Is This When Trump Became a Lame Duck?

November 4 was a bad day for the Republicans. The Grand Old Party had little reason to be optimistic going into the off-year elections, but the magnitude of the loss was surprising even to committed pessimists who questioned monkeying with food stamp payments days before people went out to transact the business of democracy, that is, to express their transient frustrations at the polls. In themselves, these results weren’t a catastrophe, and under the numbers there are still some encouraging secular trends. Retrenchment and course-correction before the midterms are still in the cards.

The hits have kept coming, though. Fox News on Monday aired Laura Ingraham’s latest interview with President Donald Trump. It was not what you’d call a great success. When Ingraham asked about negative voter sentiment about the economy, Trump dismissed the concerns: “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats”; “I think polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had”; and so on.  The president is correct that falling energy prices will bring down prices in other sectors, but one of the many sterling lessons of the Biden presidency is that telling people their feelings and perceptions are invalid or irrelevant ain’t a political winner. 

Perhaps worse was his handling of Ingraham’s questions about visa programs for college students. Ingraham expressed skepticism at Trump’s proposals to increase student visas for China from 350,000 to 600,000, and the president insisted it was necessary for floating the American higher ed sector. “Historically black colleges and universities would all be out of business,” Trump said. “You would have a system of colleges and universities, would go down the tubes.” He went on to compare the American relationship with China favorably to that with France.

Difficult as higher-ed rent-seeking and Red China boosterism might be for the base to swallow, Trump’s comments on H-1B labor may be worse. Ingraham asked about whether H-1B reform would be a priority for the administration and asserted that “we have plenty of talented people here.” Trump’s reply was stark: “No, no you don’t. No, you don’t.”

He tempered the statement with gentler (and broadly correct) statements about certain specialized skill bases in the U.S., although these arguments are largely irrelevant to the H-1B program. But that’s not the soundbyte—which, by the way, is playing very badly online. MAGA drummed Vivek Ramaswamy out of the magic circle over Christmas for a similar gaffe; the American political memory is short, but is it so short that an anti-immigration president can seamlessly transform into Bush Lite?

Close on the heels of this interview, a fresh tranche of Epstein emails splashed into the press; none so far have been smoking gun material, but they strengthen the known evidence that Trump and Epstein were familiar socially, and that the former knew what antics the latter was up to. The administration has gone to bizarre lengths to tamp down on the Epstein story for reasons opaque; it has been suggested that the shutdown was extended so the House wouldn’t come back and vote to release the Epstein files. It’s hard to gauge what’s going on here—the level of evasion doesn’t match up with the facts that have come out so far—but the song and dance is itself a show of weakness, and is infuriating elements of the base.

So, ten months into the term, Trump now finds himself wrangling not just Ds, but Rs. With Trump’s coalition at war with itself and a daunting midterm battle ahead, you have to ask whether Trump is a lame duck. Does it seem likely at this juncture that Trump will have the control over his own party, or even the raw vote count, to push through any more legislation? And, if the GOP loses the House, who’s to say that the impeachment circus won’t come back to town? (Trump may live to regret having been so fast and loose with the use of military force if the absence of AUMFs in Iran and Venezuela gives the Democrats a case.) While it’s unlikely that Trump would be forced from office, it is quite plausible that he will be bogged down in fighting the Hill, with limited bandwidth for pursuing even executive actions that do not require congressional approval.

Donald Trump has been discounted many times in the past; it has been a mistake every time. The man seems to have a luck he can trust. (However you feel about it, whipping up a riot against Congress is usually the sort of thing that ends most mortals’ public careers.) But the party will end someday. The first two weeks of November 2025 may well be the moment when Trump’s power over the government and authority within his own coalition began to ebb.

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