A year ago, President-Elect Donald Trump was faced with one mirage and one trap. He got suckered by the first and walked right into the second.
The mirage was the amount of power he would wield. Having won a trifecta of control in elected government—the presidency and majorities in the U.S. House and Senate—and spewing the kind of manic vitriol usually associated with Elon Musk on ketamine, Trump thought he could cow any opposition and get anything he wanted.
But as I wrote at the time, the shimmering post-election heat was distorting the picture. Congressional Republicans are actually fractious at best, like a room of feral cats the rest of the time—which is why Trump passed only one major piece of legislation in his first term and Republican House speakers last as long as the average mayfly. The closer we got to the 2026 midterms, the harder those cats would be to herd as voters assumed their usual backlash posture. Along the way, the judiciary would throw mountains of sand in the gears.
Still, Trump could do a lot through the executive branch, if only he could stay out of a certain catch-22 trap he had set for himself.
Trump was determined to get rid of the “Deep State”—the people in the agencies that implement the laws passed by Congress. The kinds of people who might object to blatantly illegal or just plain terrible ideas. But, as I also wrote a year back, the problem with replacing competent professionals is that you end up with incompetent amateurs. So if Trump succumbed to his addiction to loyal yes-men, it would put the most powerful tools of his presidency into the hands of the MAGA Keystone Cops.
That’s exactly how things played out: Trump sprung the trap, and now the mirage has lifted.
Trump’s unqualified hacks made a spectacularly shambolic hash of nearly everything they touched. The highest-profile and cringiest episode was the “Liberation Day” tariffs—the foundation of Trump’s entire economic and foreign relations policy, hence the kind of presidential initiative that would normally be developed and vetted by hundreds of qualified professionals. Instead, those tariffs appeared to have been generated by ChatGPT (really), targeted islands inhabited only by penguins, rested on an obvious legal sinkhole and incited such immediate economic disaster that Trump was forced to pull the plug.
The list of self-owns, stepped-on rakes and ham-fisted blunders goes on and on.
The centerpiece of Trump’s revenge campaign—charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York’s Attorney General Letitia James—collapsed because the incompetent Attorney General Pam Bondi illegally appointed the incompetent prosecutor Lindsey Halligan to replace the competent professionals who refused to charge these flimsy cases (this likely saved Halligan from seeing the charges dismissed due to basic legal procedural steps that she flubbed).
Bondi’s DOJ also blew up Trump’s big Texas gerrymander by demanding it in a letter so legally idiotic that a Trump-appointed judge cited it as the core proof in his overturning decision. It was the equivalent of bank robbers putting both their heist plan and confession on a sheet of paper and mailing it to the cops.
An attempt to do away with National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review to speed up the infrastructure permitting process (and to “own the libs”) is creating such massive legal and procedural confusion that projects are becoming even more paralyzed. The maneuver to shift Education Department grant money to the Labor Department was so botched that the larger plan to do away with Education as an agency is in jeopardy.
Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders were so sloppily drafted that they fell into a judicial morass. Waves of personnel firings turned into political blowback and immediate rehirings in a recursive roundabout worthy of MC Escher. The Brookings Institution actually tracked 26,511 of these misadventures, including comical attempts to get rid of the folks who guard our nuclear weapons, protect us from Ebola and avian flu and inspect our food.
As the trap has crushed much of Trump’s executive branch actions, the rest of the mirage has evaporated as expected. Trump has actually passed two meaningful pieces of legislation … but they’re not going great for him. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” was such a PR disaster that Trump has been furiously trying to rebrand it, and the vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files wasn’t exactly part of Trump’s agenda. Prospects for further Trump-favored bills before the midterms are dimming.
And as expected, the courts have significantly slowed the administration’s roll, ruling against them in nearly half the lawsuits filed, with another third still pending. The midterm blue wave backlash is gathering, with the generic ballot lurching in the Democrats’ favor and Trump’s popularity cratering.
To be sure, Trump has done grievous damage. But he’s also been his own worst enemy, and his power is only dwindling.
Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host and former congressional staffer.
The views in this article are the writer’s own.
