The lame duck portion of President Donald Trump’s presidency is starting two and a half years ahead of schedule, according to veteran political strategist James Carville.
Usually a president’s power “kind of ebbs away” in the last six months of their second term because “everybody’s looking for a new thing,” but Trump has already lost his political power, Carville said during the latest episode of his Politics War Room podcast with Al Hunt.
Carville’s comments came in response to four Republican House members breaking ranks to support a Democrat-led effort to extend premium tax credits for healthcare plans purchased under the Affordable Care Act.
After House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to call a vote on a proposal to extend the subsidies for three years, four Republicans representing swing districts signed on to a discharge petition to force Johnson to bring the bill the floor in January.
“No one cares about Trump anymore,” Carville said. “They’re not scared of him anymore. His presidency, other than the legal power he has granted to him by the Constitution, it’s over. No one gives a f— about him.”
The longtime Democratic insider explained that Trump can continue to exercise his legal power by doing things like appointing Supreme Court justices, but politically, “He’s done.”
“No one is scared of him. OK? The only people who are scared are people like us who are thinking he gets caught in World War III,” he said. “But there’s no fear left, and it’s easing out by the minute.”
That’s because all the evidence points to public support for the president “crumbling,” including the president’s poor polling on key issues, Democratic success in this year’s mid-cycle elections, and Republican lawmakers defecting in an effort to escape the consequences of the deeply unpopular “big beautiful” spending bill, which cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and failed to extend the ACA credits.
“When the power seeps away from you, it’s not linear,” Carville said. “It’s gone now.”
Already administration officials are “starting to point fingers,” he added, citing Vanity Fair’s bombshell report featuring nearly a dozen shockingly candid interviews with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
Although Wiles’ answers were the most revealing, other Trump insiders—including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—also participated in the piece, which made the White House appear to be in disarray, Hunt noted.
“We’ve got three years to go of this massive failure,” Carville replied. “You’re going to see more and more of this.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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