Jamelle Bouie is a regular opinion columnist for The New York Times. He is an original thinker. He doesn’t run with the pundit crowd. I subscribe to his newsletter as part of my New York Times subscription.

I am grateful for his reminder that the party in power usually loses seats in the midterm. If that happens in 2026, Trump’s ability to do crazy things will be limited. But he does have time in the coming year to deliver another tax cut for billionaires.

He writes:

The annals of American political history are littered with the remains of once-great presidential mandates.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s smashing 1936 re-election did not, to give a famous example, give him the leverage he needed to expand the Supreme Court, handing his White House a painful defeat. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society generated immense conservative opposition, and his momentum could not survive the 1966 Republican wave. Ronald Reagan was stymied by Democratic gains in the first midterm elections of his presidency. Bill Clinton was famously cut down to size by the Newt Gingrich revolution of 1994. And Barack Obama was shellacked by Tea Party extremists in 2010.

“I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” George W. Bush declared in 2004 after he became the first Republican to win re-election with a majority of the popular vote since Reagan. By the summer of 2005, Bush’s approval had crashed on the shoals of a failed effort to privatize Social Security. In the next year’s elections, Republicans lost control of Congress.

There is no evidence that Donald Trump is immune to this dynamic. Just the opposite: His first term was a case study in the perils of presidential ambition. Not only were his most expansive plans met with swift opposition, but also it is fair to say that he failed, flailed and faltered through the first two years of his administration, culminating in a disastrous midterm defeat.

Trump has even bigger plans for his second term: mass deportations, across-the-board tariffs and a campaign of terror and intimidation directed at his political enemies. To win election, however, he promised something a bit more modest: that he would substantially lower the cost of living. According to Sam Woodward in USA Today:

“Prices will come down,” Trump also told rallygoers during a speech in August. “You just watch. They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.”

Now Trump says this might not be possible. Asked by Time magazine if he thinks his presidency would be a failure if the price of groceries did not come down, he said: “I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”

At the same time that Trump won’t commit to a key promise of his campaign, he is gearing up to deliver on mass deportations, a policy position that many voters seem to treat as just blather.

When you take all of this together with policies — such as large tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China — that are more likely to increase than lower the costs of most goods and services, you have a recipe for exactly the kind of backlash that eventually hobbles most occupants of the Oval Office.

The American public is exceptionally fickle and prone to sharp reactions against whoever occupies the White House. It wants change but continuity, for things to go in a new direction but to stay mostly the same. It does not always reward good policy, but it usually punishes broken promises and perceived radicalism from either party.

Ignore for a moment the high likelihood of chaos and dysfunction from a Trump administration staffed with dilettantes, ideologues and former TV personalities. It appears that what Trump intends to do, come January, is break his most popular promises and embrace the most radical parts of his agenda.

I can’t end this without conceding the real possibility that the basic feedback mechanisms of American politics are broken. It is possible that none of this matters and that voters will reward Trump — or at least not punish him — regardless of what he does. It’s a reasonable view, given the reality of the present situation.

And yet the 2024 presidential election was a close contest. The voting public is almost equally divided between the two parties, so Trump has little room for error if he hopes to impose his will on the federal government and make his plans reality.

If Americans are as fickle as they’ve been, then Trump’s second honeymoon might be over even before it really begins.