On election night, MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell posited that “the Trump reign of terror is over.” A few days later, a headline from The Guardian read, “The End of MAGA as We Know It.” On Tuesday, The Bulwark, where several of my former Weekly Standard colleagues work, ran a headline declaring that President Trump “has lost his fastball.”
It’s touching. And as a cockeyed optimist who’d rather see the glass half-cracked than completely shattered, I’d like to share the sense that the Trump era has finally fizzled. But if people are even remotely tempted to think the president has been defanged, chastened or subdued, they should take a beat.
Yes, last week’s “bluenami” was one of the most forceful midterm rebukes of a sitting president in the modern era — Mr. Trump and his party suffered a thoroughgoing rout. But there’s no precedent to suggest that this president ever chooses humility after being humiliated.
For starters, how many florid narcissists do you know who change their ways at 80? If you thought Mr. Trump was out of control when Congress was on his side, his every whim tended to by lickspittles like Speaker Mike Johnson, just wait and see how agitated the president gets when, like a screaming toddler whose binky has rolled under the crib, he can’t have his way.
It’s hard to remember exactly when I became convinced that Mr. Trump isn’t like you and me (i.e., capable of feeling shame). It might have been 1997. While the rest of the world was still grieving Diana, Princess of Wales, he told NBC’s “Dateline” that he regretted never asking her out. When asked if he thought he’d had a shot at winning her affections, Mr. Trump, ever the reverential mourner, responded, “I always have a shot.”
Or maybe it was 1999, when I was a reporter shadowing Mr. Trump while he pondered a Reform Party presidential run. As we walked through the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, after passing replicas of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, he exclaimed to our rabbi guide, “Great location!” assessing the museum’s locale as if he was evaluating a Manhattan high-rise unit that he might flip to a Russian oligarch.
He surprised many of us by initially saying that not only would he accept the results of the midterms, but that he would “look forward” to working with the incoming Democratic majority. But by Monday, he started replaying one of his greatest hits, posting this on Truth Social: “Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest.”
And keep in mind that in the days before the midterms, he was field-testing the nickname “Mr. Veto.” Indeed, come Jan. 3, even with their majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats still won’t have the numbers to override Mr. Trump’s vetoes without Republican help.
It’s true that Republicans have less cause than ever to fear Mr. Trump. But recall that many observers assumed congressional Republicans were done with him for good after they were attacked in their own chambers by Jan. 6 hooligans. We all know how long that disaffection lasted.
So unless those Republicans can relocate their spines, which they seem to have misplaced around 2016, Democrats should level with themselves about the limits of their new legislative and oversight capacities.
If they issue subpoenas, who will enforce them? Typically, the Justice Department would. But since Mr. Trump has remade the department as his personal law firm, congressional Democrats shouldn’t expect Attorney General Todd Blanche to suddenly oblige them.
Mr. Blanche will probably have his hands full with investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump’s perceived political enemies: Just a few weeks ago, impending midterms be damned, the Justice Department brought charges against the former F.B.I. director James Comey — the department’s third try at prosecuting him in barely over a year.
Then there’s the recent exit of Susie Wiles, replaced as the White House chief of staff by the dark prince himself, Stephen Miller, a man whose agenda is so cruel that it even makes the first lady, Melania Trump, recoil. And House Republicans have already chosen the pugnacious Trump loyalist Jim Jordan of Ohio as their next leader. His selection and Mr. Miller’s promotion demonstrate, yet again, a truism of the Trump era: When you think things can’t get more hectic, they probably will.
Which doesn’t mean congressional Democrats have nothing to work with. Once they take control of Congress, they can endlessly delay Mr. Trump’s cabinet and judicial appointments. They can cost Trump advisers ungodly sums in legal fees — the incoming House Oversight Committee chair, Robert Garcia of California, has warned administration officials and assorted Trump minions to “lawyer up.” Democrats can also stymie Mr. Trump’s legislative agenda, a proposition that might prompt you to ask: “What legislative agenda?”
Aside from his Big Homely Bill, Mr. Trump barely said “boo” to Congress in the first half of his second term. Mr. Johnson dutifully prevented votes on everything from releasing the Epstein files to impeaching Secretary of Push-Ups Pete Hegseth. Rather than give Congress its due, Mr. Trump spent most of the past two years showing just how little he thought of his nominally coequal branch of government by indulging in an orgy of executive orders.
How bad was it? As of this writing, Mr. Trump has cranked out 292 executive orders in less than two years. In each of their entire eight years in office, George W. Bush issued only 291, and Barack Obama, 276. Mr. Trump has averaged signing an executive order every two days and six hours. It’s one thing to celebrate “energy in the executive,” as Alexander Hamilton called it. It’s another to wonder if the chief executive is dropping speed in his Diet Cokes.
Some folks might think Mr. Trump has an incentive to mind his manners going forward, to preserve his “legacy” by making things easier on his chosen successor. But to think that, you’d have to presume that he thinks about anyone other than himself.
This is someone who, in the final stretch of the high-stakes midterms, mused about renaming an ocean after himself, pooh-poohed high gas prices and made his admiration of Senator Jon Husted’s hind parts a central component of his closing argument. Does that guy strike you as a man who’s losing sleep over JD Vance’s or Marco Rubio’s future prospects?
One thing we do know about Mr. Trump is that however much he depicts the Democrats as Marx-loving pinkos, he himself is a lifelong karmic socialist: forever committed to redistributing blame. He has ascribed the G.O.P. wipeout — a repudiation of everything from his tariffs to his Iran “excursion” — to his absence from the ballot (even though he repeatedly told Republican voters to act as though he were on it), to Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas being a “RINO” and to those traitors at Fox News spending too much time covering “Trump Deranged Dumocrats.”
What Mr. Trump will never do is consider how much his own reckless disregard for the American people played an outsize role in his party’s downfall. For that would require probity and introspection. That would require him to be someone else entirely.
Matt Labash is the author of “Fly Fishing With Darth Vader: And Other Adventures With Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen and Jewish Cowboys.”
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