Are we witnessing the fall of Donald Trump?

Every now and then Lord Acton’s line about power corrupting strolls back into relevance with unnerving ease. Watching Donald Trump is one of those moments.

This is a man who, separate to politics has fascinated me in his clever rhetoric, his ever prevalent use of the tricolon, spatial psychology, open-trustworthy posture,  gestures and multiple methods for captivating an audience. Today, however, his hyperbolae, his twisted facts, unusual faces and postures as well as his extraordinary noises depicting the bombing like a fun computer game is unequalled in the educated world. I recalibrate and hear my mother's voice reverberating: “It’s all funny until someone cries”.

At first glance, there are signs of political weakening. Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 36 per cent, according to Reuters/Ipsos, his lowest since returning to office. On the economy, the numbers are worse still. Only 29 per cent approve of his stewardship, and just 25 per cent approve of his handling of the cost of living. In a normal political environment, those figures would set off panic in the party room, the donor class and the more excitable corners of cable television. 

But this is precisely the problem: we are still analysing Trump as though he were operating in a normal political environment.

He is not.

What Trump has built is not merely a political following. It is increasingly a cult of personality. Not necessarily in the theological or sociological sense that sends everyone reaching for a documentary narrator and a candlelit compound, but in the political sense: a movement in which loyalty to the leader outruns loyalty to fact, policy, institution or even self-interest. Reuters reported during the Republican National Convention that even delegates who rejected the word “cult” nevertheless conceded their party had become “the party of Trump”. 

Another Reuters report found that after the assassination attempt in 2024, many supporters interpreted his survival in overtly providential terms, with delegates describing him as protected by God and uniquely chosen for the task. 

That matters, because once politics becomes identity, facts stop doing the heavy lifting.

Political psychology has been telling us this for years. The identity-based model of political belief argues that social identity goals can override accuracy goals. In plain English: people do not always absorb information in order to be right; they often absorb it in order to remain loyal to the tribe they believe keeps them safe, seen and significant. When that happens, contradiction does not weaken allegiance. It can strengthen it. Correction is experienced not as help, but as hostility. 

This is why the standard anti-Trump playbook so often looks faintly ridiculous. One more scandal. One more lie. One more country to overthrow. One more piece of evidence lovingly carried to the public square like a sacred spreadsheet. And still the devotion holds. It is rather like bringing a compliance manual to a revival meeting. Technically impressive, spiritually useless.

The more serious mistake is to assume that only the gullible fall for this sort of thing. They do not. Harvard researchers have made the point plainly: there is no evidence that education is much of a shield against cultic dynamics. Successful, empowered and highly educated people can be drawn in too. That should be sobering for the professional classes, who are forever comforted by the fiction that irrational devotion is what happens to other people in other suburbs. 

Nor does a deteriorating public mood necessarily loosen the grip. Gallup’s latest data show that, for the first time since it began measuring the life evaluation of the American workforce, more workers are struggling than thriving. That is not a small detail. It is the emotional weather. People under pressure do not always seek nuance. They seek certainty, belonging and a rescuer who tells them their fear has a face and their anger has a home. 

This is where Trump has always been more gifted than many of his critics care to admit. He has long understood the theatre of power: the posture, the repetition, the reduction of complexity into grievance, the framing of himself as both victim and saviour. And above all,  his divine right to be ‘right’. One need not admire the performance to recognise its technique.

Stanford Professor Deborah Gruenfeld, tells is internal regulators that hold most of us back from bold or bad behaviour diminish or disappear with power. When people feel powerful, they stop trying to 'control themselves.'

Trump has hit the “loose control” button. That is what power often does. It lowers inhibition, strips out restraint and rewards spectacle. The problem is no longer simply the man. It is the audience that has fused its identity to him. 

And that is why the question is not merely whether Trump is falling.

He may be stumbling. The polls suggest as much. The economic pain is real. 

Voter unease is growing. Yet Reuters also reports that 74 per cent of Republicans backed the Iran strikes even as his national approval slid. That is the point. A conventional leader can be damaged by events. A cult figure is buffered by devotion. The broader electorate may recoil while the faithful lean in harder. 

So are we witnessing the fall of Donald Trump?

Perhaps. But that may be the less important question.

The more important one is whether America is confronting the fact that this is no longer just about one politician with too much ego and too little inhibition. It is about a movement that behaves like a belief system, protects its leader from normal consequences and treats contradiction as persecution.

That is a harder thing to break.

Politicians can stumble. Parties can regroup. Markets can recover. Even reputations, maddeningly, can be laundered with time.

Cults, however, do not collapse because outsiders make better arguments. They collapse when the spell is broken from within.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Love,

Dr Louise Mahler