Is Trump a Lame Duck?

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, December 18, 2025

 

It looked for a moment as if Henry Cuellar’s career might be over. The eleven-term congressman from Texas’s Rio Grande Valley had long fought to retain his seat in this overwhelmingly Hispanic region of the state, facing closer margins over the years as the Republicans gained traction among Latino voters during the worst of the Biden-era illegal-immigration crisis. The voters in Cuellar’s district had, for the first time in history, given their votes to a Republican — Donald Trump carried the district 53–46, in a straight reversal of Biden’s 2020 margin. Statewide Texas Republicans altered his district’s shape to make it slightly redder. And on top of it all, Cuellar was indicted in 2024 on twelve federal charges of bribery, conspiracy, and money-laundering. Would this be the end of the popular, but increasingly threatened, incumbent?

 

Not quite yet. After months of public hemming and hawing about the possibility of running for reelection, Cuellar received a full pardon from none other than President Trump himself, who made it clear he hoped that Cuellar would respond by switching parties — as rumors once circulated that he would, back in the aftermath of the 2022 election — and run for reelection as a Republican. Instead, Cuellar announced that, now legally unencumbered, he would seek reelection as a Democrat. (Trump responded in typical fashion: “Such a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry’s daughters, will not like. Oh’ well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!”)

 

Leave aside that Trump felt free to reveal the anticipated quid pro quo. It was rather brazen of Cuellar to “take the pardon and run,” was it not?

 

The timing was telling. Like any successful veteran politician, Cuellar knows which way the electoral winds are blowing: He no longer has any need for a president whose hostility he has little reason to fear next year. Cuellar is not the only person to openly snub Trump in recent months, merely the one who played him most successfully for a fool. Former MAGA stalwart Marjorie Taylor Greene rounded on Trump months ago for an array of reasons — everything from his support for Israel to his failure to release the so-called Epstein files — but in November announced her resignation from Congress rather than run again in a primary against his wrath. Other House members, with nothing on their legislative agenda, are making noises about early retirement.

 

And, in a stunning rebuke to President Trump’s nationwide campaign to get Republican states to engage in mid-decade redistricting, the Indiana State Senate voted decisively in early December to reject a Trump-backed 9–0 gerrymander of the state’s current GOP-dominated 7–2 delegation. After months of pressure, both public and private, from Trump and his allies, a chamber dominated by Republicans 40–10 ended up voting against Trump’s preferred map by a 31–19 margin — meaning that more than half of the Republican caucus voted against their own party’s bill.

 

The natives have been restless since the November elections. Republicans were jostled from the pleasant daze of 2024 with a cold dose of electoral feedback, awakening to the realization that Trump would never be on the ballot again: Whatever personal electoral appeal he holds disappears with him, leaving behind only the unpopular residue of his economic policies. Trump’s average approval rating now hovers consistently in the lower 40s.

 

The president can still command most of his Republican troops — through appeals to fear more than loyalty — but his House majority is currently as narrow (and as irritating) as a splinter. There isn’t a professional in either party who expects the GOP to retain it after the November elections. And now the old, dreaded question is being whispered around the corridors of power: Is Donald Trump, less than a year into his second term in office, already a lame duck?

 

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The question as posed doesn’t quite make sense, given the changes in American government over the past quarter century in particular. What does the term “lame duck” even mean today? Historically, the label narrowly applied to a session of Congress that sat after the November election but before the next session’s January swearing in, and of which several members had already been voted out of office — but not yet formally replaced — and therefore lacked legislative legitimacy. Over time, the phrase has come by analogy to be more broadly applied to any second-term president whose party has lost control of one or both houses of Congress after his final midterm election. With no more races to run, and unable to push legislation on purely partisan terms, the president is thought to be similarly hobbled.

 

So ask yourself: Does this concept mean anything in the context of Donald Trump’s second term? Arguably not. Can you name the Trump administration’s “big ticket” legislative items, the ones he has tried to cajole lawmakers into sending to his desk? Of course not. The Trump administration, by its own admission, does not have a legislative agenda per se. Trump’s theory of governance is based on his executive decision-making alone. He marshaled his legislative majority precisely once, to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act covering a grab bag of policy items, and since then has ceased even engaging with Congress, deeming it irrelevant to his needs.

 

Instead, Trump has governed, as no other president in modern history has, almost exclusively via the powers of the executive branch. Executive orders, agency and/or administrative reforms, direct presidential oversight of large corporate mergers and acquisitions, nonjusticiable matters of foreign policy: These are the primary arrows in his quiver, with Congress — and at times the judiciary — a hassle to be sidestepped. Trump has conducted his second term as a one-man show, as befits his personality.

 

If this seems like an alarming precedent for a president to be setting, it’s worth noting that the horse arguably escaped from the barn long ago. Congress has been delegating away its powers to the executive branch for nearly a century now, and it seems less likely than ever to reclaim such basic prerogatives as the power of the purse unless the Supreme Court intervenes to shove those powers back into its unwilling hands. More to the point, the modern “executive” style of presidential governance truly took off with Barack Obama and his commitment to act with “a pen and a phone” absent congressional approval. (Make no mistake: Until recently, legislators of both parties welcomed the president’s arrogating difficult decisions to himself so that they themselves would not have to take unpopular votes. But such power, once freely surrendered, is not easily regained.)

 

What use does Donald Trump even have for Congress, in that case? He would prefer they pipe down and keep the lights on, I suppose, but as the recent record-length federal government shutdown demonstrates, not so much that he would deign to negotiate in good faith with either Democrats or (more instructively) his own party’s House members. No, given the president’s current political priorities and his preferred method of acting on them, a Republican Congress serves one purpose alone: to keep the president from being impeached for a third time. Their use is as a shield, not a sword.

 

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And in all likelihood, that shield will be torn away in the coming elections. Trump is acutely aware of this looming impeachment threat: His furious insistence that red states engage in mid-decade gerrymandering to shore up his position is tantamount to an admission of it. But assuming that the Republicans’ jury-rigged electoral bulwark fails in the 2026 elections, he can expect to face a Democratic House implacably set on revenge.

 

So, in a way, that answers the prompt: Is Donald Trump a lame duck? No, not yet. Will he become one if he loses his legislative majority next November? Yes, but not in any way the term has ever been historically understood. Trump will not become a legislative lame duck because Trump’s second term was born as a legislative lame duck by intention, determined as he has been to rely almost exclusively on (spectacularly wide-ranging) interpretations of executive power.

 

Instead, a Democratic Congress will hamper an administration defined by its independence from Congress, simply because it will apply pitiless — and one assumes hysterical — oversight to his every executive action.

 

The president has chosen to govern almost entirely on his own, making deals and setting policy behind closed doors. Because of Trump’s eagerness to yank every lever of power available to the executive branch, he will never be truly ineffectual until he leaves office. In fact, expect the president to lean into his executive powers ever more aggressively as his electoral and persuasive ones fade. Will the Democrats cross the line to impeachment? If so, nobody can predict how that will play — but expect Trump to escalate. The president will retain primary relevance in our political discourse for three more years, no matter what, simply because, as president, he is the Man Who Decides.