{"id":15319,"date":"2025-11-06T09:46:56","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T09:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/donald-trump-enters-his-lame-duck-era\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T09:46:56","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T09:46:56","slug":"donald-trump-enters-his-lame-duck-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/donald-trump-enters-his-lame-duck-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump enters his lame duck era"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Hours after witnessing his party’s worst electoral drubbing in at least six years, President Donald Trump hosted Senate Republicans at the White House and demanded they ditch their chamber’s supermajority rules.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t terminate the filibuster, you\u2019ll be in bad shape,\u201d he told them over breakfast in the State Dining Room.<\/p>\n

It was classic Trump dominance theater, like many other occasions this year where he successfully muscled recalcitrant Republicans to confirm controversial nominees, support divisive policies and enact sweeping domestic policy legislation.<\/p>\n

But upon returning to the Capitol, the senators made it very clear: They planned to blow Trump off<\/a>. One GOP senator, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, laughed out loud when asked about the anti-filibuster push.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the dawn of Trump’s lame duck era.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t expect an immediate stampede away from the president, according to interviews with GOP lawmakers and aides Wednesday \u2014 he remains overwhelmingly popular with GOP voters and is the party\u2019s most dominant leader in a generation. Trump\u2019s top political aide signaled Monday that the White House is not worried about a messy \u201cfamily conversation\u201d about the filibuster.<\/p>\n

But with Tuesday\u2019s stunning election losses<\/a> crystallizing the risks to downballot Republicans in 2026 and beyond, there are growing signs that lawmakers are contending with the facts of their political lives: He’ll be gone in just over three years, while they’ll still be around.<\/p>\n

The danger for the president is that if Trump can’t run roughshod over the thin GOP congressional majorities, it would leave him few legislative options given his scant interest in compromising with Democrats.<\/p>\n

One Republican already liberated from reelection concerns openly vocalized frustrations Wednesday as Trump pushed for the end of the filibuster \u2014 something many in the GOP fear would backfire soon enough once Democrats regain power.<\/p>\n

Retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) called Democrats\u2019 victory margins Tuesday \u201ca red flag to the GOP\u201d and blasted Trump\u2019s refusal to engage with the other party.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has zero ability to work across the aisle,\u201d he added. \u201cHe needs to face reality and learn how to talk to Democrats he can reason with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other House Republicans more quietly aired frustration with Trump\u2019s approach to the record 37-day shutdown, which headed into the end of the congressional workweek with no clear end in sight.<\/p>\n

Many are privately signaling they\u2019re prepared to break with Trump if he doesn\u2019t allow Republicans to negotiate on an extension of the Obamacare insurance subsidies Democrats are demanding. Others blamed the president and his top budget aide, Russ Vought, for favoring hardball moves such as canceling blue-state transportation projects and firing federal employees that only served to cause Democrats to dig in further.<\/p>\n

One irate senior House Republican granted anonymity to speak candidly blamed Trump and Vought for spurring the shutdown with their unprecedented move to unilaterally rescind congressional funding over the summer through a so-called pocket rescission.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat decision is why we’re in this mess,\u201d the Republican said.<\/p>\n

Democrats who on Wednesday finally found a bounce in their step after a year of infighting said it was no secret why Republicans were finally standing up to Trump over the filibuster after folding so many times before.<\/p>\n

\u201cLast night’s results look like a recipe for them to lose the House and the Senate next fall,\u201d said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). \u201cAnd they’re going to hand us a 50-vote majority gift-wrapped when we show up Day 1?\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump on Wednesday night moved to buck up his faithful. \u201cOUR MOVEMENT IS FAR FROM OVER \u2014 IN FACT, OUR FIGHT HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN!\u201d he wrote in a Truth Social post<\/a> with an upbeat video.<\/p>\n

That followed a day on defense, where GOP leaders conspicuously split with Trump on the reasons for the stunning Republican losses.<\/p>\n

Both Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune played down the Democratic victories, casting them as expected losses in blue states \u2014 never mind that the margins in New Jersey and Virginia far outstripped expectations and that Democrats also won big in Georgia, Mississippi<\/a> and Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

Trump, on the other hand, told senators at the breakfast that the shutdown played a \u201cbig role\u201d in the GOP losses. Asked about that assessment, Johnson replied, \u201cI don’t think the loss last night was any reflection about Republicans at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

What GOP lawmakers do know is that there is a dramatic difference in their party\u2019s performance in elections where Trump appears on the ballot versus the midterm and off-year contests where he\u2019s not \u2014 no matter how many rallies he does or endorsements he doles out.<\/p>\n

They also know, third-term musings of questionable constitutionality aside, Trump will never run for office again \u2014 which had many acknowledging that, if not fully reckoning with, the fact it might not be a great idea to hew so closely to Trump\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump drives turnout, and if he’s not on the ballot, the turnout is way down,\u201d Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.<\/p>\n

Cornyn questioned whether the Tuesday elections \u201cprove very much\u201d and was one of the few GOP senators who said Wednesday he was newly open to considering changes to the filibuster after meeting with Trump. He could be considered the exception who proves the rule: Cornyn needs to stay in Trump\u2019s good graces amid a fierce primary battle for reelection next year.<\/p>\n

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said voter dropoff in non-Trump years is \u201can issue for Republicans\u201d and suggested the party should consider changing the filibuster to \u201cdo things that benefit the American public \u2026 secure the border, repair the damage done by Obamacare, transition to a system that works, secure elections.\u201d<\/p>\n

But with Thune making clear the Senate\u2019s rules aren\u2019t changing \u2014 \u201cI just know where the math is on this issue,\u201d the majority leader said \u2014 Johnson put the focus on GOP voter behavior.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople need to understand: If you want to keep Trump’s agenda moving forward, you\u2019ve got to come out in midterms,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Discussion has ramped up among senators about not only changing the filibuster but also trying to pass a new party-line reconciliation bill under the budget rules the GOP used to enact their megabill this summer. The suggestion came up at the White House breakfast, according to senators.<\/p>\n

But there are huge obstacles to going down that road. The GOP still has a super-tight margin in the House, four senators can kill any party-line effort, Senate rules restrict what initiatives can be passed under budget rules and Republicans are far from united on what they would want to do with a reconciliation bill in the first place.<\/p>\n

James Blair, political director for Trump\u2019s 2024 campaign and the RNC who now serves as a deputy White House chief of staff, rejected the notion that lawmakers will treat Trump as a lame duck in an interview for Blue Light News\u2019s \u201cThe Conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t think Republicans are going to do that at all,\u201d he said. \u201cThe president, you know, sort of has his way of communicating, but the senators have their way, and it’s a family at the end of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some GOP senators, he added, \u201chave long relationships, and they hope somehow the Democrat fever will break one day. And I think the president’s view is, it’s not breaking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dasha Burns, Mia McCarthy and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hours after witnessing his party’s worst electoral drubbing in at least six years, President Donald Trump hosted Senate Republicans at the White House and demanded they ditch their chamber’s supermajority rules. \u201cIf you don\u2019t terminate the filibuster, you\u2019ll be in bad shape,\u201d he told them over breakfast in the State Dining Room. It was classic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}