Anything seemed possible.

Nineteen months later, as the strange and desperate Republican “midterm convention” in Texas recedes into an odd historical footnote and Democrats dominate midterm polling, it’s a harsh reminder never to get too low or too high in this business.

Exactly how far has Trump fallen? From the heights of his resplendent inauguration in the Capitol Rotunda to the pits of bribing Republican voters with scam $5,000 “dividend checks” to turn out for the midterm elections and rescue what remains of his agenda.

The bribe offer — there is no other way to describe a monetary offer in exchange for a political act — is the exclamation point on what has become a rotten second term. Sure, Trump has notched some wins: securing the border, removing Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro without sacrificing a single American soldier, and passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

But the people who put him back in the White House wanted cheaper groceries and an orderly country. They got neither. And every time Trump says “greatest ever” or “you’ve never seen anything like it,” the picture looks bleaker.

We’ll start with the obvious: The centerpiece of Trump’s economic program, his tariff regime, has failed to deliver what it promised. Manufacturing output has indeed picked up — in the sectors facing the lowest tariff rates, not the ones tariffs were meant to rescue. But the tariffs succeeded in making life less affordable for voters. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis found American consumers and companies were absorbing nearly 90% of the tariff costs, and the Tax Foundation put the hit at roughly a $1,000 tax increase for the average household.

Voters noticed. A new Fox News poll shows that 63% of registered voters believe the administration has made the economy worse, not better, including a quarter of Republicans.

Pushing this inflationary policy at a time when taming inflation was the top voter priority will go down in the annals of political self-sabotage. America rehired Trump to bring down the cost of living, and his policies, including the war in Iran — more on that later — have had the opposite effect. Trump’s admonishment of the term “affordability,” as well as his fixation on ballrooms and monuments to himself, compounds the political problem. Let them eat arches!

When the Supreme Court ruled he lacked the authority to impose his tariff regime, Trump was given a clean out. But instead of moving on from the failed policy, he replaced those tariffs with a somewhat less inflationary flat surcharge.

Then, four days later, he launched an air war in Iran, which sent the price of oil spiking, driving the economy into another affordability death spiral.

That’s not to say the war was unjustified — I’m on record repeatedly arguing that it was and that keeping nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands would have been worth the economic pain and then some. But Trump’s leadership deficit, especially his unwillingness to explain the war to the public and then do what was necessary to win on the battlefield, prevented victory of both the military and political kind.

In place of resolve and statesmanship, Trump alternated between a psychopathic social media persona, making genocidal threats about wiping out Iran’s “whole civilization,” and an eager deal-maker, easily strung along by the shrewder negotiators in Tehran. The result is a war that has drifted into its seventh month and will likely last through his term.

What has Trump lost in the meantime? He’s lost the public, which never understood what it was being asked to endure. He’s lost the argument inside his own party, where the restrainers, including his own vice president, now speak with the confidence of people who were proven right. And he’s lost the initiative in the theater itself. The sanctions campaign Operation Economic Outcast has inflicted real damage on the regime, but Tehran only needs to outlast the Trump administration, not defeat it.

And the regime has a high tolerance for pain — far higher than Trump’s, who wavers by the hour, relentlessly bulls***ting about the other side “begging for a deal.”

Meanwhile, American munitions stockpiles have been dangerously depleted, leaving less in reserve for China in Taiwan or Russia in Estonia. American military deterrence, which Trump spent the first year of his second term powerfully reestablishing, has crumbled.

Perhaps what Trump has lost in Iran above all is the privilege of being taken seriously.

On immigration, where Trump can boast his only unqualified success with the border, his botched deportation efforts wrecked the public’s confidence in the government’s ability to restore order. Public approval of Trump’s handling of immigration plummeted after the chaos in Minneapolis and never recovered. The amateurs, hacks, and crooks running the Department of Homeland Security squandered the agency’s legitimacy by insisting that Alex Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement” the day he was shot to death.

The mismanagement of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was compounded by hideous communications from the White House, which spent 19 months reinforcing the Democratic caricature of pro-enforcement Republicans as heartless and sinister. This included a retro video game on the White House website called “Rio Run,” in which players control a suited white man rounding up brown-skinned people. A deputy assistant to the president described the video game initiative as “policy you can interact with.”

It will be many years before voters trust Washington to carry out a deportation program again. And why would they? Whatever one thinks of deportation as policy, it is the forcible removal of human persons — not a game, not a “based” joke. It is a grave matter. People instinctively distrust those who make light of it.

There is a universe in which the public’s vindication of Trump humbled him and magnified his virtues. Where he repaid supporters with bold governance, yes — but also prudent and honorable governance. But that is not the universe we live in.

No, we live in the universe where Trump regularly throws tantrums over having his name on the Kennedy Center and fixates on reflecting pools. Where he mocks his dead adversaries before their bodies are cold — even those allegedly murdered by their own son. Where he sells early access to his social media posts so that rich people can become richer on betting markets.

Where the president offers $5,000 a head for a midterm vote. That’s our universe.

TRUMP SEEN READING PLANS FOR KENNEDY CENTER ‘DEMOLITION’

Meanwhile, the same Democrats who danced the electric slide and torched Teslas never learned the lesson of 2024. Trump made it unnecessary. Now they’re winning for free.

What a shame.