The cracks in Trump’s coalition keep growing — but when does it break?

“Make it stop,” said the voice on the other end of the phone in the tone of someone weary from emotional pain, or maybe under the influence of opioids. Could be both. I’d asked him about President Trump’s Truth Social post that began by declaring “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” 

“I haven’t had my morning coffee,” he continued, “my wife has a doctor’s appointment and I haven’t had a day off from this mess in two weeks.” 

Those symptoms describe many who live in the United States, but then he said, “The fact that I voted for this dumb**s makes it hurt more.” The fact that the person on the other end of the phone is a ranking Republican member of Congress made that statement even more poignant.

Some congressional Republicans, like Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and Texas Rep. Nathaniel Moran publicly chastised the president for his recent actions. Many more, like my friend on the phone, are saying far worse things about Trump privately. This has been the M.O. of Republicans since Trump first walked down the escalator, attacked Mexicans and made fun of a handicapped reporter. Privately, they say he is rude, crude and socially unacceptable while defending him publicly. Some no longer do. 

MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones, along with former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have called Trump “disgusting” or “evil” and “vile.” Jones described Trump’s Truth Social post as “the definition of genocide,” and he joined Greene and Owens in calling for Vice President JD Vance and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. In response to their criticism, on Thursday afternoon the president attacked Carlson, Owens, Jones, Greene and podcaster Megyn Kelly as “NUT JOBS” and “TROUBLEMAKERS” in a lengthy Truth Social post.

This is a political “wow” moment. The United States no longer has the moral high ground. Some of Trump’s biggest propaganda megaphones have become detractors, and when that happens, pal, you’re probably screwed. That’s what the defection of his largest influencers portends. The more they scream that Trump’s lost it, the more he loses his ability to influence the public. It is also solid evidence Trump has lost a political step. Please: don’t try to argue otherwise. I get my comedy from comedians.

Trump’s supporters have demonstrated a depth of loyalty we rarely see in politics. We can admire such devotion. But it is far more important that, in this case, those who displayed it until recently, like Greene and others, now say they understand that closer scrutiny is required before we decide who is worthy of our public loyalty. All of us should be more critical of those to whom we offer this gift in our social contract.

Don’t dismiss those who woke up this week and said, “We don’t want this s**t anymore.” At least they’re not saying they’d prefer to have a nuclear bomb dumped in their lap rather than vote for a Democrat. (I saw that, Megyn Kelly. Really? Apparently you can both drop a bomb and eagerly embrace one at the same time.) The rest of us would like to live tolerantly in some form or fashion without using nuclear ordnance on each other. We prefer civility to civil unrest.

Trump’s recent Truth Social post was disturbing for its coarseness and implied threat of nuclear genocide, and many couldn’t help but notice that when he talked about destroying a “whole civilization,” Americans are part of the “whole.” He either doesn’t care if we are all destroyed, or he misused the term. Either way, many of us can do little more than rant about it. The largest single-day protests in American history certainly haven’t stopped him.

November’s midterm elections still seem far away, and each week with Trump seems like months. In the last week alone he has threatened our allies, embraced our enemies, talked  about withdrawing from NATO, jailed American citizens, fired his attorney general and threatened to sue those reporting facts he doesn’t like about a war in Iran that several sources close to him say he desperately wishes he hadn’t started. He said he isn’t guilty of war crimes because the Iranians are animals. He has cursed at them and threatened them, and now he is apparently relying on one of his oldest tricks to get out of the mess: He’s going to play fire fighter to a blaze he started. 

That’s how we got here. Trump tried to start a fire to deflect from the all-consuming scandal surrounding the Epstein files. Naturally, with 90 minutes to go on Tuesday night before his self-imposed deadline to eliminate Iran, Trump announced a fragile two-week ceasefire agreement. We all sighed with relief. The details didn’t matter. We all could take a breath that Trump backed away from the brink. We have a tenuous respite from the storm, and maybe for the next two weeks we can, at least, wake up and enjoy our morning coffee with the expectation that genocide and nuclear war are briefly off the menu.

“Stay tuned,” as Trump would say about his ongoing reality show. No one can control the president’s natural proclivity to improvise, conflate, misstate and create fiction to sell his story; the circumstances are constantly changing due to the disasters he creates when he improvises.

There is renewed talk of implementing the 25th Amendment and removing Trump from office — especially among Democrats who can’t do it. Forget it. Vance remains firmly aligned with the president, as does every member of the Cabinet and most Republicans on Capitol Hill. Democrats are stuck in a fever dream if they think someone within the Cabinet is going to invoke the 25th.

Trump’s Cabinet has invoked the “madman” theory from Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War to explain his increasingly unhinged behavior — the idea being that, if you appear crazy, your enemy might agree to more favorable terms at the negotiating table. It didn’t work for Nixon, and it shows no signs of working for Trump. But what else can his people say since they continue to defend him? “He’s not crazy, he only pretends to be” isn’t a viable defense in the real world. But it’s all they got.

There are occasional cries of impeachment in the Senate and House. Those brave Republican souls who valiantly oppose Trump privately while praising him publicly are among the loudest to scream into a pillow that he should be impeached. But so far, House Speaker Mike Johnson still controls his razor-thin majority. That is expected to change after the midterms, and if the Democrats don’t successfully snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, they may find themselves with a working majority in the House next year. Many, including the president, have predicted he will then be impeached. 

Maybe the third time will be a charm. But even if the Democrats control the Senate, they’ll need their Republican colleagues to convict Trump. At this point, that is a long shot. Then again, the war in Iran, congressional retirements, anger with Trump and general discontent on health care, education, affordability and other issues are making the political landscape extremely volatile. Conceivably, Trump could be removed from office in early 2027. Whoever is given the job of informing him of that had better take a handful of sedatives and a crowbar to pry the president off the wall of the Oval Office.

As horrible as Trump is, and as increasingly desperate as he becomes, there simply isn’t a procedural way to quickly remove the president from office. Since there isn’t a “recall election” clause in the Constitution, impeachment remains the best method by which we can rid ourselves of Trump. We just don’t have a Congress willing to do it. 

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Outside of the structural ways to remove him, there is also constant speculation about the president dying in office. His bruised hands, slurred and slowed speech, nodding off in meetings, lack of public appearances and constant spouting of gibberish, coupled with his violent threats, have many speaking about him the way Trump once referred to his predecessor as “Sleepy Joe.” Since the actuary table isn’t kind to people of Trump’s age, there’s nothing necessarily nefarious in this speculation. 

But it all gets us nowhere.

The only real response to Trump is to demand that members of Congress show some backbone. While that also currently remains a pipe dream, we can take some solace in the fact that the president’s historic appearance before the Supreme Court last week wasn’t the intimidating event Trump hoped it would be. He left the oral arguments over birthright citizenship early, as if he were Charlie Brown and Chief Justice John Roberts were Lucy yanking the football away from him at the last second.

While the judiciary has sided with him on occasion, it remains the only independent branch of government standing. Trump may think he’s a god, but so do judges — and they outlast presidents.

We also need to be careful of what we wish for. Those demanding Trump’s ouster should look at the insurance policy Trump has put into place — the vice president. You may not like Trump, but even fewer like his veep. Vance said last week that Iran was engaged in acts of “economic terrorism” that apparently qualified them to be a target of genocide. In a Tuesday speech in Hungary, where he had traveled to support President Viktor Orbán ahead of this weekend’s elections, he didn’t deny nuclear weapons could be involved in Trump’s threat to destroy Iran, and he even cryptically referenced unused weapons in the military’s tool box. 

So Vance is not an improvement over Trump. There are a growing number of Republicans who say that anyone who believes UFOs are demons, as Vance recently claimed, may not have passed the cognitive test Trump brags about acing.

With limited options for holding Trump accountable, the United States and the rest of the world  continue to suffer — and will do so at least until the midterms. This is the frightening but honest reality, especially as the president’s downward spiral accelerates and as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continues to fire generals who won’t do his bidding. Our allies are upset, our enemies are smiling and the world is holding its breath.

Those who continue hoping for sanity think that just one more violent public outburst from the president hinting at the horror of a nuclear conflagration and genocide will cause the only-brave-in-private Republicans to get off their political posteriors and remove Trump before he completely destroys humanity.

But I am not holding my breath.