Trump is becoming a lame duck

As President Trump, flanked by a couple dozen Republican lawmakers, signed legislation reopening the government after the longest government shutdown in U.S. history last night, he threw out a claim about the price of a Thanksgiving meal at Walmart supposedly costing 25% less this year than last year. (According to Factcheck.org, the 2025 meal doesn’t have as many or the same items as 2024’s.) But the gimmicky claim only showed how out of touch Trump is with the experience of most Americans who actually go to the grocery store on a regular basis and face not only rising food costs, but higher housing, energy, health care, and other costs.

Then he threw out an even more half-baked thought saying Americans should stop paying health insurance companies, and pay for health care that way. Even if conceptually the idea was worth spit-balling, say at a bar, it was, in typical Trump fashion, not even a gesture to an actual plan that will help a single American actually be able to pay for their health care in a concrete way in the near term. Real people like the over 22 million Americans, 45% of are whom in Trump-voting states, who rely on federal tax credits to pay for their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. (This was the issue that Senate Democrats had demanded a vote on in order to agree to vote for a continuing resolution to fund the government, until eight Senate Democrats joined Republicans to vote to reopen the government on Sunday.)

Then, as reporters tried to ask Trump questions about explosive new Jeffrey Epstein emails concerning him that had been released by House Democrats yesterday, the White House cut off the livestream feed.

For the first nine/ten months of Trump’s second term, it seemed that he wielded virtually unchecked power, with a supplicant Republican Senate, House and Supreme Court, incompetent but purely loyal cabinet chiefs like Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi in place solely because they would not refuse Trump’s illegal demands to use US troops against Americans in American cities, and to prosecute Trump’s perceived political critics, or pardon his corrupt henchmen, which he continues to do at an astonishing pace.

But in the past week, Trump’s power has been facing a