Trump Only Gets Weaker From Here
I posted this piece yesterday for Political Wire members, but I wanted to share it more widely with Politics Extra readers.
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Donald Trump is already a lame duck. He didn’t even make it a full year into his second term.
After ten months of pushing presidential power to its outer limits, it’s now obvious his power is slipping.
The first real warning sign came in the off-year elections, where county after county — in races for governor, mayor, even city council — swung decisively toward Democrats compared to 2024.
The political class has noticed.
J.D. Vance is openly mulling a 2028 presidential run. Ted Cruz is too. Marjorie Taylor Greene suddenly thinks it’s to her advantage to pick a public fight with Trump. Senate Republicans ignored his demand to kill the filibuster. Indiana and Kansas Republicans brushed off his early redistricting schemes.
And House Republicans — his House Republicans — were about to mount an en masse rebellion to force the release of the Epstein files.
Once a politician enters the lame-duck phase, the drop-off is not gradual. It’s a cliff.
Allies stop investing. Opponents stop fearing. And every fence-sitter recalibrates toward whoever looks like the next source of real power.
History offers almost no examples of someone reversing that trajectory.
Which means Trump doesn’t stabilize from here. He only weakens.
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