ORANGE CRUSHED

This Is Humiliated Donald Trump’s Brutal New Nickname

It is a fitting name but not one that Donald Trump is going to like.

Opinion

In the NFL, Mr. Irrelevant is the name given to the last player drafted. In American politics, it may be a title that increasingly fits Donald Trump.

For ten years, Trump was the dominant force on the U.S. political stage. This week, on Tuesday, that changed.

Oh sure, Trump will be around for another two years if his health holds up and he doesn’t decamp for a sunny dacha on the shores of the Black Sea. But with every passing day, with every tick of the clock, he will become less important.

Indeed, figuring out just what his role is likely to be is now a big question. Several DC-based diplomats have asked me my opinion in the past few days about what to expect. Will he just fade away as the battle to be his successor heats up? Will he become erratic and frustrated? Will he focus on foreign policy as lame duck presidents often do? Will his ego lead him to actually try to cut deals with the new Democratic leaders in the House and Senate?

While the answer is very likely to some extent to be all of the above, the most striking factor is that he will find it harder and harder to maintain the spotlight, to throw his weight around, to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to advance his agenda.

Douglas MacArthur said, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” The Wicked Witch of the East said, “I’m melllltttinnnng…” The truth for Trump is likely to be somewhere in between.

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Indeed, for a man who lives for attention, watching himself just fade away… melt away… is likely to be excruciating and, absent some real histrionics or lunacy, very hard to reverse.

In just a couple of days since the election, we have already seen multiple ways Trump’s role has changed and how his future diminution seems foreshadowed.

Within his own party, the buzz is less about him and more about who will succeed him. His own vice president, JD Vance helped trigger that with a social media post that clearly attempted to distance himself from Trump, blaming the Iran War in large part for Tuesday’s election debacle.

Newt Gingrich offered a post saying Vance is tainted by his ugly support of Vivek Ramaswamy’s vile political campaign and ticked off a few names of likely candidates with Marco Rubio being the most prominent of those. Articles have appeared in the media suggesting other potential successors to Trump including, implausibly, Sen. Katie Britt. When a non-entity like Katie Britt crops up as your potential successor the message is clear, you’re light is no longer shining so bright.

Vance is not alone, by the way, in going after Trump, as the party is showing an increasing willingness to distance themselves from him. Ron DeSantis, another potential successor, on Election Day also said the Iran War was behind higher gas prices and to deny that was to try to “gaslight” the American public. Multiple GOPers have done post-election interviews blaming the war or Trump’s tariffs.

In the words of former NJ Gov. Chris Christie, “the Trump era is over.” These are not election analyses. They are post-mortems on a political movement and its leader.

At the same time, we’ve seen the first rumblings of an almost inevitable wave of departures from within the administration as the denizens of MAGAworld seek to cash in on their ties before they become too much of a liability. (It may be too late for that.) DoJ Office of Civil Rights head Harmeet Dillon resigned on Thursday. Stories are circulating that Susie Wiles departure as chief of staff seems inevitable and that she might even be replaced by Stephen Miller. Many rumors and actual departures may follow.

Trump also seems to be willing to sacrifice a few of his closest aides to the political bonfires of the moment in an effort to blunt attacks on himself and his family as stories of his asking friends whether he should fire Pete Hegseth suggest. (Trump said on Thursday he would not cut Hegseth loose but, as everyone knows by now, he has often said that about people he later cans.)

The media are covering different stories this week. They are covering the new faces on the political scene. Schumer. Jeffries. Winners from Tuesday like El Sayed, Andrews, Talarico, Hinojosa, Cooper, Acton, Turek, Hamilton and many others. The stories are about a major turnabout in American politics. The beginning of a new era… and therefore, as suggested by Christie, the end of an era as well.

The great orange orb that shone over us all for a decade seems to be setting.

Soon, Trump will discover he can pass no legislation. His inability to get appointees approved, especially to places like the Supreme Court, has resulted in stories that justices who were once thought to be departing, like Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas, may be forced to stick around for years to come.

Trump says he will threaten to veto legislation from Congress. But Congress has tools at its disposal that may well drive him to distraction too. They can withhold funding. They can conduct investigations. They can dig deep into his administration’s corruption or incompetence… and with every hearing, Trump will be seen less as the most powerful man in the world and more like just another perp in the docket (whether he or anyone close to him ever shows up to testify.)

Further, with every passing day, the biggest story in American politics becomes not Trump or what he did or what he tweeted but the approaching end of his term. Democrats are well positioned to win in 2028 because of Trump’s record, because of the advantages they gained at the state level in this week’s election, because of their shallow bench depth (made shallow in part because Trump made the party all about himself and crushed any independent voices), and because there are plenty of high-quality Dem candidates who will be running for president. It is only natural that they will increasingly become the story, the hot interview, the people headlining rallies, even as the GOP increasingly seeks to distance itself from Trump.

Is it possible that Jon Ossoff or J.B. Pritzker or Andy Beshear or AOC or Wes Moore or Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or Elissa Slotkin or Pete Buttigieg could ever become a more important story than our Donald? Count on it. Indeed, to many in the media and their audiences, as Tuesday indicated, the change of pace will be welcomed.

This will leave Trump to do what lame duck presidents do. He will seek to travel around the world and visit potentates who will treat him like he has grown accustomed to be treated. But he may even have some problems on that front. Some of his relationships have been so tainted by his or his family’s or his Cabinet members’ and their families’ transactional view of life that foreign leaders (like many corporate leaders) will seek distance. It’s not going to be easy for Trump as it has been for some other presidents to glide smoothly to a finish.

This may frustrate him. He is likely to periodically melt down. Who knows, he may demand attention by trying to launch new wars (Cuba) or restart old ones (Iran) or cut headline-making deals (with the Kremlin). He is not completely impotent. He still runs a big government. He has muscles he can flex.

But compared to what he could do when the entire GOP cowered in his presence and world leaders and CEOs kowtowed before him, offering him golden knickknacks, and his Cabinet paid him tributes that would make Kim Jong Un cringe, the next two years will be very different for Donald Trump. Very much less than. Very much more isolated. Very much more frustrating.

And very much closer as January 2029 draws nearer to the obscurity he so richly deserves. Goodbye, Mr. Irrelevant.

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David RothkopfChief Global Affairs Columnist

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