The American political landscape has always resembled a dumpster fire viewed through a kaleidoscope, but the current iteration—the triumphant, golden-hued return of the forty-fifth-now-forty-seventh president—has reached a level of recursive absurdity that would make Camus weep into his absinthe. According to the latest data points harvested from the fever dreams of the American public, Donald Trump’s approval rating has begun its inevitable, gravity-defying descent. It turns out that the honeymoon period of a second non-consecutive term is roughly as romantic as a colonoscopy performed in a parking lot. This is not a development that should surprise anyone with a pulse, yet here we are, pretending that the fickleness of the lobotomized electorate is a breaking news event.

The crux of the matter, if we are to believe the frantic scribblings of the pollsters, is that Trump’s key political strengths have miraculously transformed into his weaknesses. This is news to no one with a functioning frontal lobe. The very traits that his disciples once described as authenticity and strength are now being perceived by the exhausted middle as incoherent rambling and tiring incompetence. It is the classic trajectory of the populist grift: the louder you scream that the house is on fire, the more people expect you to actually have a bucket of water. When it becomes clear that you only intended to use the flames to toast your own marshmallows, the audience tends to get a bit surly. The strength of being a political outsider is difficult to maintain when you are literally the person sitting in the Oval Office for the second time, fumbling the same levers of power you previously claimed were rigged against you.

Of course, the professional mourners of the Left are already dancing in the streets, as if a dip in a poll is equivalent to a moral victory. They remain trapped in their own loop of performative outrage, clutching their copies of the Constitution as if it were a magical talisman that might actually do something if they just wish hard enough. Their inability to provide a coherent alternative to the orange-hued chaos is exactly why we are in this position in the first place. They are the wet blanket that forgot to bring the actual blanket, standing in the rain and complaining about the dampness. They thrive on his presence because it gives their aimless existence a villain to point at, yet they are shocked when the dragon they keep poking refuses to turn into a diplomat.

Meanwhile, the Right is discovering that the no-nonsense approach they championed is, in reality, a no-governance approach. The shock that a man who spent his entire life building gilded monuments to his own ego might not be interested in the minutiae of bureaucratic efficiency or the stabilization of markets is the kind of revelation that only visits the truly dim-witted. They bought the ticket, they took the ride, and now they’re complaining that the roller coaster doesn't have a safety harness and the operator is screaming at the clouds. The cognitive dissonance required to maintain support for a leader whose primary policy is chaos is finally starting to crack under the weight of actual, lived reality.

The polling dip is not a sign of a burgeoning national intelligence. It is merely a sign of sensory adaptation. Much like a man living next to a sewage treatment plant eventually stops smelling the stench, the American voter has become desaturated. The strength of a politician who breaks things is only appealing when you think they’re breaking things you don't like. When you realize they’re just breaking things because they enjoy the sound of shattering glass, the novelty wears off. The strengths—the belligerence, the refusal to admit error, the constant warfare with reality—are now the very anchors dragging the administration into the murky depths of disapproval. The voters wanted a disruptor, but they are slowly realizing that a disrupted grocery bill is less fun than a disrupted press conference.

But let us not pretend that disapproval means change. In the grand, rotting theater of American democracy, a polling hit is just a plot twist in a soap opera that has been running for too many seasons. The writers are lazy, the actors are overacting, and the audience is only still watching because the remote is out of reach and they’ve forgotten how to stand up. We are witnessing the slow-motion collision of a man who cannot change and a public that expects him to, despite all evidence to the contrary. It is a tragedy played for laughs by a cast of characters who aren't in on the joke. As the year grinds on, we can expect the usual cycle: a desperate pivot to a new grievance, a manufactured crisis to distract from the sagging numbers, and a media apparatus that treats every fluctuation of two percent as a tectonic shift in human history. It is a wearying display of intellectual bankruptcy from everyone involved. The polls will go down, the polls will go up, and the fundamental rot at the core of the system will continue to fester, unbothered by the opinions of a public that couldn't find its own interests with a map and a flashlight.