THE RUBES WON'T REALIZE THEY'RE GULLED ANYTIME SOON

Yastreblyansky agrees with The New Yorker's Adam Davidson that we're in the end stages of the Trump presidency. He doesn't think impeachment is coming any time soon, even after what he expects to be an "extremely damning" report from Robert Mueller on obstruction of justice. But he does expect there to be a steady decline in Tump voters' enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, the figure of Trump himself gets less and less impressive, as we've seen this week from the ridiculousness-cum-criminality of Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke and above all Cohen the feared gangster, with his implosion and defeat by Kimba Wood and WTF Hannity?!??!; after who knows what foreign policy failures, and no Wall, no Muslim Ban, no transgender ban, troops in Syria, the tax law incomprehensible but people notice they're not rich, and the coal industry dying, and NAFTA renegotiated in a way that nobody can differentiate from the way it used to be and talk about the TPP as well and we're talking 2006, the year after Katrina and the evident failure of the Iraq campaign to accomplish anything, and the clarity with which the entirely population was beginning to see the hollowness of W Bush. Trump's base still won't desert him, exactly, no doubt, but there will be discouragement in the ranks, diminished expectations, weeping Alex Joneses, fewer interviews with The New York Times, and their turnout will be very bad.

I don't see it -- not before the midterms, and probably not for a couple of years after that.

I've believed for a while that the deplorables will lose faith in Trump eventually, but it will take about as long as it took George W. Bush's voters to lose faith in him -- about six years. Yes, I know -- that means only after Trump is (God help us) reelected (something I still think is possible no matter what Mueller turns up). I certainly don't think disillusionment among Trump voters will settle in before this November.

The economy isn't weak. White kids from red America (mostly) aren't dying (or being humiliated) in a futile war. The coal industry isn't dying any faster than it was pre-Trump. There's been no effort (yet) to privatize Social Security and Medicare. The front-loaded tax cuts for the hoi polloi won't turn into tax increases for years.

Also, Trump hasn't run for reelection yet. Part of what makes right-wing voters rally around their heroes is the joy of elections -- they may think that what they want is a set of policies, but what they want even more is just to watch their heroes kick our asses at the ballot box, something they're certain Trump will do again. After the fall and capture of Saddam Hussein, there wasn't much that Bush could do for Republican voters except humiliate a Democrat in an election; following that, it was all downhill for him. No matter how disappointed the deplorables are with Trump, he still offers them the hope of another round of liberal tears in November 2020. Remember that they think no electoral victory ever induced more of those tears than Trump's win in 2016. They absolutely won't forgo the possibility of a repeat, even if Democrats rout Republicans this year. (If a rout happens, it'll be blamed on GOP candidates who are insufficiently Trumpesque -- the base will never believe it was Trump's fault.)

It's possible that a massive rout by the Democrats plus evidence of blatant criminality from Mueller will change the calculus. (This assumes that Mueller will get to finish his work, when it's not at all clear he'll even survive this week.) It could happen -- but it's not going to change the Trump diehards' minds. It might tell Republican officeholders that being a Trump end-timer is politically perilous. (Right now they think it's perilous for them not to be loyal to Trump.) But I believe Trump voters aren't going anywhere -- not until a second term, if there is one.