When is a president not a president? When he’s a lame duck.
President Donald Trump has not reached that stage yet, but it’s no longer outlandish to wonder when he will.
He arrived in office in January with extraordinary potency. He’d won the presidential election not in a landslide but nevertheless convincingly. He’d been victorious in all seven swing states and had won the popular vote in addition to the constitutionally decisive Electoral College.
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Then he set about implementing his agenda at breathtaking, perhaps unprecedented speed — issuing a blizzard of executive orders, injecting DOGE like a purgative into federal agencies, inviting and frequently defeating legal challenges to his reassertion of executive authority, and bulldozing the biggest piece of fiscal legislation in history onto the statute books.
For a while, Trump swept all before him. Democrats didn’t know where to turn or how to resist. Like President Bill Clinton, who a generation earlier deflected attention from the outrage du jour by perpetrating a new outrage, Trump issued a new policy or launched an initiative before his opponents had stopped spluttering over the previous one.
Now, however, Trump’s hold over his party and the country is weakening. Senate Republicans, who were once accused of toadying to Trump, rebuffed his pressure to nuke the filibuster, which would have allowed them to ram through his agenda at the cost of making the tyranny of the majority a permanent feature of our politics.
Republicans also resisted White House pressure and voted overwhelmingly to force the Department of Justice to disgorge non-classified documents from its file on the late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, although Trump did a U-turn and supported their release so as to avoid the appearance of defeat.
Headlines are appearing such as “President’s sway over GOP shows first signs of slipping,” reporting state-level Republican resistance to Trump’s demand for congressional map changes to win more races in next year’s congressional midterm elections.
It is not only among elected Republican officials that Trump’s power is dwindling. He is also buffeted by headwinds from within the conservative and MAGA bases of his support. Immigration hardliners, for example, are enraged by comments he made in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham in which he argued that it was necessary to bring foreigners into the country on H-1B visas because America has insufficient talent.
“You don’t have certain talents,” he said, “and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say I’m gonna put you into a factory where we’re gonna make missiles.” This seems a simple truth to me, but some of Trump’s hitherto staunchest supporters regard it as a sickening mess.
Some of the same people are at odds with Trump for his support of Israel, seeing it as negating America First. A massive ideological crevasse has been exposed on the Right by reactions to Heritage President Kevin Roberts’s video last month, arguing ambivalently about America’s relationship with Israel and positing that the conservative movement should make room for the likes of the “groyper” hero Nick Fuentes, a racist bigot.
The dispute over Fuentes, with its ideological and moral ramifications, will shape the future of conservatism for the next generation. Nothing in the evolution of political ideas could be more substantive, and the issue will be thrashed out for years.
But my immediate focus is more on the astonishing speed at which Trump, the hegemon of our national politics 10 months ago, has become a leader whose own supporters, both on Capitol Hill and across the country, have begun to look past him to the post-Trump era.
All presidents are strongest in the first year after they are elected or re-elected, and all second-term presidents have obsolescence built in. But the pace at which they weaken is accelerating. Today, they start to go stale and curl up at the edges less than a quarter of the way through a second term.
The reason is simple and regrettable. It is because America’s politics is increasingly about elections and decreasingly about governing. Just as, in Oscar Wilde’s epigram, America went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between, so our politics now leaps from the presidential inauguration to the next election campaigns without a dignified period betwixt them when pols can focus on government.
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As political philosopher Thomas Sowell pointed out, we often forget that a politician’s agenda is not to deal with this problem or that, but to get reelected. That’s why pols are relentlessly partisan, letting no slight act or statement of an opponent go by without unleashing excoriation upon it.
Division and hostility help give voters a clear choice when they go to the polls. But those same qualities bestow rotten government on the nation in the years in between. The more politics is about jockeying for electoral advantage, the less it can be about governing the country.