Trump Is Suddenly Looking a Lot Smaller (gift subscription) [View all]

[LetMyPeopleVote]

The president is no longer dominating his party or the country in the way he once did.

Link to tweet

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/president-donald-trump-diminished/685427/?gift=SCYx-5scVta3-cr_IlgTyVA9ZXFDRuuBgb9F1hhzJXU

When President Donald Trump marked his 100th day in office at the end of that month, he was on a seemingly unstoppable roll. After taking four years out of office to prepare, he and his team returned to power with a blitz of more than 140 executive orders. He bent the Republican-controlled Congress to his will and dismantled much of the federal bureaucracy. He brought powerful institutions, including prestigious universities and law firms, to heel, demanding that his ring be kissed and his wallet fattened. He upended the nation’s economic and diplomatic relations with the world. He hijacked Americans’ attention—he was everywhere!—while openly musing about tearing up the Constitution and serving a third term. Moreover, Democrats were in disarray—truly—and their party’s future seemed in doubt. Trump stared out from the cover of this very magazine with the accompanying quote “I run the country and the world.” Honestly, it was hard to argue with him.

But as 2025 draws to a close, Trump seems a whole lot smaller. His party has been battered in recent elections. His poll numbers on even his signature issues—the economy, immigration—have tumbled. He’s seemingly lost touch with what got him elected, instead focusing on projects both petty and self-aggrandizing. As Americans worry about affordability, Trump and his family have profited wildly from his time in office. Republicans have begun to openly and repeatedly defy him. Democrats have started to outmaneuver him. Today, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal once more erupted with embarrassing revelations and unanswered questions. And every now and then, Trump seems to have a hard time even staying awake......

And he’s eager to show off the designs for the arch that will mark an entrance into Washington and the $400 million ballroom that will be built where the White House’s East Wing once stood. Yesterday, he boasted about a new “Trump class” of naval warships that military experts immediately denounced as unnecessary and expensive. He reveled in receiving a “peace prize” from FIFA, the soccer organization, and in hosting the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony. (Next year, he’ll surely insist that they be called the Trump-Kennedy Center Honors.) And he proudly showed off the “Walk of Fame” he constructed on the West Wing colonnade, which included insulting assessments of some former presidents (no word yet on what he wrote about Chester A. Arthur) that even some Fox News hosts panned as a childish desecration of a sacred national space.

Trump’s preoccupations have only reinforced the perception that he’s lost touch (as have the several recent moments in which the 79-year-old president appeared to fall asleep in public). None of this has reassured a Republican Party beginning to eye the midterms with dread. As Trump’s poll numbers continue to dip, more Republicans feel that a permission structure has been created for them to occasionally defy the president’s wishes. And for the first time, some in the GOP are beginning to consider life after Trump. There are deep divides in the MAGA base—many on full display at the Turning Point USA conference this week—but also a willingness by Vice President J. D. Vance and others to take some (quiet) steps toward inheriting Trump’s mantle.