Lame Duck Soup

Is Donald Trump Beginning to Quack?

On those rare occasions when the Trump Administration fails to distract me with its histrionic outrages, a tiny peek of blue sky reality shines through: Donald J. Trump is a lame duck and he’s beginning to act like one.

Now I know there are lots of people who think that Trump is successfully destroying the republic—and that might well be true. His disrespect for just about every American tradition not associated with P.T. Barnum remains prodigious. He doesn’t seem to be running out of steam. I am disgusted by the ICE excesses and fear that Trump will push a personal militia unless someone stops him. I fear that no one has the cojones to stop him. I am appalled by his disdain for governance, the slow-burning fuse of federal desuetude. I’m sure Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have wanted his bathroom gilded and marbled.

Then again, there are signs aplenty of Trump behaving as other second-term presidents do—and even a few signs that his fellow Republicans, some of whom have grand ambitions, are beginning to get twitchy. There are other signs that MAGA is no longer a unanimous enterprise. It isn’t easy to discern these patches of blue as Trump hurtles around the globe with the energy of someone half his age, and presides over a government that seems to have retired its legislative branch, but there are signs the Trump Project is running the natural course of a second term presidency.

The most obvious come from the man himself. He recently admitted that he can’t run for a third term:

“If you read it, it’s pretty clear — I’m not allowed to run,” he said. “It’s too bad.”

While not quite Shermanesque, that seems definitive enough. Furthermore, he has just about endorsed the ticket that should replace him:

“We have great people, I don’t have to get into that. But we have one of them standing right here,” Trump said, referring to Secretary of State Marco Rubio before bringing up Vice President JD Vance.

“The vice president is great,” he continued, “I’m not sure if anybody would run against those two.”

Now, I know: Dimitri Medvedev may not be the first name you think of when the notion of J.D. Vance as President flashes across your frontal cortex, but the precedent is not outside Trump’s imagination. Medvedev was the hand puppet Vladimir Putin supported to succeed him when he was prohibited—briefly—by the Russian “constitution” from running for a third consecutive term. Putin “stepped down.” He became Prime Minister. There were those—including members of the Obama Administration—who actually thought Medvedev was in charge. He signed a new START treaty. And then, after four years, he was relegated to prime minister and Putin was back as President, the role he’d been filling, with a wink, all along. It is easy to imagine Trump fantasizing about a similar turn of events: The Vance-Rubio Administration…brought to you, and supervised, by Donald Trump. This is not impossible.

But it’s not a lock, either. Trump may have an enduring influence on Republican politics, and his successors—who will, no doubt, fear that Donald will pull an Elon Musk on them, go berserk and destroy their credibility if they don’t tow his line. On the other hand, he’s getting pretty old. The visits to Walter Reed are increasing. And J.D. Vance seems a very adept politician to me. He may be smarter, if not as cunning, as Trump. He could be a “kinder, gentler” alternative, just as George H.W. Bush was portrayed after Reagan. Of course, in plain English “kinder, gentler” translates as “one-term president.”

And there are sharks in the water. There is Ted Cruz, who recently dared to criticize Trump’s FCC. Chair Brendan Carr for threatening to pull ABC’s broadcast license if it didn’t fire Jimmy Kimmel:

“[Carr] says, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way,’” the senator said…in the latest episode of his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” which aired Friday morning.

“And I gotta say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas,’” Cruz said, referring to the classic mob film.

Who knew Ted Cruz had a podcast? I guess everyone does nowadays. (I have two.) The point is, Cruz—once touted by the liberal lions of Harvard Law School as the cream of their crop; and later positioning himself as the most hated man in the Senate—will probably be sorely disappointed if he doesn’t get to be President some day. There are others in the Republican Party, or adjacent to it, who do not lack ambition. There is Tucker Carlson. There are Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, who also flash Harvard cred. There is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is also rehearsing some independence from Trump these days, per NBC news:

Over the past six months, Greene has made waves in Washington for publicly breaking with Trump and the GOP on a number of high-profile issues and lobbing some pointed attacks at her fellow Republicans in the process. She was critical of the Trump administration’s strikes on Iran, referred to the situation in Gaza as a “genocide,” signed her name to an effort to force a House vote to require the Justice Department to release its files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case and, most recently, sided with Democrats in calling for an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies amid the government shutdown fight.

“I’m not some sort of blind slave to the president, and I don’t think anyone should be,”

Ohh-kayy. I’m not sure that MTG is thinking White House for herself, but she is displaying classic ambitious pol behavior as lame duckitude settles over a presidency. And there are a growing fistful of Republicans in Congress beginning to feel their oats, especially in the Senate, where there have been several anti-Trump votes by Republicans lately, including this one on Trump’s personal-peeve tariffs against Brazil:

“Emergencies are like war, famine, tornado,” said Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the sole Republican sponsor of the resolution rejecting the tariffs on Brazil in Mr. Trump’s trade war. “Not liking someone’s tariffs is not an emergency. It’s an abuse of the emergency power, and it’s Congress abdicating their traditional role in taxes.”

Joining Mr. Paul in supporting the measure were four other G.O.P. senators who have expressed concern that the tariffs could cause economic pain in the United States: Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

And then there’s the beef beef:

The vice president found himself in a heated discussion with Republican senators from major cattle-producing states over the administration’s plan to quadruple the amount of beef from Argentina allowed into the United States each year, at a lower tariff rate. The move is a bid to bring down the cost of beef after prices rose in recent years. But it has enraged ranchers, a key Republican constituency.

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, called it a “frank and vigorous conversation,” innocuous words often used by members of Congress to characterize a far more intense and angry discussion.

Ted Cruz again. Hmmm.

It is difficult to sustain fanaticism. Even the Puritans became famously unpuritanical when it came to sex—and the dire need for procreation—in their second generation. (Google “bundling board”) And there are fissures developing within MAGA. Here’s Dominic Green in the Wall Street Journal:

The woke right has a toehold in Congress, notably in Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene of Georgia, who has rescinded her speculation about Rothschild conspiracies and Jewish space lasers but now claims that Israel exerts “unique influence and control” over her congressional colleagues. But most of its leaders are online entrepreneurs. They include the wicked uncles Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, who have adapted to online incentives, and the digital natives of the “alt-right” class of 2016, such as Candace Owens and Nicholas Fuentes.

It is easy, given the flaccidity of Trump’s opponents, to overestimate his strength. And he may have tilted American democracy toward authoritarianism in perpetuity. But the wonderful thing about our democracy is that it lacks the stability of Putinism. We are most definitely not Russians. There has been an unofficial 12 year limit on party control of the White House since the FDR-Truman regency. And there is the indisputable fact that Americans get bored very easily. Trump understands this. That is why he always seems to be running up the down escalator, an act of veinous vanity. It is possible that his perpetual motion will keep him aloft. It is also possible that he will deflate slowly, even as his movement moves on.

All Hail The Free Press

I’ve been a fan of Bari Weiss ever since she defied her Stalinist bosses at the New York Times and took off to start the Free Press, which is one of the sharpest and most entertaining sites on this here Substack thing. I don’t agree with her on everything: I’m a more moderate supporter of Israel than she, but she’d be disappointed if I gave her carte blanche. She has assembled a far more compelling stable of writers than the op-ed pages of the Times and WaPo combined. So I welcome her ascension to the presidency of CBS News. (You should know: I was fired as a CBS news commentator for writing an anonymous novel.) CBS has a grand tradition—and it maintains two gems in Sixty Minutes and the CBS Morning News—but, like our other media dinosaurs, needs a freshen-up. The in-house reaction against Tony Dokuopil’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates—he actually asked Coates tough questions!—is an example of the passive left rot that is the default position of our legacy institutions.

Speaking of which. Weiss’s spouse Nellie Bowles—what a grand musical comedy name!—delights me every Friday with her weekly news-summary, TGIF. Here’s a sample from this week’s offering:

The Keepnews ejection: I’ve learned that several New York Times employees are up in arms over the paper’s decision to fire veteran obituaries deputy editor Peter Keepnews over an off-color remark he made in a meeting this week. According to Times sources, Peter made a joke about a photo of a rabbi during the meeting that apparently offended Hanna Ingber, who wrote a note to an obit editor in which she asked whether Keepnews was Jewish, and wrongly speculated that he might be an “old white christian dude seeing a photo of a rabbi and making a rude statement about all jews.” (Keepnews is Jewish.)

You go, Nellie. And Bari, too.