President Donald Trump saw “his own mortality” in election results that rejected both his administration and the MAGA movement, political columnist David Rothkopf said.
Speaking to The Daily Beast Podcast, Rothkopf said Trump realized that there is no political future for him after a night that saw Zohran Mamdani elected mayor of New York City, two Democrats win governorships in Virginia and New Jersey, and Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50 pass in California.
“He saw death. He saw his own mortality. He realizes there is no future for him… he looks in the eyes of Republicans, and he sees they know he’s old and dying,” Rothkopf told The Daily Beast Podcast’s Joanna Coles.
Rothkopf also warned that the GOP’s total surrender to Trump will permanently damage the party’s future.
“I just think the chickens are going to come home to roost for a lot of people. You know, the Republican Party and the people who supported Trump, the people that look the other way, people that participated in the corruption, all of it,” Rothkopf said.
Rothkopf explained to Coles, “I think there’s a lot of things happening at once, and none of them are good for Trump,” referencing Trump’s failure to control inflation and the rising cost of living, as well as the fact that 61% of Republicans think Trump has made the economy worse.
He noted that at the same time, the president is throwing lavish The Great Gatsby-themed parties at Mar-a-Lago.
“He’s completely clueless to the fact that this book was written about the soulless lives of the rich who were celebrating while America was in the middle of the depression and suffering,” Rothkopf said.
“That’s the theme. ‘The Great Trumpy‘ is the theme where, you know, let them eat ballrooms because you’ve got a lousy economy for all of us, the prices of healthcare going up. Really bad, right? So what is our president doing? Americans are starving and he’s doing let them eat cake.”
Rothkopf isn’t alone in comparing Trump to the worst excesses of the French aristocracy that resulted in the French Revolution, with California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday posting an AI-generated image of Trump as Marie Antoinette, who has become associated with the phrase “Let them eat cake.”
— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) November 8, 2025
The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.
On Sunday’s episode, Rothkopf also discussed how Trump might publicly respond to the realization that his political career has an end date, arguing that, “he’s going to make this desperate play.”
“What Trump cares about more than anything else, even more than money, is being relevant, and it’s going to be real,” Rothkopf said.
Asked by Coles whether this means Trump might feel forced into saying he’s running for a third term, Rothkopf said, “I think he’s going to have people saying, he says he’s going to do it and then he says he’s not going to do that, then he says ‘People say I should do it’… the longer it’s hanging out there, it’s just a desperate attempt to convince. It’s the policy equivalent of a trophy wife.”
