismanagement isn’t a major factor in today’s rising egg prices.

So would I rather voters rise up in outrage at Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine, his threats to NATO and his campaign to undermine democracy?

Of course!

But I welcome indignation of any kind. Maybe we can be rescued from our nation’s disastrous course by chickens.

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Contact Nicholas Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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