Democratic strategist James Carville says Donald Trump’s presidency is circling the drain as voters sour on him and his Cabinet’s fiascos—with more trouble on the horizon.
“The power’s going out of Trump by the minute,” the famed strategist, 81, said on The Daily Beast Podcast. “You can just feel it oozing out.”
A new Gallup poll released on Friday found Trump’s approval rating dropping to just 36 percent—the lowest mark he’s recorded in Gallup’s polls in his second term.
“The public has turned on him. It turned on him decisively,” Carville told host Joanna Coles, arguing that voters are increasingly blaming the 79-year-old president for their economic woes. At the same time, Trump’s Cabinet, mired in a string of scandals, is fueling a sense of “disorder” around Trump, Carville said.
“I don’t see how this gets better for them, I really don’t,” said the strategist behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, and its winning slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Carville pointed out that healthcare premiums are set to soar for more than 20 million people in the new year, a consequence of Trump and the GOP’s refusal to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Noting Trump’s “catastrophic” numbers, Carville said, “I don’t know how much lower you can go. I think his presidency, in terms of, like, anything significantly done, is over.”
He predicted that Democrats would ride Trump’s missteps to 2026 midterm victories and leave him a lame duck president. “He’s going to definitely deal with a Democratic House. I think it’s more likely that he’ll be dealing with a Democratic Senate.”
Carville pointed to the scope of Democrats’ Nov. 4 victories in states across the country, calling the results “stunning, not just in the depth, but the breadth of it.”
Last week, Carville declared in a New York Times opinion piece that Democrats must embrace a “platform of pure economic rage” to respond to the “economic pain” of the current era.
“I am now an 81-year-old man and I know that in the minds of many, I carry the torch from a so-called centrist political era. Yet it is abundantly clear even to me that the Democratic Party must now run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression,” he wrote.
Trump has so far struggled to deliver on his campaign promises to “vanish” inflation and “make America affordable again.” At the same time, he has presided over a weakening job market, and his erratic tariff strategy has hurt farmers and caused market volatility.
He has also devoted himself to decorating the White House in gold and building a massive $300 million ballroom that he says he and his billionaire friends will pay for.
In his piece for the Times, Carville said “the French Revolution is in the American wind.”
Asked by Coles to elaborate on what he’d meant, Carville pointed to America’s skyrocketing economic inequality and Trump’s coziness with the billionaire class.
“Young people see no future. They can’t imagine themselves ever buying a house. They can’t imagine themselves ever affording an education. Meanwhile, savers and old people have just run off with the whole stack,” Carville said, noting that Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill slashes Medicaid while giving tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit wealthy Americans.
“And the young people are going to see us, and they’re going to figure out that, ‘Hey, these people stole everything from us, so let’s go get our fair share.’ And that’s how unrest starts,” he said. “And the best thing to do is get ahead of it and try to even this thing out a little bit.”
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
New episodes of The Daily Beast Podcast are released every Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday on YouTube. Follow our new feed on your favorite podcast platform at beast.pub/dailybeastpod and subscribe on YouTube to watch full episodes.
