Trump Is Winning the Chaos. He’s Losing Everything Else.

Spirit Airlines is the latest casualty in Trump, and America's, self goal.

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Let me tell you what nobody in Washington wants to say out loud right now.

Donald Trump was handed the strongest opening position of any second-term president in modern history. A House majority. A Senate majority. A Supreme Court tilted in his favor. An opposition party in disarray. A mandate that was real and undeniable.

He had every advantage. And he is squandering every single one of them.

Not because his enemies are clever. Not because the media is against him. Not because of some deep state conspiracy working against his agenda.

Because of him. Because of decisions he made, impulsively, one after another, that no competent president would have made. The self-inflicted wounds of this administration aren’t a side effect of Trump’s presidency. They are his presidency.

Let me show you what I mean.

The Gold Card Fiasco

Start small, because the small things reveal the character.

In February 2025, Trump announced the Gold Card Visa with fanfare — pay $1 million, become a legal immigrant, proceeds go toward the national debt. By last summer, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was claiming 76,000 sign-ups. Trump himself declared over $1 billion in revenue collected.

Both of them were lying.

Under oath at a recent House Appropriations Committee hearing, Lutnick confessed that exactly one person had been approved. One. And that person — Nicki Minaj, who received her card for free at a White House ceremony — paid nothing.

The Gold Card was a performance. Like most of what this administration does, it was designed to look good on Truth Social, not to actually work. And like most performances, it collapsed the moment anyone looked closely.

The Gerrymander War He Started and Is Losing

Trump spent the last year pressuring Republican state legislatures to redraw congressional maps mid-decade — something almost never done — specifically to manufacture House seats before 2026. Texas added five seats. Missouri and North Carolina added two each.

Then Democrats fought back. California matched the Republican gains. Virginia voters approved a redistricting plan that gives Democrats four more seats. As Republican strategist John Feehery put it plainly to Politico: “Mid-decade redistricting brings bad karma to whoever calls for it. How does this help the economy exactly?”

It doesn’t. Trump started a redistricting war he is currently losing, burned enormous political capital doing it, and handed Democrats a legitimate grievance and a winning issue heading into the midterms. He did this voluntarily. Nobody made him do it. Of course, with the gutting of the Civil Rights Act, the final result still could change,

The Economy He Broke Himself

Trump was elected on economic credibility. He is destroying it with his own hands.

The tariff war he launched cost American households between $1,000 and $1,300 each in higher prices. Farmers lost billions in export markets as trading partners found other suppliers. Inflation rose more than half a percentage point. Then he and his congressional allies passed tax cuts that added $4.2 trillion to the national debt — cuts that benefited the wealthy most and that his own base will eventually pay for.

And then there’s Iran.

The decision to go to war — a war of choice, without a coalition, without a clear objective, without an exit strategy — closed the Strait of Hormuz and sent oil prices up fifty percent. Gas prices are up more than a dollar. Diesel has crested at $6 a gallon, which means everything transported by truck — which is everything — gets more expensive. Every American who fills a tank or buys groceries is paying for this war.

And today, Spirit Airlines is no more. The GOP is desperately trying to spin the block of the merger with JetBlu under Biden as the reason…but Spirit was surviving, albeit thinly, until gas prices put the nail in the coffin.

I’ve spent years in uniform. I’ve thought about how military force should and shouldn’t be used. What I’m watching is not strategy. It’s improvisation. Thirteen service members dead. More than 200 wounded. Over $5 billion in munitions expended in the first two days alone. The United States has fired approximately 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles at $4 million each, and we are manufacturing roughly 600 new ones per year. Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Forces Committee, put it plainly: “At current production rates, reconstituting what we have expended could take years.”

There is no exit strategy. Early negotiations failed. Iran isn’t budging on the strait or the nuclear program. The president who canceled the Obama-era nuclear agreement — which had limited Iran’s weapons-grade uranium stockpile until 2030 — is now fighting a war against an Iran that has increased that stockpile tenfold since the agreement was canceled.

He built this problem. He owns it.

The Pope, the Image, and the Catholics He’s Losing

American Catholics — 59 million of them, a core pillar of the coalition that elected Donald Trump twice — watched their president spend the last several weeks attacking the leader of their church.

Trump called Pope Leo XIV “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.” J.D. Vance told the Pope to be “careful when he talks about matters of theology.” And then Trump posted an AI image of himself robed in white, hands glowing with divine light, healing the sick — presenting himself as a Christ figure to an audience of evangelical and Catholic voters who take blasphemy seriously.

He deleted it. The damage was done.

Latino Catholics — who moved toward Trump in 2024 in numbers that surprised nearly everyone — are watching immigration raids conducted in military-style tactics in their communities, watching 61 percent of Americans oppose those tactics in polling, watching two protesters killed during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, both deaths caught on video.

These are voters Trump earned. He is voluntarily giving them back.

The Pattern

Here is what I know from years inside this party, and from watching this man operate across two terms.

Donald Trump is not losing because his enemies are stronger than he is. He is losing because he cannot stop himself. The tariffs, the Iran war, the Pope feud, the Gold Card fantasy, the gerrymander overreach — none of these were forced on him. Every single one was a choice. Made impulsively, designed for the performance, executed without a plan.

His approval rating is now as low as 32 percent in some polls. For the first time in sixteen years, voters trust Democrats more than Republicans on the economy. On a generic congressional ballot, Democrats lead by five points.

He had everything. He is doing this to himself.

And the rest of us — the service members, the farmers, the families paying $6 diesel prices, the communities being swept by ICE raids, the Catholics watching their president mock their Pope — we’re paying the price for it. Now, the real question is, can we sell the case to the American people? Because the Trump spin machine, is effective in some circles.

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