Donald Trump Is a Lame Duck Now
When Democrats ended the government shutdown a week after the election—without securing an extension of the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies—it seemed like they were throwing Trump a lifeline. The shutdown had worked for the party politically: Trump’s poll numbers, which had been steadily declining, shot downward, and the Democrats successfully turned the off-year election into a referendum on rising prices and a coming spike in Obamacare premiums. But even if Democrats momentarily relieved the pressure on Trump, it didn’t change his trajectory. He did not regain the momentum that he began the year with, and voters still despise him.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the coming release of the Epstein files, which will almost certainly contain more details about his long friendship with the financier and alleged sex trafficker. Trump ultimately issued an eleventh-hour edict instructing Republicans to vote for their release, but that was only after it was clear they were going to do so anyway and there was nothing he could do to stop them. It’s now clear that, for the first time in his presidency, cracks are showing in his control of the Republican Party. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the conspiracy-addled Georgia representative who had long been one of Trump’s biggest defenders, has embarked on a weeks-long media campaign berating him for his broken promises on the cost-of-living crisis and his failure to release the Epstein files. The lengthy news cycle about those files—and the release of emails in which Epstein described his friendship with Trump—has further damaged his popularity. The full release, if it comes, almost certainly will hurt him further.
As all of this is happening, Trump has also been forced to walk back tariffs on agricultural products—a clear admission that his favorite economic policy is causing prices to rise. By cutting tariffs on coffee, beef, and other consumer goods, Trump is trying to alleviate inflation that he has made significantly worse by embracing a harebrained and antiquated economic scheme. But this likely won’t do enough to bring prices down to consumers’ satisfaction, since the prices were seen as too high even before he embarked on his tariff rampage.
