The true test of exactly how much Trump has fallen will be whether Republicans stop fearing to cross or criticize him.
In formal terms, Donald Trump is officially a lame-duck president. He’s constitutionally barred from running again, the next election cycle (outside of the governors races in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana next fall) will be to replace him, and the opposing party now controls both houses of Congress by substantial margins.
In reality, it’s worse than that. Sure, Trump still holds the immense powers of the executive branch. But after the scale of Tuesday’s wipeout, his political juice is down to zero. Not one person outside the Republican Party has any reason at all to care what he says or worry about the political costs of crossing him. So many voters abandoned the GOP, with Trump’s approval rating in the thirties, that he simply wasn’t wanted on the campaign trail in most of the country. However one prioritizes the different reasons for the debacle, everything on the list of major failures traces back to Trump, his decisions, and how he and his appointees executed them. Trump owns the entire defeat. One doubts that we will see a lot of enthusiastic Trump rallies over the next 18 months — maybe not even in the 2028 campaign. Even JD Vance has begun seeking distance from Trump, albeit only on the Iran war, which has always been at odds with Vance’s public political brand. We have right-populist commentators such as Matt Walsh declaring, “The worst thing conservatives can do now is feel any obligation at all to defend this bulls***. It’s indefensible and we all know it.”
Trump himself seems shell-shocked, with uncharacteristically little to say. That won’t last forever; if there is one genuinely admirable virtue Trump possesses, it is resiliency. But he has nothing to bluster about, and the scale of the defeat precludes even the most ambitious stolen-election theories. Some on the far right are grasping at straws to blame demographic change since 2024, a period in which the borders have been nearly closed, but Trump can’t really go there in attacking the one area in which even voters in Tuesday’s exit polls still broadly preferred his policies to those of the Democrats.
In coming battles on Capitol Hill, Trump will almost certainly find Democrats refusing to confirm any judicial nominees and quite likely refusing to confirm any executive branch nominees either, even if key posts like the secretary of defense become vacant. They are spoiling for fights to shut down the government and refuse to raise the debt limit, and some Republicans may join them on the latter cause, whether out of small-government principle or objections to the Iran war. Government shutdowns are typically a test of political strength and will between the two parties, and Trump will find it difficult to get the public on his side unless (as is always possible) the Democrats just comically overplay their hand. But even then, Trump’s style makes it hard to paint himself as the calm, reasonable one.
Second-term presidents have fallen in their last two years before. Some fell harder than others. Barack Obama remained hugely popular within his own party, but the Republican takeover of the Senate marginalized him. After the 2006 wipeout, George W. Bush was able to rally around the flag enough to keep Democrats from defunding the Iraq War, but otherwise was a cork bobbing on the sea of events as the economy collapsed and Russian tanks rolled into Georgia. In the midst of the financial crisis in September and October 2008, even as Bush presided over negotiations for a financial industry bailout via the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and later a bailout of General Motors, he had to rely on leaders in Congress to provide the political juice that he couldn’t add and Obama wouldn’t. In 1999–2000, Bill Clinton remained widely popular after an effective draw in the 1998 midterms, but the Monica Lewinsky scandal and ensuing impeachment so poisoned Washington that he could do little on domestic policy and had to split his time between marriage counseling (on which he was spending a full day every week even while his wife was running for the Senate) and bombing Serbia. Ronald Reagan took a tough setback in the 1986 midterms by losing the Senate, but given his 63 percent approval rating entering that election, it was hardly a public repudiation; Democrats just drew an inside straight. In 1986, “seven Senate races (six on Election Day, plus a special election in June) and one Governor’s race were decided that year by less than two points, five of them involving incumbent Republican senators. And in those eight races, Democrats went eight for eight, plus winning a rematch of the special election by 3.6 points in November . . . the GOP’s Senate majority went up in smoke, even though Republican Senate candidates actually earned a larger share of the two-party vote nationwide than they had in 1980.” Reagan suffered real consequences in enduring the Iran-Contra hearings and losing the fight over Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination in the summer of 1987, but he also gave the Brandenburg Gate speech in June of that year, remained a towering figure in foreign affairs to the end of his presidency, and recovered to an identical 63 percent approval rating by the time he handed over the office to his vice president, who ran explicitly as a continuation of Reagan and carried 40 states.
The true test of exactly how much Trump has fallen will be whether Republicans stop fearing to cross or criticize him. The broader right-populist movement isn’t going away overnight, but it is apt to be less dominated by the Trump personality cult. Trump may find that Republicans aren’t entirely eager to defend the rancid corruption of his second term. He also faces another undefeated enemy who could start taking bigger bites out of him without a lot of advance warning: Father Time. Age has hit Trump gradually over the past decade. Despite being overweight and seeing the decline of his already-weak verbal and emotional discipline, he’s not in bad shape at all for an 80-year-old man. But getting old, to borrow from Hemingway’s famous phrase about bankruptcy, can happen gradually, then suddenly.
Maybe the worst thing of all for Trump is the prospect not of unpopularity but declining relevance. The first 21 months years of his second term have been an extended “Summer of Donald” in which he dominated attention and press coverage. That may not last now that the spell of his whopping reelection in 2024 has been broken. He bleeds.