Losing Loser Keeps Losing

And yet Trump isn't exactly an impotent president. Confused? Yeah.

Donald Trump is defeated all the time, and perhaps this week was some sort of record for that. At least so far. He lost several times in various courts. He had a Jimmy Carteresque day in Congress on Thursday, losing votes on Venezuela in the Senate and on health insurance in the House; he did have his two vetoes sustained in the House, but with quite a few Republicans voting against him; and then for good measure the Senate passed a resolution by unanimous consent to find a prominent place in the Senate to commemorate the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Congress is also ignoring quite a few of his requests in newly-written spending bills.

Meanwhile pretty much every European nation (and plenty of people in the US, including Republicans) condemned his Greenland dreams, while Big Oil went to the White House and emerged without much interest at all for his Venezuela plans for them. It’s not clear, too, exactly how much influence the US actually has in Venezuela right now; almost certainly it’s at least somewhat less than Trump seems to think.

That’s a lot of losing.

At the same time…Trump continues to act, and while plenty of what he claims to be doing never happens, some of it really does. He may or may not be running Venezuela, or even toppled the regime, but he certainly did snatch away Nicolas Maduro. He definitely has built up ICE, and his administration has deployed it to terrorize one city after another. Elon Musk’s operation may have been mostly phony, but that and other congressional and administration actions really have reduced the federal workforce by over 200,000 people, with all sorts of real consequences.¹

Frankly I think it’s extremely difficult to accurately characterize the combination of those two things.

It’s simply not true that Trump is a dictator who gets his way on everything; I’m not really convinced that he’s even a president who gets more than the usual amount of things he wants to happen. The more I hear people say that, the more I want to emphasize that he really is a losing loser who keeps losing. And that time after time he announces policies and even events that just don’t happen.

At the same time, it’s also very obviously true that he is disrupting one thing after another. His presidency is somehow both getting much stronger and much weaker at the same time, and even through the same events.

One small-scale example? The Kennedy Center fiasco. Trump really has succeeded in taking it over. That really happened. And while he has no legal authority to do so, he really did put his name on the building, and his flunkies and enablers and allies are treating it as if the “new name” is real.

Yet it’s also a series of unnecessary defeats for him, as one after another performer refuses to appear in Trump’s Kennedy Center, and ticket sales have cratered. Indeed: Trump may have the building, but he doesn’t have the institution at all.²

There’s plenty to say about the “why” of all this. But just at the basic “what” level – how to characterize Trump’s influence over policy and the nation – it’s extremely difficult to clearly articulate it.

And my sense is that all of that accelerated – in both directions! – during this last week. You would think it can’t go on like that indefinitely. But I really have no idea.

Well, at least if I can’t give you a definitive answer there, at least I can solidly recommend a nice slate of links:

1. Heather Sullivan at Good Authority on Venezuela’s future.

2. Dan Drezner on the chaotic world Trump is creating.

3. A whole bunch of Brookings folks on Venezuela – see in particular Elizabeth Saunders, Caitlin Talmadge, and Kelebogile Zvobgo – and see too Sarah Binder and others here.

4. Matt Grossmann talks with Agustin Markarian about which groups Republicans and Democrats reward.

5. Seth Masket on Trump’s lawlessness

6. Don Moynihan on Trump’s “clicktatorship.”

7. Lindsey Cormack on how members of Congress talk about Somali and Somalians.

8. Miranda Yaver on civility.

9. Daniel Ziblatt on January 6.

10. And Matt Glassman has some predictions for 2026.

1. Of course those consequences may not be what Trump wants. More broadly, there’s an extremely important distinction here between what Trump wants and what others within the administration or elsewhere wants and manipulate him into supporting.

2. Similarly, he definitely did achieve knocking down a chunk of the White House…but it’s yet to be seen whether he’ll actually build his ballroom.