The Tribune

with CHARLIE HARPER

WE'RE soon going to become much more familiar with the term ‘lame duck.’ Generally, in politics, a lame duck, or outgoing official, is defined as an elected person whose successor has already been elected or will be soon.

Outgoing politicians often have diminishing influence with other politicians and the general voting public due to their limited remaining time in office. At the same time, though, a lame duck is at least theoretically free to make decisions that exercise the standard powers of his office with little fear of effective political backlash. It is truly awesome to contemplate what that might mean for a certain incumbent US chief executive.

According to published definitions, the first time the phrase lame duck is known to have been used in its metaphorical sense was in 18th century England. It was used at the London Stock Exchange to refer to a stockbroker who had defaulted on his debts.

Describing a politician as a lame duck is probably most common in the United States, but it’s also in contemporary use in Canada, Australia, and Brazil, among other nations.

But pundits on all sides of the American political spectrum are already starting to apply the term to US President Donald Trump, even though he has nearly three years to go in his current and last term at the helm of the American government.

Why is this so?

Probably the biggest single reason is that nearly everyone involved in American politics now believes Trump and the Republicans are going to get trounced in the upcoming November Congressional elections. Punishing the newly-elected American president and his party in the Congressional elections known as the “midterms,” has become the recent political standard, dating back to Ronald Reagan’s tenure in the White House.

Trump and the Republicans got comprehensively beaten in 2018 after his first election, and most observers believe that will happen again in November. The president, always alert to electoral dangers, is already beginning to warn darkly that unless the GOP and Magas rally around him, the party will lose its razor-thin margin of control in the US House of Representatives.

He's warning that a Democratic-controlled House will impeach him for a third time. Given the president’s increasingly reckless behaviour, and the fact that the everyday cost of living has not declined since his inauguration for most Americans, Trump is probably correct in his forecast. (It’s instructive that long prior to Trump’s re-election defeat in 2020, he had publicly identified Joe Biden as his most formidable prospective opponent.)

And even though the schedule of US Senate elections this year overwhelmingly favours Republicans maintaining at least a slim majority there, some are speculating that control of the upper house could also be imperilled. But a 2027 Senate would be no more likely to convict Trump in a potential impeachment trial than it was during his first term in office. 

Viewed from this gloomy election perspective for the president, it seems that Trump really has less than one year in which to pursue his goals. A Democratic House would surely make denying Trump the budgetary latitude he would need to succeed its highest priority. If his recent public behaviour is any indication, he seems like he feels the heat.

Trump also is looking old. He’s going to be 80 this summer, around the same time the US celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence. So his looking older shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. But he has long been obsessed with projecting an image of vitality, strength, and conviction.

Looking weary and less than resolute has not been part of this man’s narrative.

Yet he increasingly shows his age, and it’s hardly surprising. Look at pictures of Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama before they were elected president. Then compare those images to what you see in news accounts today. Being the American president is hard work, no matter how much golf you play or how much time you waste on social media indulgence.

We’ll doubtless hear a lot in the media about how Trump accurately berated Biden for his increasing age-related frailty just a couple of years ago, and how ironic it is that Trump himself may now be excoriated for the same relative weakness.

As the end of his political preponderance looms, Trump is showing the strain. His face--relaxed in almost rhapsodic satisfaction during his televised exchanges with oil company executives after the taking of former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro--is more often tired-looking and, well, old. And his signature mane of blond hair, so carefully coiffed for so many years, looks somehow a bit less glamorous these days. (Is that a bald spot we see, as he is increasingly photographed in unrehearsed spontaneity?)

Trump is right to be concerned. The Republican-controlled Congress, so pliant for the past year, is showing signs of rebellion. On Trump’s continued assault on the independence of the US Federal Reserve Bank and its current chairman (appointed originally by Trump), it looks like Congress may resist the president. His unilateral actions against Venezuela without Congressional approval are virtually certain to provoke a strong, continuing response from the Senate, especially since the administration’s justifications for failure to consult are almost comically weak. The Supreme Court may soon frustrate the president with its decisions as well.

Trump’s corruption of the American Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and their constituent agencies like the FBI and ICE may eventually stimulate a public outcry so loud that the American Congress will need to respond. The tragic and needless shooting of a middle-aged white American mother in Minneapolis will probably not be as quickly forgotten as Trump and his associates hope it will be.

And the Jeffrey Epstein scandal persists, despite the president’s increasingly desperate attempts to push it off the front pages and newscasts with his heightened focus on foreign adventurism. It’s already obvious that Trump is deeply concerned at what a full release of the Epstein papers might reveal about his scandalous personal past. His attorney general, Pam Bondi, has not displayed much skill or cunning in trying to assist in Trump’s obfuscation. The president may already regret not appointing as his top law enforcement official his able former personal attorney Todd Blanche, Bondi’s more capable deputy.

This whole domestic political situation has created the astounding resurrection of former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene as something of an unlikely hero for liberal pundits. She is now potentially the prodigal daughter who has finally returned to her senses after years in the spiritual wilderness of sycophancy to Donald Trump. Huh?

How Trump responds to the current widespread unrest in Iran will bear careful watching. According to published reports, Iranian security forces may have now killed many thousands of protesting citizens. The brutal theocrats in charge in Tehran, whose desperation to cling to power is fuelling their current inhuman response to the current crisis and has evoked worldwide condemnation, have been in charge in Iran for nearly 50 years. Their tenure in an increasingly secular world may not endure.

Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Palestine, Gaza, and Syria have been weakened. Tehran’s long-successful policy of financing chaos and unrest in the Middle East has been discredited – for now. Western sanctions have hobbled the Iranian economy. Iranians have seemingly had enough. Trump is threatening to intervene.

Iran, among the most significant contemporary nations in the Middle East, is an oil-rich nation with a Persian-rooted history that rivals Greece, China, Italy, and Egypt in its rich and lengthy narrative. Iran is home to one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations, first united as a nation in the 7th century BC. It is the centre of Shia Islam, the less widespread but still influential second branch of the world’s second biggest religion.

Trump must be tempted to turn the screws on Tehran’s leadership in various ways. As with Maduro, world opinion would hardly mourn the dethroning of the Ayatollahs. The US has the means to push out the theocrats. Action would distract from Trump’s domestic problems.

What will the president do?