Trump Ripped for Pursuing ‘Stupid, Irrelevant Indulgences’ in Scathing National Review Column: Voters Don’t Care About MAGA ‘Side Quests’

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

President Donald Trump “is at risk of blowing his second term before it has hit the two-month mark,” wrote National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke to kick off his latest column about the president’s hectic last few weeks, criticizing him for getting distracted by “stupid, irrelevant indulgences” instead of the core issues that led voters to re-elect him.

“Does Trump Know Why He Was Elected?” asks the headline of the column. According to Cooke, no one except “a handful of terminally online zealots who do more harm than good to their side” is on board for these “presidential side quests” like Trump’s “chaotic, capricious, contradictory tariff agenda.”

Trump, wrote Cooke, risked repeating the mistakes of his predecessor, President Joe Biden, by forgetting that “neither social media nor the activists who dominate it are representative of real life” and neglecting to start his term with “quick wins” to “gain the trust and support of the public by yielding stability.”

The party controlling the White House had changed, explained Cooke, but what remained true was that voters don’t care about the “preoccupations, presumptions, and put-downs” of the MAGA movement, such as “Canada becoming the 51st state, the purchase of Greenland, how people currently perceive Tesla, the ‘Gulf of America,’ the real or imagined infractions of random legislators, the grudges and conspiracy theories of Truth Social users.”

” The public wants the economy humming, the border secure, an end to the illiberal lunacy that was wokeism,” wrote Cooke, denouncing Trump’s agenda thus far as “all stupid, irrelevant indulgences.”

The tariffs were unpopular, Cooke noted, and voters’ economic anxieties would not be assuaged by arguing that Trump had a brilliant plan or trying to dismissively insult them as “globalists,” “billionaires,” or “elites.”

“The people who voted Donald Trump back into office wanted him to bring back 2019,” argued Cooke. “They did not sign up for a trade war with Canada, the resurrection of William McKinley, or an endless game of red light/green light that tanks their 401(k) and makes it harder for their kids to buy a house.”

Read Cooke’s column at National Review.