Daniel Wolfram
With his approval rating sinking to 36% and a brutal midterm battle looming, Donald Trump is preparing to survive yet another political setback. Here are three times he survived a major scandal and defeat that would have doomed anyone else.
President Donald Trump currently has one of the lowest approval ratings of any modern president, as just 36% of people surveyed in a Fox News poll approve of his job performance.
Trump is also staring at a monumental midterm election that will decide whether the Republicans will retain the majority in the Senate or whether he will become a lame-duck president if the Democrats take both houses.
However, Trump has weathered so many political losses and scandals that would have doomed so many other presidents. Here are three examples of that:
The Epstein files
There has perhaps not been a larger scandal than the Epstein files. When Trump was making his triumphant return during his 2024 election campaign, he promised to uncover the Epstein files and find out which powerful elite in the US had assisted notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in his decades-long schemes.
It turns out that Trump’s name appears frequently throughout the unsealed records, renewing intense scrutiny over their high-profile social relationship during the 1990s and early 2000s.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to give old information about the Epstein files to MAGA influencers, but the revolt soon started after the public felt that the Trump administration was covering the whole thing up.
Surprisingly, this scandal did not doom Trump and did not hurt his approval rating either. However, it did hurt the GOP and has carried that into the midterm elections. Pam Bondi was eventually fired as AG and replaced by Trump’s former lawyer Todd Blanche.
“It is surprising that these losses have not hurt his approval rating more than it has, but it seems to have significantly hurt Republicans in the recent off-year elections and bodes poorly for the midterm elections,” Columbia University professor Robert Y. Shapiro told Newsweek.
Profiting from his presidency
Over the last couple of months, there has been a large increase in reports on private business dealings within the Trump orbit and how the president and his cabinet have profited from the presidency.
There have been numerous reports about how Trump has managed to profit $1bn from business dealings in cryptocurrency in just his first year back in office in 2025.
Experts are saying that this is a massive conflict of interest. “It is reflective of his own moral compass. It is showing the way in which he thinks about his role as president,” Susan Rose-Ackerman, a professor from Yale who studies political corruption, told CNN.
“It isn’t tied so much to a million dollars here or a million dollars there. It’s tied to his perspective about what it means to be president – that he sees it as giving him free [rein] to do things.”
Inciting an insurrection after disputing voting results
The last scandal is also the biggest and comes after a political loss Trump still cannot seem to accept even though there is no evidence to prove otherwise.
Trump tried to delegitimize the election loss to Joe Biden back in 2020. It ultimately led to a violent assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, after he urged supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.”
The insurrection attempt led to a second impeachment by the House of Representatives, followed by an acquittal in the Senate. That allowed Trump to return four years later and serve another term as president of the United States of America.
“The founders intended that the office of the president be held by people with sufficient virtue,” Franita Tolson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Southern California, told CNN.
“They recognized the risk of someone who is a tyrant abusing the office, but they didn’t build a system to prevent it. The question is, will we learn from this, and alter our Constitution to prevent this from happening again?”
The politicians in the country did not learn from it, and a scandal and political loss that should have caused major changes to the foundation of American democracy has instead turned into a new battle for the soul of this nation.
What will the American people and politicians in Washington, D.C., do if Trump decides on Tuesday or Wednesday that he will not accept the results of the midterms? Will Trump survive yet another scandal and serve out his last two years, or will that be the end of the road for him?
