The current administration is politically powerful in one sense, they're also not particularly adept, making them increasingly unpopular and hardening others ag

The current administration is politically powerful in one sense, they're also not particularly adept, making them increasingly unpopular and hardening others against them. For example, they if they were reliable negotiators they could be leveraging power to get historic wins over how Universities are structured. But because they're not reliable negotiators, these universities have to fight like cornered animals. Similarly, deporting people with the Alien Enemies Act might have snuck by a conservative supreme court. But the administration seems completely unwilling to show that there is room for remediating mistakes. They've annoyed even conservative Supreme Court members who don't seem eager to support the power grab. If they were smart they'd also be doing things that made the economy strong, not intentionally harming people and creating a fairly universal thing to bitch and moan about - tariffs/high prices. On the one sense GOP has had a strong negotiating position historically, as they're the party willing to burn it all down. But eventually you get to a point of unreliability as negotiating partner, that there's no appeasement to be had, and you have to go all in on opposing them.