He is clearly weaker—and also more dangerous.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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****NOVEMBER 21, 2025****

On the

**Prospect** website [link removed]

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New York Gets Serious About Food Prices [link removed]

A proposed state antitrust law has the potential to cut food prices, a boon to Mayor-elect Mamdani.

**BY EMMA JANSSEN** [link removed]

[link removed]

The Right-Wing Legal Movement Made Trump a King [link removed]

John Roberts created a monster.

**BY RYAN COOPER** [link removed]

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Panic Tears Through U.S. as Health Insurance Costs Spike [link removed]

The end of expanded subsidies for the Affordable Care Act exchanges means more people will go without health insurance, workers, doctors, and researchers said.

**BY WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH** [link removed]

****Kuttner on TAP****

**Is Trump a lame duck yet?**

**He is clearly weaker—and also more dangerous.**

At several points in the past few months, it looked as if Trump had gone too far and that resistance to his incipient dictatorship had reached a turning point. But each time, it didn’t quite happen.

In mid-September, I wrote **a moderately optimistic piece for the**

**Prospect** [link removed], taking stock of the various elements of resistance, most notably courts and elections. Many readers felt I was being a little too hopeful.

Since Election Day, however, there has been a notable shift. And each aspect feeds on the others. They include:

* A Democratic wave election that is likely to be repeated and intensified in 2026

* Lower courts becoming even bolder in striking down Trump’s excesses

* The Supreme Court likely to overturn three key Trump cases: tariffs, his efforts to fire Federal Reserve governors, and birthright citizenship

* At least some states, such as Indiana and Kansas, resisting Trump’s redistricting demands

* The continuing fallout from the Epstein files

* Republican defections. The most important sign of impending lame-duckery is Republicans finding that they can defy Trump with impunity. The examples are legion. They keep cumulating and nurturing each other.

Trump kept pressuring House Republicans not to sign the discharge petition to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. He threatened to punish Republicans who resisted, but in the end it was Trump who was thoroughly humiliated.

The White House, by trying to delay release of the files by launching a whole new investigation, is miscalculating again. This only keeps Epstein in the headlines: What is Trump hiding?

But the Republicans’ Epstein revolt is only the beginning. Republican legislators have defied Trump’s demand to end the filibuster, his scheme to engage the cost-of-living issue by sending everyone a $2,000 “tariff rebate” check, his proposal for a $10,000 subsidy for people to buy private health insurance, his idea for **50-year mortgages** [link removed], and more. They are not taking him seriously.

Republicans have joined Democrats in expressing unease about his illegal demolition of fishing boats as alleged drug smugglers, his plan for a splendid little war on Venezuela, and his latest pro-Putin scheme to sell out Ukraine.

His threats to primary disloyal Republicans are going nowhere. And the more Republicans are willing to stand up to him, the more his threats ring hollow.

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There is also the sheer incompetence of Trump’s efforts to use selective prosecutions [link removed] to punish political opponents. Trump’s effort to prosecute former FBI director James Comey has turned into an embarrassing fiasco. The Department of Justice admitted that it never presented [link removed] the two-count indictment to the full grand jury.

The appalled magistrate wrote, “If this procedure did not take place, then the court is in uncharted legal territory in that the indictment returned in open court was not the same charging document presented to and deliberated upon by the grand jury.” The whole case may be thrown out.

And Trump’s crony, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, who has combed mortgage records to find ways to prosecute prominent Democrats, is now on the defensive himself, as lawyers challenge his flagrant conflicts of interest. Trump’s minions even managed to bungle a slam dunk by admitting the sheer racism in the Texas redistricting plan, which was then overruled by a three-judge panel, with the most indignant comments coming from a Trump appointee.

Appellate Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote that “it’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors. Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General—who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration—describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally[] unsound,’ ‘baseless,’ ‘erroneous,’ ‘ham-fisted,’ and ‘a mess.’”

Meanwhile, the Republican victory in forcing Democrats to reopen the government with no concessions on health care is looking more and more like a defeat because it keeps the issue of unaffordable health insurance front and center. In the most recent polls, approval of Trump is underwater by 17 points. Even among Republicans, his approval is 68 percent, sharply down from 92 percent in March. As we head into an election year, with Democrats flipping both Houses a distinct possibility, more and more Republican legislators are looking to save their own skins—which gives them more reason to distance themselves from Trump, and the process keeps intensifying.

So are we out of the woods yet? No, we are not.

The more Trump is on the defensive, the more hysterical he becomes. The latest example is his call to execute Democrats who pointed out that the professional military has an obligation to defy illegal commands. Even the White House press office had to walk that back. But Trump is continuing to use carrots and sticks with the corporate parents of media organizations to destroy a free and critical press.

And as an increasingly desperate Trump tries to keep changing the subject and the headlines, watch out for even more reckless foreign-policy adventures.

However, something fundamental has shifted. Trump is not a dead duck yet, but he is increasingly a lame one. And the more he proves impotent to punish defiant Republicans, the more they will keep acting to distance themselves and to weaken Trump.

We may yet redeem our democracy. That seemed a long shot just a few months ago. Not a bad cause for Thanksgiving.

**–ROBERT KUTTNER**

Follow Robert Kuttner on Bluesky [link removed]

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