TL;DR Not good. Taking account of economic failure, nothing Trump has done – rape, war crimes, corruption, insurrection, ICE or trashing the constitution – has cost him a single vote on balance.

In  a flowchart prepared before the 2024 election, I gave US democracy a 30 per cent chance of surviving a Trump election win. This was broken down as 10 per cent that Trump would govern constitutionally, 10 per cent that the Supreme Court would stop him and 10 per cent that he would face effective popular resistance. Obviously, the first of these didn’t happen. And while the Supreme Court has occasionally ruled against Trump, it has more helped him by overturning lower court judgements.

That leaves popular resistance, including both the public as a whole and institutions like the media, law firms, big business and universities. The level of acquiescence, or outright collaboration from the institutions, with the partial exception of universities, has exceeded my most pessimistic expectations. For me, as a lifelong Apple fan, the sight of CEO Tim Cook fawning over Trump while he handed over protection money was particularly galling, but Wall Street and Big Law have been just as bad

As regards the public at large, optimists have taken heart from the fact that Trump’s popularity has dropped sharply from the 49 per cent he won at the 2025 election. But the drop is about what would be expected for a president of either party who ran on a promise of lower prices and failed to deliver. Trump’s decline almost exactly parallels Joe Biden’s, as well as Trump’s own first term

Putting this as sharply as possible, once you take account of economic performance, nothing else Trump has done – rape, war crimes, corruption, insurrection, megalomania, secret police or trashing the constitution – has cost him a single vote on balance. An issue-by-issue analysis for The Economist supports this. Trump is deep underwater on the issue of inflation, but has barely lost any ground on national security and immigration since the election. And his support among Republicans remains rock solid.

The big problem Trump faces in 2026 is that of the mid-term elections to be held in November. Under normal circumstances, the party of a relatively unpopular incumbent would lose. And this would set the stage for the successor to a term-limited incumbent to be defeated in the subsequent presidential election. The incumbent would then retire to write his memoirs, give speaking tours etc.

But it’s obvious that a Democratic presidency with control of Congress would put Trump and his cronies in grave danger. Even if Trump could not be criminally prosecuted, and even with liberal use of the pardon power, he would surely be subject to civil actions of all kinds and state-level prosecutions which (hopefully) would not be bungled. The problems for cronies would be even greater.

For that reason, it’s highly unlikely that Trump will willingly accept a mid-term defeat. Can he prevent it? His first attempt to stop the outcome, taking gerrymandering to extremes, proved counterproductive when California Democrats responded in kind. And it’s unlikely that the usual long-standing forms of voter discouragement will be enough to change the outcome. That leaves two possibilities: forcible suppression using ICE or military forces, and annulment of results.

Trump somewhat botched the first option with his order of troops into US cities, which achieved nothing and undercut any basis for invoking the Insurrection Act. Even the Supreme Court rejected his attempts to establish control over state-level national guards against the wishes of governors. But there are still plenty of possibilities. For example, ICE could be mobilised to arrest Hispanic voters on the suspicion of being illegal immigrants and detaining them long enough to stop votes being cast. Or mail-in ballots could be seized and destroyed on some pretext or other.

Alternatively, Trump could direct Republican officials to “find” the necessary votes to deliver the desired outcome in close contests, as he tried to do in Georgia in 2020. While Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger resisted that time, it’s doubtful that many Republican officials would do so now.

Finally, the current speaker Mike Johnson could seat Republican losers in place of elected Democrats. The only limit here is the willingness of the House of Representatives to countenance such an action. With a slim majority in the existing House, there would be a risk of defection.

Looking at this, it struck me that Trump could make Johnson’s task easier by detaining enough Democrats to ensure the vote went the right way. When I searched on whether this was possible, I received the reassuring answer that members of Congress are protected by privilege and that arresting them would be a felony, “except in cases of treason, felony or breach of the peace”. The last of these exceptions seems broad enough to drive a truck through. And, when I asked what remedy was available, the first answer was “impeachment”, which was grimly amusing. More promising options are actions under habeas corpus, but as recent cases of arbitrary arrest have shown, the government can drag its feet over such actions for a long time.

Successful suppression of the voters’ will in the mid-terms would clearly mark the transition of the US from democracy to dictatorship. A “normal” election or successful resistance to suppression would allow some breathing space, but would still imply an uphill battle for the remainder of Trump’s (current) term.

Overall, I’d say that the probability of US democracy surviving past 2028 is a little better than the 10 per cent implied by by my 2024 flowchart, but still well below 50-50.

Best wishes for the New Year

This came out in The Conversation, a while ago, but I didn’t get around to posting it here. I’m posting my original version, which includes a discussion of vapes

Few Australians can have failed to notice the proliferation of tobacconists and “convenience stores” in the last few years. And most of us are aware that these stores aren’t making much from the limited set of offerings on public display. Rather, their profitability comes from under-the-counter sales of untaxed tobacco and illegal vapes.

The growth of illegal tobacco sales has reached the point where the national accounts produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics have been significantly distorted. The ABS has announced that it is taking steps to “measure the consumption of illicit nicotine related products to supplement existing measurement. ”

Before looking at how this decision will affect the national accounts, it’s worth asking how we got here. The short answer is that, over the past decade or so, tobacco excise has been steadily increased to the point where there are big profits to be made from dodging the tax.

But that’s not the whole story. Taxes on spirits have also been raised substantially, yet we haven’t seen a return of the “sly grog” shops that were common in Australia until the 1960s, when 6pm closing of pubs was abolished. And despite heavy taxes on gambling, illegal casinos seem to be a thing of the past.

What explains this difference? The sale of alcohol and gambling services is subject to licensing restrictions, managed by state authorities and enforced by police specifically allocated to these duties. By contrast, until very recently, nicotine products have been treated as normal grocery items. Enforcement has been left to health inspectors with many other duties and very limited powers. A store found to be selling illegal cigarettes might get a warning, or at worst, a 24-hour closure.

The Australian Taxation Office, along with the Australian Border Force, makes serious efforts to prevent illegal importation of tobacco products as well as seizing tobacco crops grown here. But it appears unable or unwilling to do much against retailers who sell cigarettes under the counter.

State police forces have been similarly unwilling to enforce the law in this respect. Their reluctance here contrasts with the reasonably effective licensing enforcement discussed above and with the positively draconian measures taken against suspected users of drugs like ecstasy, which are less dangerous than tobacco.

State governments have gradually tightened up the law, and have begun shutting down tobacconists found to be breaching it. But the imbalance between the incentive to dodge the tax and the risks of being caught remains. Until it is resolved, the federal government would do well to defer further increases in taxation.

Another measure that would help to resolve the problem is the abandonment of the anomalous policy under which vapes (legally available only from pharmacists, many of whom are unwilling to supply them) are more severely restricted than cigarettes and loose tobacco. The aim here was to prevent the arrival of a new form of nicotine, but that horse has well and truly bolted by now.

A question that remains open is whether the growth of illegal tobacco has led to an increase in smoking. Evidence here is mixed. AN AIHW survey in 2022-23 showed a continued decline in smoking with an increase in vaping. However, a more recent Roy Morgan survey suggests an increase of smoking among young people as a result of the vaping ban

Now, back to the ABS. The objective in producing national accounts statistics like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is to measure economic activity, giving a guide as to whether the economy is operating at full capacity. As critics have often pointed out, this measure pays no attention to whether the production being measured is socially desirable, neutral or harmful. Similarly, the ABS has always been aware that not all economic activity is legally recorded.

The solution, in the past, has been to add an adjustment of 1.5% to official measures, to take account of unrecorded activity. There hasn’t been a perceived need for anything more detailed. But with untaxed and unrecorded products now accounting for around half of all tobacco consumption, this ad hoc adjustment is no longer sufficient. The ABS estimates that growth in final household consumption expenditure has been underestimated by more than 0.5 percentage points over the past year, which is a big deal given that the typical annual change is around 5 per cent.

Finally, it’s worth noting that this isn’t the only issue the ABS is looking at in response to an ever-changing economy. As more and more households meet their electricity needs through rooftop solar, the ABS has faced a conceptual issue. This might be thought of as household production, like growing your own vegetables or cooking your own meals, which isn’t counted in GDP. But the ABS has decided it’s between to regard solar rooftops as a home-based small business, whether the electricity is self-consumed or fed back into the grid.

As distinctions between home and work, and between licit and illicit production become increasingly blurred, statisticians will need to make more and more judgements like this.