Go ahead and stuff that turkey. Trim the tree. But don’t expect the news to ease up. Not with Donald Trump in so much trouble.
Trump claims sedition post ‘not threatening’ Democrats
President Donald Trump said his sedition post was ‘not threatening’ Democrats during a Fox News interview.
Here come the holidays, and with them that perennial sense of nostalgia. Like, remember when the news cycle used to slow down from Thanksgiving to Christmas?
Go ahead and stuff that turkey. Trim the tree. But don’t expect the news to ease up. Not with Donald Trump in so much trouble.
This November, in the first year of the president’s second term, has piled up losses and embarrassments on top of defeats and disgraces. Trump is irascible in the best of times. Now he’s in full meltdown mode.
So brace yourself for a steady wave of Trump’s distraction tactics as 2025 nears its conclusion.
Trump is already calling to execute members of Congress, lashing out a journalists who ask legitimate questions, and demanding that his complicit appointees at the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute anyone he perceives as an enemy.
He’s just getting started. So much is going wrong. And his knee-jerk instinct here is to deny reality while kicking up a ruckus to distract attention. But reality is starting to win that war.
Trump’s trouble with the truth is starting to show up in polls
Trump, with the assistance of U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, spent four months trying to dodge a congressional push for his administration to release the Epstein files, a massive tranche of documents detailing the terrible crimes attributed to Trump’s former buddy, the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
He failed. In the House, 427 members voted to release the Epstein files, and then no U.S. senator objected when the legislation came up in that chamber. Just one House member voted no. That’s a combined vote of 527-1. Quite a loss, when you consider how Trump is terrified of those files becoming public.
Trump had a short but strong run, forcing his Republican allies in Congress to give up their duty as a coequal branch of government and submit to his every whim. But you can see that starting to stall out.
During the government shutdown, Trump urged Republicans in the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, the procedural requirement for most legislation to gain support from at least 60 of 100 senators. Republican senators openly humored Trump, but it was obvious during that fiasco that they were not going to give him what he wanted.
Trump’s victory in the 2024 president election centered on his two strongest issues: concerns about the economy and illegal immigration. It took him just 10 months to convert those strengths into liabilities.
Trump now treats the word “affordability,” a key factor in significant Democratic election wins earlier this month, like a curse. He doesn’t want to hear about it. Instead, Trump wants to keep insisting that he has already turned around America’s economy and that we’re entering some sort of “golden age.”
Two problems there. First, it’s not true. And second, his own team doesn’t buy it. Vice President JD Vance on Nov. 20 pleaded in an interview for Americans to show “a little bit of patience” until the economy recovers. Why would we need to be patient for something that Trump tells us has already occurred?
Trump’s economic, immigration ploys are sinking his popularity
Knowing that Americans feel the economic pinch, Trump is once again dangling the offer of mailing us all a check. This time, he proposes a $2,000 payment from profits brought in from his disastrous tariffs, which sparked trade wars that only drove up prices for American consumers.
Again, Trump faces problems here. First, the math he uses to calculate that $2,000 makes no sense. And second, his own team and his Republican allies in Congress are not at all on board with this enticement.
On immigration, Trump’s militaristic invasion of American cities and towns has put on display his desire for dystopia –with masked federal agents rampaging through our streets, smashing car windows and racially profiling pedestrians, teargassing and arresting peaceful protesters, and at times detaining American citizens for deportation.
Trump’s “deport them all” approach has been so heavy-handed that it reversed public opinion on immigration. A Gallup poll in July found that just 30% of Americans want immigration reduced in this country, down from 55% in 2024.
Trump’s approval rating, after all that, is abysmal. CNN’s Poll of Polls puts his average approval rating at about 40% while RealClear Polling ranks him about 43% and the Silver Bulletin has him at 41.2%.
Even Fox News, with a team of hosts and pundits who spend most of the day running cover for Trump, has bad polling news for him. It reported on Nov. 19 that 62% of registered voters blamed Trump for the current economic issues, while just 32% blamed former President Joe Biden.
That undercuts Trump’s recent claims that he is successfully restoring the economy after Biden’s term in office.
Maybe Trump turns it all around in 2026, with the midterm elections looming and control of Congress up for grabs. But he has, for now, simply refused to accept that his “golden age” is a mirage and that Americans are not buying it anymore.
Instead, we’ll get fulminations and fury from a frustrated president who can’t deliver on what he promised. And the news cycle will keep spinning through the holidays.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.