Trump remains a headache for the Democrats and the nation
When a bear is cornered, it often tries to look as big and scary as possible. As the National Park Service warns, it may bare its teeth, huff, blow air and make snapping sounds with its jaws. It may then rush you.
We’ve seen a lot of this behavior from Donald J. Trump in the last couple years. Now that he’s been electorally castrated, we could see more of it. Already, he’s putting the blame everywhere but on himself, lashing out at Fox News and lambasting candidates swept away in the historic bluenami.
“If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, for instance, referring to the term Republicans in name only. “He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty!”
Though Trump told pre-election rally crowds to “pretend” he was on the ballot – urgings he made no less than 47 times this fall — he and his aides tried on election night to whitewash all that. One White House official told The Washington Post that the election was not a referendum on the president, instead blaming Republican candidates. “President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves,” the person said.
For his part, Trump sloughed off responsibility for the sweep that cost the GOP both chambers of Congress. “I wasn’t on the ticket,” he said in an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday night. “And because I wasn’t on the ticket, we couldn’t get enough people out to vote.”
Others were anything but charitable about the emasculated president. “Trump has almost dared Americans to vote against him,” Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in Michigan, told the Times, adding that the president had closed the midterm campaign on a “greatest hits tour on every annoying thing that could be done to aggravate the American people.”
Calling Trump’s analysis of the results “ridiculous,” Roe said the president was “the engineer of the Republican collapse.” Similarly, retiring Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska said: “This is all about him… We lost the Senate race in South Carolina for Pete’s sake … He pushed bad people forward.”
Reminding voters he will likely court over the coming two years that he opposed the Iran War, Vice President JD Vance blamed it for the election results. “The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote on social media. He added that “everyone knows why we lost” and that “any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”
Vance also split with Trump on the president’s claim that turnout was the big problem. “Our voters did show up,” he wrote in his post. “In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”
Well, duh. Wonder why that was, JD.
Sure, the war is Trump’s albatross (and the GOP’s more broadly). But we’ve also got tariffs, inflation, a sluggish job market, unaffordable housing, billionaire tax cuts, soaring national debt, ICE killings and other outrages, Trump’s cozying up to Putin and all but casting Ukraine to the wolves, and the profiteering by Trump and his family while in office, not to mention his egomaniacal D.C. projects and his failed bids to rig the election. The Trumpian buffoonery – which Vance has helped enable — is extraordinary.
So, what happens after Jan. 3, when the levers of power shift?
Certainly, there will be investigations of Trump’s iniquities. “Interviews with more than two dozen Democratic leaders, strategists, and members of Congress in the days before the election revealed a party itching to fight on nearly every front,” Time reported. “‘LAWYER UP,’ Representative Robert Garcia of California, who is in line to chair the powerful Oversight Committee, posted on social media as returns came in.”
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin told The New York Times in late October that among the potential oversight targets were the pardons Trump granted, possible corruption in government contracting and the president’s family’s cryptocurrency deals.
Of course, the ever-litigious Trump – notorious for dragging his battles through the courts – will do his best to stymie any probes. As the New York Post reported, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in August issued an opinion arguing that the president can assert executive privilege over “communications that he has with advisers who do not work for the Executive Branch.”
“This new assertion offers former officials, outside allies, relatives and potentially even businesses a shield to balk at demands for their testimony and documents — likely resulting in court proceedings that can take months or even years to resolve,” the paper reported. “Officials and experts believe this claim will dramatically slow Democrats’ inquiries.”
The paper noted that the probes likely will be spearheaded in the House by Garcia on the oversight committee and in the Senate by Raskin on the judiciary committee. Surely, the wounded bear in the White House, aided by his toadies at Justice, will bare his teeth in those investigations.
But if they are to please voters, Democrats will need to do more than just shine bright lights on Trumpian turpitude. Especially if they want to take the White House in two years, they will need to deliver the goods on issues in voters’s lives.
Hakeem Jeffries, expected to become the Speaker of the House, already has plans. His aides told the Times that in the first 100 hours of his tenure he would speed legislation to the floor that would reinstate expired Affordable Care Act health care premium subsidies, reverse the nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts that were included in the president’s domestic policy law, move to end Trump’s tariffs and restore congressional power over trade policy, and direct Trump to end the war in Iran or seek authorization from Congress to continue it.
The sailing will hardly be smooth, though. “Going forward, Democrats will share governing responsibility — and the blame if nothing gets done to alleviate this problem,” columnist Matt K. Lewis of The Washington Sun noted. “Unfortunately, controlling inflation is notoriously difficult, and unwinding the most obvious drivers of the problem — Trump’s tariffs and his war in Iran — won’t be easy.”
Indeed, we’re likely to see that bear slip out of his den on all such matters and pretty much anything the Dems try to do. He plans to become “Mr. Veto.”
Trump said he expected to issue vetoes for “a month or two” before reaching compromises with the Democrats, as the Independent reported. “I guess I’ll become Mr. Veto,” Trump said on a New York Post Pod Force One podcast. “And then at some point, we’ll probably make deals.”
While the Democrats won majorities in both chambers of Congress, they remain short of the two-thirds figures needed to guarantee overrides of presidential vetoes. Among other things, that “will constrain Democrats’ ability to reverse Trump’s tariff policies or his approach to the Ukraine war and relations with European allies,” the Council on Foreign Relations advised.
That doesn’t mean they will be powerless, though. Their 54 Senate seats and at least 237 House seats provide a lot of clout.
“While … Trump will maintain significant control over U.S. foreign policy and tariffs, Democrats will hold the federal purse strings, chair congressional committees, and—through control of the Senate—decide which of Trump’s nominees are confirmed to key national security and diplomatic posts,” CFR experts said.
Indeed, perhaps the most important thing the Senate could do in the coming couple years would be to block Trump from replacing at least two aging Supreme Court justices. Right-wingers Samuel Alito Jr., 76, and Clarence Thomas, 78, are thought to be likely retirees. “Chance of confirming a worthy successor to Justice Thomas and/or Alito during President Trump’s term: Zero,” Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said in a social media post Tuesday night.
The three justices Trump appointed spawned a conservative supermajority that has overturned abortion rights, bolstered gun and religious freedoms and broadly shielded the president from criminal prosecution, Bloomberg Law reported. Phil Brest, who directed judicial nominations under Democratic President Joe Biden and now leads the progressive American Constitution Society, told the outlet that there is now “a real possibility of starting to move the court back in a more balanced direction and ultimately towards a liberal majority.”
In the end, for all the excitement that the election has stirred among Democrats, Trump seems unlikely to slink off in humiliation to Mar-A-Lago. He’s got his personal monuments — his arch, golf course and ballroom — to fight for, if nothing else. And he may have more to do to fix his remodeled Reflecting Pool, which is already showing fresh cracks — perhaps a profound symbol for his presidency.
“President Trump in the last two years has basically ignored Congress and tried to do as much as possible through executive orders and executive power,” Nathan Gonzales, editor at the nonpartisan Inside Elections told the Independent. “I think he will only continue if there are Democratic majorities.”
The paper said that history also suggests that while the Democrats are likely to bombard Trump with new legislation, he would do his best to thwart them. “They can send over 50 different great bills that they are all excited about, and I send them back with a nice stamp,” he told FOX News.
Though cornered, the bear still has teeth and claws and can do a lot of damage until he’s finally driven out of his gilded lair.