Trump is running against the clock
Plus: Hegseth fiasco, Trump $1 coin, Keir Starmer's woe, Saudi comedy fest
In January, days after Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time, British analyst Andrew Payne noted the president’s “extraordinary degree of political power.”
“Some describe him as a dictator, a king, or even an emperor—and for now, that perception is not entirely unfounded.” But Payne predicted that “no leader, not even Trump, is immune to the constraints of political time.”
“As a second-term president, his authority faces an unavoidable expiration date. Unless he succeeds in changing the Constitution—an unlikely prospect—his presidency will end in four years.” Payne also cited the Republicans’ “razor-thin” margins in the House and Senate as a huge limitation on Trump’s power, along with the predictable emergence of a contest among Republicans to succeed Trump in the 2028 election.
For the last eight months, Trump has looked more like an emperor than a lame-duck president. He cowed senators into confirming extreme loyalists, often with scant qualifications, for top jobs in his administration. He slashed foreign aid and thousands of jobs in federal agencies.
He maneuvered his “one big beautiful bill,” with its tax cuts and immigration enforcement spending into law. He won one temporary victory after another with the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, through its “emergency docket.” He intimidated several major media outlets into silencing critics, and got some major law firms to bend to his will. He drastically curtailed illegal immigration to the U.S. and unleashed ICE agents to use military tactics to round up immigrants in Chicago and other cities.
Yet, at this moment, it appears that Payne’s prediction of the eventual waning of Trump’s power may still be on target. By refusing to approve a government spending bill in the Senate, Democrats are forcing him to take ownership of sharply rising Obamacare insurance premiums for next year, with all of the potential political costs that would entail.
The Supreme Court slowed down Trump’s effort to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook by scheduling arguments over the matter in January. The Court is also likely to rule this term on the sweeping tariffs Trump imposed unilaterally and possibly on the merits of his effort to overturn birthright citizenship.
But most significantly, Trump could lose his House majority in the midterm elections a year from November. He is an unpopular president. Only 43% of Americans approve of his performance as president; 54% disapprove, according to The New York Times polling average. The newspaper’s most recent poll gives Democrats a two-percentage point edge over Republicans in the generic ballot for Congress. A House of Representatives under the gavel of Hakeem Jeffries would likely be the most significant roadblock yet to Trump’s imperial agenda.
Big unknown
One big unknown is the economy. Job growth has sputtered out and people appear gloomy about the outlook. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that, “In private conversations with the president, Trump’s advisers, rather than dwell on shaky economic data, have painted a rosy outlook, insisting that data will begin to improve in the first quarter of 2026, according to people familiar with the matter, including senior administration officials.“
One year ago, in Saginaw, Michigan, Trump told a campaign rally, “Starting on day one of my new administration, we will end inflation, and we will make America affordable again.” That hasn’t happened by any means; the rise in prices has been above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target and Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs may not yet have been fully factored into the inflation numbers.
According to a recent survey by Pew Research Center, “Around three-quarters of Americans (74%) describe economic conditions as only fair or poor — similar to the 72% who said this in January 2024. That includes 56% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats.”
Trump still commands the news agenda, and by federalizing national guard units or deploying federal troops in one city after another (Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago…and even New York, assuming Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor), he can generate endless headlines.
With Trump’s unconventional administration, there’s no telling where his instincts could lead the nation. But the past few weeks have provided the first hints of some effective checks and balances on Trump’s power.
Here are some stories that caught my eye in the past week:
Revealing times
“Power doesn’t always corrupt,” biographer Robert Caro said. “What power always does is reveal.” The job of secretary of defense (or of war) is all about power. His department employs more than 2 million people and spends nearly $900 billion a year.
Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to dramatize his power last week, when he called more than 800 high-ranking generals and admirals to Quantico, Va., ranted about “fat generals” and “beardos,” woke views, diversity, physical training standards and just about every superficial feature of military life without ever seriously tackling strategy, national security and the world outside the Pentagon.
If his power trip revealed anything, it was his staggering lack of ability to lead. The reviews were brutal.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who served in Ronald Reagan’s White House, observed:
When you are driven by a sense of urgency you must still try to act like a normal person—normal in your comportment, which means sober, judicious. Not like some pumped-up drama queen who makes everything more jarring and fevered, and who comes across as the living answer to the question, “What would it look like if Captain Queeg took Adderall?…
Mr. Hegseth could have reiterated all this by secure video conference, or just sent a video.
Instead he dragged commanders from their stations to be his audience. So he could pose with a giant American flag behind him like George C. Scott in “Patton,” only Scott delivered a great speech. Mr. Hegseth gave a TED Talk, a weirdly self-reverential one. He paced the stage like a strutting, gelled bantam, like an amped-up actor with rehearsed gestures and expressions and voice shifts.
The war within
Richard Haass, emeritus director of the Council on Foreign Relations focused on Trump’s speech to the military brass:
…what caught my attention more than anything else was President Trump’s rambling set of remarks in which, among a good many other things, he spoke of the need to fight the “war from within.” He went on to declare that “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
This comment raises the concerning possibility that the administration is preparing to dispatch the military to cities inside the United States, possibly under the authority of the Insurrection Act of 1807. This law allows a president to circumnavigate another law, the Posse Comitatus Act, that limits the use of the military within the country. The concern with this brazen move is that the objective would have little to do with promoting order (which is not in any real jeopardy) than to create an environment in which those supporting Democratic candidates are intimidated or blocked from voting so that Republicans manage to hold on to the House of Representatives in the midterms and the White House in 2028.
The Trump coin
The U.S. Treasury Department is making plans to mint a $1 commemorative coin marking the nation’s 250th birthday. According to Treasurer Brandon Beach’s post on X, the “first drafts” of the coin do indeed feature images of President Donald Trump on both sides:
Whether we’ll ever see such a coin is unclear, since U.S. law forbids the depiction of a living person on real currency. According to Allen Rappeport of The New York Times, “It is not clear that Mr. Trump’s image can be featured on a coin. An 1866 law enshrined a tradition that only deceased people could appear on U.S. currency to avoid the appearance that America was a monarchy.”
The Times added:
An explanation of the legislation on an archived page from the Treasury’s website noted that the act “was caused by an uproar over the actions of the chief of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Spencer Clark,” who had “placed himself on a five-cent note and had a large quantity of them printed before it was noticed.”
That webpage has been removed from the Treasury’s website.
A prime minister’s prime worry
If Trump worries about his low approval rating, he should consider himself fortunate that he is not Keir Starmer, the U.K.’s prime minister. As Andrew Sullivan wrote, a recent poll gave Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, an approval rating of only 18 percent. Sixty-one percent of those polled disapproved of his tenure so far. “His government, just a year old, is polling around 19 percent,” Sullivan noted. “And in his first year in office, the new anti-immigration Reform Party has doubled its support from 15 to around 31 percent.”
Sullivan added:
This, to put it mildly, is an earthquake. A party barely a year old is almost more popular than the Tories and Labour combined. On paper, Starmer still has four years to right the ship. But in reality, a prime minister who is loathed by four out of five Brits is like Wile E Coyote five feet off the cliff edge.
Comedy war
Some of America’s top standup comics took part in a controversial comedy festival in Saudi Arabia. W. Kamau Bell wrote:
Tim Dillon is a Rogansphere comic who was booked to perform on the festival, but he was uninvited after he made some jokes on his podcast about Saudi Arabia’s use of slave labor.AWWWWWWKWAAAAAAARD! According to Dillon, he was going to be paid $375,000 for one performance. Apparently, that was a middle class wage for this festival. According to Dillon, lesser known comedians are being paid $150,000 for one performance and the top comics are being paid $1.6 million. I have a hard time believing that top number though. I just can’t believe that $1.6 million gets Kevin Hart or Dave Chappelle off the couch. But then again, maybe I don’t believe it, because $1.6 million wouldn’t be enough for me to go to Saudi Arabia and take the government’s money. And I could use that money. These kids won’t stop eating.
Although, to be clear, I wasn’t invited.
Jamal Khashoggi
Karen Attiah, who was Jamal Khashoggi’s editor at The Washington Post, wrote on October 2:
Seven years ago today, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi went into a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He was trying to get papers to proceed with marrying his then-fiancée, Hatice Cengiz.
He never returned alive…
Instead, he was murdered — and reportedly dismembered by Saudi agents dispatched to Turkey to dispose of him. The CIA determined that the murder was approved by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
This piece about Jamal should have been in the Washington Post. The paper accepted international glory, Pulitzer finalist recognitions, and all manner of accolades for keeping the story of his murder alive in the months after his death.
Attiah was fired by The Washington Post, which criticized her social media comments in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The paper has gutted its opinion section and is reconstituting it along the lines of the “personal liberties and free markets” stance endorsed by its owner Jeff Bezos.
Attiah said, “I was unjustly fired after 11 years, for doing my job, expressing the truth about race and violence in America.”