Is Trump becoming a lame duck?

No sooner did Democrats in the Senate reach a deal to end the federal government shutdown than a frenzy of liberal pearl clutching ensued. The Democrats should have held out longer, they argued. Healthcare subsidies could have been rescued. Donald Trump’s approval ratings were plunging. Golly, maybe the Democrats could even have driven the dreaded Trump from office? Jonathan Chait’s verdict in the Atlantic was not untypical: “Senate Democrats just made a huge mistake.”

Don’t believe a word of it. The surprising thing isn’t that Democrats folded. It’s that they held out as long as they did. In the end, the moderate Democratic Senators, ranging from Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman to Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, made the right call. Here’s the deal: ending the government shutdown puts the focus back squarely on Trump – and his failure to deal with a faltering economy and rising healthcare costs. Add in the fact that the Epstein files will now likely be released as the House of Representatives goes back into session and you have turbulent political seas awaiting Trump. Can the President safely steer his administration through them?

Some of Trump’s key supporters are starting to get queasy. Exhibit A is a fiery excoriation from Sunday night on X issued by one of the President’s most prominent supporters in the Maga media – Sean Davis, the co-founder of the Federalist. After contending that congressional Republicans have no real accomplishments or plans, Davis laid into someone who is usually exempted from such criticisms by MAGA world: Trump himself. According to Davis: “Trump needs to ditch the foreign policy crap and focus all his attention on the domestic economy, which is still not working for the majority of people. Right now he looks weak and rudderless. Be mad all you want, but it’s the truth.”

The truth is that Trump has in many ways become a foreign policy president. He’s been hosting a stream of foreign visitors, including from Central Asia this past week. He’s also handed out a $40 billion subvention to his Argentine chum Javier Milei, while failing to assist farmers in America who have been whacked by his tariffs. Instead, he’s engaged in happy talk about how prosperity is just around the corner. As Davis observed: “Newly minted college grads can’t find work and are saddled with debt. Where is their path to the American dream right now? Who is giving them a vision of a future worth fighting for?”

This past weekend, I spoke with a mother whose 24-year-old son earned double degrees in mathematics and computer science and is now living in Manhattan – where he works as a rock-climbing instructor and scrapes by living in an efficiency apartment that costs $2,400 a month to rent. Small wonder that a socialist like Zohran Mamdani cruised to victory as mayor of New York.

For his part, Trump appears to be living increasingly in the past. He dozed off in the Oval Office three days ago. Now his latest move is to preemptively pardon 77 of his supporters, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and lawyer John Eastman, for their support of his efforts to upend the 2020 presidential election. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declared, “President Trump is putting an end to the Biden regime’s communist tactics once and for all.”

Hmm. Actually, it is figures on the right who are starting to sound the red alert. On the RealClear Politics news site, for example, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Berkowitz warned that the kerfuffle over the Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’ defense of Tucker Carlson for interviewing the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes could damage the conservative cause. According to Berkowitz: “Tucker Carlson’s cozying up to Holocaust downplayers, Nazi apologists, Stalin enthusiasts, and rank anti-Semites – along with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ October 30 insistence that conservatism’s big tent is big enough to embrace those who hate Jews and fawn over murderous tyrants – widened a parlous rift on the right.”

Internal fights are one thing. But the economy is what could take down a president who declared in his second inaugural speech that he would usher in nothing less than a triumphant new golden age in America. With the Supreme Court poised to strike down his tariffs, Trump is starting to look like a lame duck and the 2026 midterm elections loom larger than ever. As the government reopens, the battle between Trump and the Democrats may only have begun.