Hey, remember April?
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.
Every president is inherently a lame duck the moment he takes the oath of office for the second time. But many presidents have been at least able to delay their diminishment until after the midterm elections, at which point—political capital largely exhausted, the political world turning to the race to pick a successor—they tend to focus on things over which they still have control, such as foreign policy and legacy building. Remarkably, Trump, not even a full year into his second term, seems to have already gotten there. Intensely focused on winning a Nobel Peace Prize and on striking lucrative business deals, he’s hosted a parade of world leaders at the White House while increasing his foreign travel and cutting back his domestic trips. He’s also intent on leaving a physical mark on the nation’s capital, slapping his name on the Kennedy Center and commissioning the construction of a massive arch (surely the “Arc de Trump”) while using gold fixtures and a demolition crew to remake the White House itself.
That myopic focus has worried Republicans, who are now sounding the alarm on a possible wipeout during next year’s midterm elections. There has been a wave of congressional retirements and rumors of more coming early in the new year. And among some of those who look to outlast Trump in Washington, there has been a growing willingness to defy him. To be clear, the president still enjoys widespread popularity with the MAGA rank and file, and many GOP lawmakers live in fear of a Trump-backed primary challenge. But arguably, one of Trump’s greatest political superpowers—one that has been evident since his hostile takeover of the GOP in the 2016 campaign—was an ability to demand absolute fealty from Republican lawmakers. That is now eroding. And the first, most meaningful, fissure has been about a dead man.
Trump really wanted to stop hearing about Epstein. He snapped at aides who tried to bring up Epstein when storylines about the disgraced pedophile financier began to percolate during the late summer, and he grew furious at some MAGA supporters who wouldn’t let the matter go. The president himself was never a full-throated Epstein conspiracy theorist, but he repeatedly intimated during last year’s campaign that something was nefarious about the government’s handling of the case. Yet he never understood why the matter—and questions about Epstein’s prison death, which was ruled a suicide—was so meaningful to some of his supporters: It was not a liberal conspiracy theory; it was largely a MAGA one. Trump admitted to a long friendship with Epstein—the two men ran in the same rarefied Manhattan and Palm Beach circles and enjoyed pursuing young women—but, he insisted, he broke off contact with the financier before he ran into legal trouble. (His accounts as to why they had a falling-out have shifted multiple times.)
Yet it was some of MAGA’s loudest voices—Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace among them—who defied Trump’s efforts to bury the story. And it turned out that they were the harbingers of an avalanche; Trump got rolled by Republicans in both the House and the Senate last month when they voted for the publication of all of the Epstein materials. His hand forced, Trump authorized their release. But every time his administration has tried to make the Epstein matter go away, it’s only inadvertently turned up the spotlight. Last week’s publication of Epstein materials failed to satisfy lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, and that release focused on former President Bill Clinton, making it appear transparently political. Today’s batch—quite the news dump, just before the Christmas holiday—yet again reinforced just how close Trump and Epstein were.
The Epstein question spawned the first widespread Republican rebellion against the president and opened the door for GOP defiance on other issues, including the legality of the Venezuelan boat strikes and tossing away the filibuster. Formerly meek Republicans found their voice to scold Trump for his callous social-media post blaming the filmmaker Rob Reiner for his own murder. They urged him to focus on health-care costs and affordability in the new year.
The White House, which did not respond to a request for comment, insists that Trump is listening. His aides have begun organizing events on housing and prescription-drug prices. They touted the fact that the nation’s economic growth accelerated to a 4.3 percent annual rate last quarter, blowing past expectations. After months without any domestic travel, Trump went to both Pennsylvania and North Carolina to (at least nominally) discuss affordability. Aides promise that he’ll be on the road often next year, ahead of the November midterm elections. Hill Republicans seem willing to try to tackle health care. Although the chances of getting another sweeping legislative program through Congress may be slim, the West Wing is looking into another batch of executive orders—including rolling back more environmental and business regulations—to goose the economy. And conventional political wisdom has rarely applied to Trump, who still has the time, and power, to pull off another comeback.
But Trump himself displays no sign of a course correction. He has defended tariffs that have raised prices on consumers and previewed plans to ratchet up a deportation plan that polls show voters think is too extreme. He shouted his way through an Oval Office address last week meant to be a reset, seemingly trying to browbeat America into believing that he’s doing a good job. (He also recently rated the economy “A+++++.”)
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.
“No Republican had dared even breathing the word 2028 for fear of triggering Trump,” one close outside adviser told me. “But that’s changing. And the quickest way to become a lame duck is to lose your own party.”
