President Donald Trump will be in Dallas next week to headline a two-day GOP convention. But many Republican lawmakers and candidates reportedly have other plans — or aren’t sure about attending. While the party’s congressional leadership will attend, of the 70 members of Congress or would-be members Politico surveyed, “most either do not plan to attend or are still weighing whether to go. Dozens more declined to share their plans.”
This is how an unpopular president becomes a lame duck.
The reasons for non-attendance abounded: “I just felt I’d be more useful in my district,” said Michigan’s Tom Barrett. “I’m not a party guy,” said Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick. “Rep. Nick LaLota, R-N.Y., said he instead plans to visit colleges with his daughter,” Politico reported.
Every chief executive’s influence wanes in their final years in the Oval Office. But how early that decline starts varies from president to president.
Sincere or not, the rationales also likely stem from one number: 35.9%. That’s Trump’s average approval rating according to FiftyPlusOne. Other polling averages have the president a point or two higher, but in all averages, the president is at or near record-low approvals — including his first term.
Other polls are grim reading, too, for Republicans. Democrats hold around a 6% lead in the generic congressional ballot, a gap that widens in surveys of likely voters. Republican Senate candidates are in tight races in several states that Trump carried easily two years ago, including Ohio and Texas. In Gallup’s quarterly poll of party affiliation, 49% of respondents identified as Democrat or “Democrat leaner” versus just 39% for the GOP and GOP leaners. As political scientist Tom Wood noted, that 10% advantage is the largest for either party since 2008.
Every chief executive’s influence wanes in their final years in the Oval Office. But how early that decline starts varies from president to president. In March 2015, more than six years into Barack Obama’s presidency, CNN reported that increasing Obamacare enrollments and rising poll numbers meant “Obama’s prospects are brighter than they have been for years.” Trump, on the other hand, can barely get anything through Congress, and even in deep-red districts, some GOP candidates are removing references to the president from their campaign websites.
Other struggling presidents have abandoned out-of-favor policies and given members of their party room to save themselves by criticizing the White House. On both counts, Trump is doing the opposite. He persists in imposing new tariffs, increasing prices. At the same time, he announced a plan to let in 300,000 tons of reduced-tariff beef, angering ranchers. He has restarted a trade war with Canada. He has resumed clashes with Iran, pushing oil prices back up. And despite Republicans’ warnings, he continues to tout data centers, even mocking communities rejecting them as “backwards and poor.”
If Trump’s lame-duck era is beginning for the same reasons that other unpopular presidents have entered theirs, it’s unlikely to unfold as it did under his predecessors.
For vulnerable GOP lawmakers, a party convention just two months before Election Day will complicate efforts to distance themselves from the president. The same is true of the plan for the president’s super PAC and its $400 million war chest. The Atlantic reports that Trump wants to “lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself” with ads touting his record.
If Republicans fail at the polls anyway, the president is already blaming everyone but himself. Voters are “not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans,” he told Punchbowl News last month. In fact, as CNN’s Aaron Blake pointed out, Trump polls as bad or worse than the Republican Party.
But if Trump’s lame-duck era is beginning for the same reasons that other unpopular presidents have entered theirs, it’s unlikely to unfold as it did under his predecessors. Other chief executives stepped back, to varying degrees, as the next presidential campaign began. That is not Trump’s style. We can expect he’ll fight any attempt to hold him accountable.
But we don’t know how he will try to cling to the spotlight, what lengths he will go to demand the GOP gaslight the country about his record and legacy, and what ways he will sabotage the government on his way out. Trump may be a lame duck, but that doesn’t make him any less dangerous to the country.
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