Is the Trump coalition beginning to fray? Is the break with Elon and preview of things to come?

Nate Cohen, It’s Getting Harder for Trump to Keep the Gang Together, NYTimes, June 6, 2025. Well into the article:

Mr. Trump won a second term with a much broader political coalition than the one that brought him to the presidency in 2016.

He added millions of young and nonwhite voters to his base of older, white, working-class populists and stalwart Republicans. He also added considerable support from anti-woke and anti-establishment elites who previously backed Democrats.

These new Trump supporters were very different from the voters who backed him in 2016. They were neither traditional Republicans nor conservative populists drawn to Mr. Trump’s pitch on issues like trade and immigration. Instead, they were animated by issues that weren’t so potent back in 2016, like the excesses of the “woke” left and pandemic-era public health policy or anger at rising prices, crime, homelessness and an influx of migrants. In different ways, Joe Rogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mr. Musk each epitomize different facets of this enlarged Trump coalition.

It seemed possible that vehement opposition to progressives would hold everyone together during the presidency, as it did during the campaign, and that maybe Mr. Trump would also do enough to please each group and avoid alienating a constituency.

Less than five months into Mr. Trump’s term, there are already indications that this broader coalition is fraying. The polls suggest that many young and nonwhite voters who backed Mr. Trump in November now disapprove of his performance. There haven’t been as many examples of elite defections, but there have been many signs of queasiness with the excesses of his policies. The extent of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, his defiance of the courts, his attacks on high-skilled immigration and higher education and more simply go beyond what many of Mr. Trump’s backers thought they were signing up to support.

Money money money:

The deteriorating fiscal situation is already beginning to affect politics, most obviously in the challenge of passing a big tax and spending bill. In the past, it was easy enough for Republicans to cut taxes. Now, with the deficit and interest rates so high, a nearly $3 trillion expansion in the debt over the next decade is suddenly not so easy to swallow.

This challenge for Republicans won’t go away. The alliance between traditional and populist conservatives was much easier when Mr. Trump could promise tax cuts while sparing popular entitlement programs. As the burden of the debt mounts, this win-win proposition will be hard to sustain.

Less obviously, the same fiscal issues will be a major challenge for the Democratic coalition as well. With all the fighting between progressives and moderates over the last decade, it’s easy to overlook that deficit spending made it much easier for the party to stay unified. [...]

It’s hard to say whether the Republican megabill is really the reason Mr. Musk broke with the president. Still, he called the bill an “abomination.” And the potential power of this issue over the longer term should not be underestimated.

There's more at the link.