Trump Is Already Losing - Violence Would Canonise Him.

How one act of violence could erase a year of damage and turn failure into martyrdom

Apropos of nothing in particular in the news today, I thought I’d do a bit of a round-up on the impact Donald Trump has had on the world since coming into power in January with his brand new coterie of sycophants, enablers and yes men and women.

How decisions made by an orange-tinged, near-80-year-old man with dwindling power (and wits) may just move people to become pissed off enough to do some very idiotic things.

Now, I say apropos of nothing right at the top, but everyone will already know why I’m writing this piece today - and many of you will have had the same thoughts waking up to the multiple BBC notifications blinking on your mobile phone this morning.

Because it happened again.

Last night at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, there was, what may or may not be - another attempt on Donald J. Trump’s life. The details are still making their way through the news cycle, and the full picture will take some time to put together, but needless to say, there was an “incident.”

If it was another attempt, however, then let me be absolutely crystal clear about something:

The assassination of Donald J Trump would have been utterly catastrophic.

Not for the reasons Trump’s supporters would claim, nor in the way his enemies might privately calculate. It would have been catastrophic because there is almost nothing more perfectly designed to do a full resuscitation on his administration’s legacy, energise its base, and hand the MAGA movement a martyr that would even further radicalise them into madness.

Think about it for a moment.

Donald Trump’s approval numbers are in freefall. Consumer sentiment is at a 74-year low. The people who voted for economic competence are watching their grocery bills rise and their retirement funds stall. The coalition is fraying. And then - an assassination attempt.

Overnight, every legitimate grievance becomes noise. Every protest becomes suspect. Every critic becomes, in the telling of the movement, complicit in a culture of violence. The man who has done more damage to American institutions, global alliances, and the world’s most vulnerable people than any president in the modern era would be transformed, instantly, into a symbol - a saint, even, in the church of grievance politics.

It would be the greatest gift anyone could give him - and whoever considered giving it to him, is either a fool, a plant, or someone who has thought about this so little that they deserve the full contempt of everyone who actually wants things to change.

With that all said, however, let’s talk about why the fury exists - because the fury is legitimate, even if last night’s alleged expression of it was not.

We are fifteen months into this administration, and the scale of what has happened is so vast, so relentless, and so deliberately disorienting that most of us - even those of us who professionally or semi-professionally track it - have genuinely struggled to keep up.

Every week brings a new outrage. A new policy reversal. A new set of smokescreens designed to protect one man and one man alone. A new White House tweet about dismantling some federal agency that quietly kept things working.

By the time you’ve processed Tuesday, Thursday has already happened. This is, of course, not accidental - the Trump administration have become masters at “flooding the zone”.

That doesn’t mean that people aren’t holding a tally, and good god, that tally is rising rapidly - with the most obvious place for Americans being with the shelves and the bills.

The average American household is now expected to pay approximately $1,000 to $1,500 more per year as a direct result of Trump’s tariff regime. That’s the average. For lower-income families who spend more of their income on goods rather than services, the number is worse. Beef is up 16% since January 2025. Coffee - the one thing people are clinging to as a comfort in dark times - is up nearly 20%.

Nearly 40,000 supermarket products are affected, either directly or through the cascading effect of higher input costs across supply chains. Trump, ever helpfully, spent much of 2025 assuring Americans that grocery prices were “going rapidly down.” Except that they were not - and even his own Agriculture Department said so.

Consumer sentiment hit an all-time low in April 2026. And just to clarify, that’s not a pandemic low, or a since 2008 low - it’s the lowest in the survey’s entire 74-year history, with three of the worst readings ever recorded have all occurred in the past nine months. The auto industry, meanwhile, has been gutted by the very tariffs designed to protect it. Ford reported an $8.2 billion loss. Workers the policy was supposed to save lost their jobs anyway. You can almost hear the logic completing its own circle.

While the tariff wars dominated headlines, something even more insidious and destructive was happening inside the machinery of American government. The Department of Government Efficiency - which is neither a department, nor particularly efficient, nor in any meaningful sense about government - set about cutting the federal workforce with the enthusiasm of someone who has never had to call the Social Security Administration on behalf of an elderly parent. The SSA was already at a 25-year staffing low. DOGE cut it further. Field offices closed. Phone lines went unanswered.

As of mid-2025, nearly one million people were waiting for disability benefit decisions. In 2023 alone, 30,000 people died while waiting for those same decisions. You do not need to be a statistician to work out the trajectory. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - which had quietly returned $26 billion to ordinary Americans cheated by banks and payday lenders since 2011 - was effectively shuttered. The CDC lost 10% of its workforce in a single day. The NIH received a proposed budget cut of $48 billion. Cancer research. HIV prevention. Clinical trials. Cancelled. A scientist quoted last December described it as “a huge rupture in everything.”

They were not being melodramatic.

The impact, as anyone outside of the United States knows, has also not been isolated to just America - it has been global.

On his first day back in office, Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organisation - its single largest donor, gone. He shut down USAID and terminated 90% of its programming. HIV treatment clinics in South Africa closed overnight. Malnutrition programmes across Africa and Asia stopped without warning. By early 2026, tracking models estimated that over 750,000 people - the majority of them children - had already died as a direct result of the aid funding cuts. That is 88 deaths every hour.

A Lancet study published in February 2026 projected that if current trajectories continue, at least 9.4 million additional deaths could occur by 2030. A child under five, according to Oxfam’s modelling, could die every forty seconds by that point. The initial White House response was that “no one has died because of USAID cuts.”

This is not a claim that is holding up to even the lightest of scrutiny.

The problem we have is that these numbers are so large they become abstract, but they describe real people. People who were alive in January 2025 and are not now, because a government on the other side of the planet decided that foreign aid was an indulgence it could no longer be bothered with.

Here in the UK, the experience has been different. Not catastrophic, but thoroughly, persistently unpleasant. The Special Relationship - that grand transatlantic fiction we’ve been polishing for 80 years - has taken a battering. Keir Starmer did his patient, careful, undignified best to remain on good terms with Washington. He was rewarded with a trade deal that reduced some tariffs while the US continued to treat the UK largely as a minor inconvenience in its broader economic war.

Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s emotional support billionaire at the time, spent chunks of 2025 opining about British domestic politics on his own platform in ways the Home Secretary and Prime Minister found it necessary to formally rebuke. The Iran war - which the UK had absolutely no role in starting - is now projected by the IMF to hit the British economy harder than any other major developed nation. 2026 growth revised down to 0.8%.

British households are experiencing what commentators have taken to calling “Trumpflation.” Energy bills. Food costs. Mortgage rates. All of these rapidly rising in the wake of a conflict Britain didn’t choose, driven by an oil price spike Britain can’t control. Around 25,000 UK jobs are at risk from tariffs on car imports alone. Aston Martin has already announced cuts. The irony - that a president who promised to put America First is managing to also put Britain Last - would be funnier if it weren’t costing people money they don’t have.

None of this is surprising if you were paying attention - the project was never hidden. The tariffs, dismantling of federal agencies, retreat from alliances and the abandonment of the world’s most vulnerable. Every single one of these were in the platform, the cabinet appointments and the rhetoric. People were warned - loudly and repeatedly.

No one should be surprised at the level of feeling, the protests and the outright fury. The sense, spreading across continents, that something profoundly wrong is happening. What we should also not be surprised by - and what last night, if the reports are accurate, illustrates with grim clarity - is that a small number of people will eventually decide that fury is not enough and that they should take matters into their own hands.

They will be wrong. They will be catastrophically, strategically, morally wrong.

Because the one thing that Donald Trump’s second term has not yet managed to produce is a unifying myth - a successful attempt on his life would hand him one. Fully formed. Wrapped in a flag. Ready for the history books he’s been angling to rewrite since the moment he came down that escalator.

The world is watching and keeping score, and the only reckoning that will actually matter is the one that arrives through ballots, through courts, and through the slow, grinding work of holding power to account.

Anything else just makes him stronger.