The lame duck dictatorship
Trump is fighting his "war within" on multiple fronts and losing them all.
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Democrats of all ideological persuasions correctly rebuked the decision of eight senators to accept a deal to end the shutdown without meaningful GOP concessions.
But the unforced error by that small cohort shouldn’t blind Democrats to the dramatic shift in political fortunes against the Republican Party that’s occurred or to the need to remain focused on doing everything possible to enhance the growing political crackup of the GOP as Donald Trump enters the lame duck period of his dictatorship.
The rationale for the shutdown “deal” was rooted in received wisdom that government shutdowns inevitably work to the political determinant of their proponents.
It’s true that Republican legislators in 1995-96 and 2013, and then President Donald Trump in 2018-19, created huge messes for Republicans by using shutdowns to coerce Democrats into abandoning their core commitments, including by trying to force an end to the implementation of the ACA and to fund the building of a Berlin Wall-like structure on the southern border.
But the 2025 shutdown was based on an entirely different political calculation, honed by Democratic leadership in the House and Senate to focus on a point of major GOP vulnerability: The MAGA scheme to undermine the ACA, legislation supported by a supermajority of Americans and a program on which many Republicans rely for health coverage.
Democrats made a single shutdown demand: the continuation of the enhanced ACA tax credits, an action Trump’s own pollsters predicted Republicans would pay a huge political price for opposing. That’s why Republicans were on the losing end of the political battle over the past couple months.
From the outset, a majority of Americans bucked the historical norm by not blaming Democrats for causing the shutdown. Instead, they (rightly) found Trump and his captive Republican Party culpable for opposing the Democrats’ reasonable (and popular) healthcare demands.
More, weeks into the shutdown, Democrats on November 4 won race after race up and down the ballot and across the country. The next morning, Trump, in a rare recognition of reality, conceded that public rage at the shutdown was one of the keys to Republicans’ loss.
Despite the unforced error that prematurely ended the shutdown, it’s increasingly clear that Trump and his captive political party are in the midst of a political reversal — one that Democrats must now do everything possible to accelerate.
Every major “policy” of Trump’s Republican Party is unpopular, and the regime’s leader is a lame duck dictator who is poised to draw his party deeper into a political abyss.
Revenge of the safety net
In the wake of the shutdown, the GOP has, once again, fully identified itself as a fierce opponent of affordable healthcare, an identification that has been politically disastrous for the party before.
In 2018, Republicans lost a wave midterm election in the wake of their failed scheme to destroy the ACA. Since that time, Obama’s signature legislation has only become more popular, and working- and middle-class Republicans have only become more dependent upon it, predictably making Republicans’ latest kneecapping efforts a political weight that will continue to drag the party down.
During the shutdown, the Republican assault on the safety net — including Medicaid and SNAP — suddenly became front page news.
Trump’s agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, and House Speaker Mike Johnson went before the cameras to declare the “silver lining” of the shutdown was its exposure of the purportedly “fraudulent” nature of SNAP, a program that, literally, keeps millions of Americans (many of them children) from starving.
Amplifying his stooges’ message of performative cruelty, Trump procured multiple rulings from the Supreme Court allowing him to keep food out of the mouths of babies, one even after the shutdown “deal” was reached.
Many SNAP recipients count themselves among Trump’s supporters and are all the more dependent on the program at a time of increasing grocery inflation. Polls showing massive public disapproval of Trump’s stewardship of the economy, as well as the November 4 electoral rebukes, demonstrate that Trump and his party wildly misread the national mood.
This week, Rollins has been doing the TV rounds and asserting that Trump is desperately trying to save SNAP from an imaginary onslaught of fraud, waste, and abuse.
But nobody — and certainly not those Trumpers tried to starve — is likely to buy it.
Democracy stands strong
Following Trump’s victory last year, it became conventional beltway wisdom that Republicans can engage in frontal assaults on democracy without facing blowback from voters. That theory is now taking a blow.
Trump recently demanded that Republican legislators in red states engage in brazen mid-decade gerrymandering of House districts as part of a desperate attempt to blunt voters all but certain rebuke him and his party next year. Once again, reality intervened, as a measure sponsored by California Gov. Gavin Newsom to counter-gerrymander his state’s House districts not only passed, but won overwhelmingly.
It has now become more likely that similar actions will be taken in other blue states, including the now solidly Democratically controlled Virginia, and that opposing Trumpers’ assault on democracy will be an effective organizing tool for Democrats.
To add insult to injury, a three judge panel just ruled that the Texas super-gerrymander Trump ordered can’t be implemented in 2026, requiring Trump to rely on his pliant Supreme Court majority to salvage that gambit.
Another piece of received wisdom held that Trump’s assaults on immigrants, and indeed entire US cities, would not move the political needle. After all, pundits spent the last year touting the political power of Trump’s brutal immigration policies.
But it turns out that most Americans are not cool with the images of masked thugs beating, gassing, and kidnapping migrants and citizens alike on the streets from coast to coast. Trump’s approval rating on his “signature” issue of immigration is now 11 percent underwater, and opponents of his militarized anti-immigration scheme were elected across the country.
Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a swing county in a swing state, elected a Democratic district attorney for the first time since the 19th century. That gained a great deal of attention. But the fact that voters of that heavily suburban and rural county also tossed their Republican sheriff out of office after he attempted to make his deputies junior ICE agents spoke even louder about how swing voters feel about what Trump himself recently described as his “war within” America.
Trump’s latest invasion of North Carolina has been met with rapidly organized non-violent opposition and seems likely to result in another political backfire in a state with a critical upcoming senate race. Much of the resistance emanates from churches, demonstrating once again how repulsed many Americans are by Trump’s war on the nation he was elected to lead.
The failing coverup
This week also provided a reminder of the political vulnerability that began ripping the Republican Party apart last summer: Trump-Epstein. Not since Watergate has a president so intently focused on, and risked his political capital by, keeping a set of documents secret.
Trump and his stooges were willing to force the GOP to endure the political damage of the shutdown because Trump knew that, when Congress returned, the pressure to release more Epstein materials would return. Indeed, the emails that dribbled out last week, including words from Epstein himself about Trump’s culpable knowledge, demonstrate why Trump fears opening of the DOJ’s Epstein files to the public.
Yet, after threatening the few GOP signatories to the Epstein files discharge petition to no avail — and publicly breaking with his once staunch ally Marjorie Taylor Greene — Trump found himself forced to endorse the legislation, which was virtually unanimously passed in both houses of Congress. By quasi-supporting it, Trump was able to pretend he had not suffered a huge political reversal. But nobody but The Donald believes it.
The Trump-Epstein revelations threaten to implicate Trump in a child sex abuse scheme that Greene and other MAGA conspiracists have long defined as the epicenter of the “corruption” they (however absurdly) believed Trump was destined to fight. While most Trump followers may not share Greene’s belief that a Jewish conspiracy controls everything from space lasers to the Epstein files and that Democrats live on a diet of kidnapped babies, they have long convinced themselves that Trump was on the side of the “forgotten men and women” against the evils they identified.
So being repeatedly confronted with stark evidence that he was actually at the side of Epstein is causing a political fissure Trump cannot undo — one that is only bound to grow as Trump’s desperate coverup scheme continues to blow up in his face.
The beginning of the end
The abortive end to the shutdown demonstrated how not to oppose Trumpism, but recent weeks also offered many examples of how to do so successfully.
It’s now clear that potent opposition to the dictatorship requires concerted efforts by actors across the country, both in and out of government, all directed at bringing every abuse of the regime and its dictator to the attention of a public that is already alarmed.
In DC — where the January 30 expiration of the recently passed continuing resolution is already approaching — Democrats must continue to force Republicans to choose between the wishes and needs of their constituents and the demands of their increasingly unpopular leader. Trump’s intransigence will be their greatest ally in this endeavor.
Despite the absence of any colorable GOP alternative, Trump has now demanded that congressional Republicans oppose continuation of the enhanced ACA tax credits. That leaves Republicans with a stark choice between defying their lame duck dictator and being blamed for forcing many of their constituents to choose between healthcare and bankruptcy.
Congressional Democrats must also use the budget negotiations to force Republicans to go on record for (or against) funding further violent invasions of the nation’s cities, suburbs, factories, and farms, which the Trump regime gives every indication of being determined to continue despite growing public backlash.
And, in the face of Trump’s likely efforts to stonewall the release of the Epstein files, Democrats must continue to focus the nation on Trump’s desperate effort to hide his sordid past from the nation, which will inevitably, and properly, increase the public’s growing disgust at him.
Finally, as demonstrated by the elections Republicans just decisively lost, Trump can’t prevent the growth of opposition to him. To the contrary, his thugs’ invasions of communities around the country are giving rise to more organized and determined community-based opposition. Cultivating the rejection of Trumpism at the community level, as well as in DC and state capitols, is essential to the nation’s survival as a democracy.
That’s it for today
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Great recap, Public Notice… I keep thinking we need to hear from Jack Smith… How do we get him in front of Congress? Does Epstein appear in any of his investigations? Can we connect this to any of Trump’s treasonous behavior? The dots are all connecting to one conclusion…. 47 will do anything to stay out of prison.
That image says everything: the archaic world is still in charge, and cruelty remains the currency of power.
A wannabe Authoritarian Standing shoulder to shoulder with Middle Eastern dictators isn’t just optics, it’s a behavioral signal.
The performance of dominance, the rejection of accountability, the ritual of shamelessness…all of it is inherited, rehearsed, and exported.
In my recent piece The Farce of Justice: Built on Women’s Pain, I trace how this same architecture plays out in the U.S. justice system. Women are punished for surviving violence. Vulnerability is criminalized. Meanwhile, powerful men (whether celebrities or heads of state) walk away untouched. The system doesn’t malfunction. It performs exactly as designed.
This article makes clear that Trump’s lame duck status doesn’t mean retreat, it means consolidation. He’s aligning with regimes that treat dissent as treason and cruelty as law. That photo isn’t incidental. It’s a portrait of the world we’re still living in: archaic, patriarchal, and shamelessly authoritarian.
The question now isn’t whether we see it. It’s whether we’re ready to dismantle it. Not just the figureheads, but the architecture itself…the rituals, the incentives, the inherited machinery of domination.
We name the farce.
We refuse its terms.
And we build something that doesn’t require cruelty to function.
Stop the BS now, enough is enough!
—Johan