Who Has Blown the Biggest Opportunity of Trump 2.0?

An anti-power rankings reviewing the biggest political chokejobs of the past 16 months.

While it may be quite a long time before we finally reach the beginning of the end of the Trump administration, we can now say that we have reached the end of the beginning. As hard it may be to believe, we are now actively choosing the candidates that will run in the midterm elections that will occur only five months from now. Those races will dominate our attention until November, when presidential election season will officially start soon afterwards. As such, all but the most high-profile politicians have essentially run out of time to prepare for the next national cycle. If you’re not an already-famous national figure, someone who will outright be on the ballot in a top-tier race, or currently running the country, you no longer have any runway to name for yourself before things officially begin. What you have now is what you get, and it’s what you’re going to have to work with in 2027, 2028, and all the years going forward.

In this newsletter, we’ve talked extensively about the sides that have made the most out of their time in this new, open-ended political era. Today, we’re here to look at the other side of the coin: those who have blown the biggest opportunities of Trump 2.0. Some of our subjects are presidential contenders who are still truly in the mix, but failed to make the most of the fluid early days of this administration. Others had an opportunity for immediate advancement and long-term relevance right in front of them but chose to turn it down to prioritize short-term presidential aspirations that look more and more suspect by the day. And in the most extreme cases, we have those who almost certainly should have been at the top of the world right now but bungled things so badly that they hardly have any political future left.

Between them, we can arguably learn more than we can by looking at the few big winners of the past 16 months. So, without further ado: who could have been great—should have been great—but isn’t?

The Top (Bottom?) Ten

#10: Governor Josh Shapiro

With his placement at the very bottom of this list, Josh Shapiro serves a very important purpose: to show that one not necessarily be at political rock bottom to have missed a major opportunity over the past 16 months. As I’ve detailed in my Democratic presidential power rankings, Shapiro still enjoys a solid position in the upcoming primary. No matter what happens between now and the start of the primaries, Josh Shapiro will win re-election by a stunning margin, will run for president, and will be paraded around by every editorial board in the country as the only candidate a sane person could vote for. It is because of this that Shapiro stands as the reactionary center’s best and possibly only chance of getting the party’s disgruntled base behind a true centrist candidate. For as much as the party’s voters may be put off by his right-of-center tendencies and alignment with an unfathomably unpopular Israel lobby, he will still be the guy who blew the doors off in the swing state, and he will stand as their best option if they decide they need to make a pure mercenary pick to beat Republicans.

This brand of condescending centrism is certainly a lane, and it’s one that Shapiro looks set to monopolize. As the rest of the party has raced to the left over the past few months, Pennsylvania’s governor has remained unmoving in his personal ideology, the fact of which has made him the only real remaining eat-your-vegetables moderate among the contenders. But while Shapiro may be entirely content to double down on this reputation ahead of the primary, there’s a rapidly growing body of evidence from Democratic voters themselves that it’s the most unviable tack any aspiring Democrat can take. While we now have proof that voters are open to reformist leftists (think Zohran Mamdani), institutionalist liberals (think Keisha Lance Bottoms and Xavier Beccera), and a certain class of reformist liberals (think James Talarico), there’s zero evidence that they’re interested in reformist centrists. From New York City to Georgia to California, all of the candidates who have run along radical moderate lines have done terribly, so far always only seeing vote totals in the single digits.

Perhaps it’s possible that Shapiro ends up ascending the now-well-established limits of this category through his sheer credibility and personal political skills. In any case, he would have been on far safer ground if he simply swallowed his pride and just acted like a normal Trump 2.0 liberal, à la Jon Ossoff. But because of his sheer unwillingness to abandon hasbarist talking points, he has resigned himself to competing for an establishment voting base that couldn’t care less about what he has to offer electorally. I’d call it a shame if I weren’t happy to see him fail.

#9: Vice President JD Vance

Live from the kiddie table…