By any measure, it hasn't been a great week for President Trump. First came the Democrats' domineering performance on election night, which Trump himself acknowledged: "I don't think it was good for Republicans," he said, per the New York Times. Then came Trump's direct plea to Republican senators to end the filibuster, which was met with a clear it's-not-going-to-happen vibe. But just how bad is it for the president? In an analysis at Politico, Meredith Lee Hill and Jennifer Scholtes call it: "Welcome to the dawn of Trump's lame duck era."
To be clear, Trump "remains overwhelmingly popular with GOP voters and is the party's most dominant leader in a generation," they write, meaning that Trump opponents shouldn't expect an internal "stampede" against him. But the piece, based on interviews with GOP lawmakers and aides, suggests that those Republican lawmakers are coming to grips with a political reality: "He'll be gone in just over three years, while they'll still be around."
Trump, of course, delights in proving his critics wrong, and an analysis by Stephen Collinson at CNN offers a counter: Don't "believe talk of Trump being a lame duck already," he writes. Presidents, even those in their second term, still have great power, and Trump in particular loves to wield it. Still, the president clearly had a rough few days, especially when factoring in the Supreme Court's apparent wariness of his tariffs. "This week doesn't spell the beginning of the end of Trump's second term," writes Collinson. "But it might be the end of the beginning."
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
