Five Ways This Trumpian Moment Is Temporary and Fleeting

Photo by noor Younis on Unsplash

I had a difficult time sleeping—for me, at least—as I tossed and turned for about 30 to 40 minutes on Wednesday and Thursday night this past week. You might think this was because I was having a hard time adjusting to the reality of the new administration in Washington, D.C., but that actually wasn't it.

I turned 51 on Thursday. That same day, my only child auditioned for the local performing arts high school, something which he had been building up to for almost two years. What I was having a difficult time with on both nights was not contemporary politics or the shock of the news cycle, but the passage of time itself. I thought about friends I have fallen out of touch with; family activities that you can only do when your kid is young; all the good times my kid has had at his current school and the friends he has made; days lost to illness, anger or procrastination; and all the other things one thinks of when they are having difficulty dealing with the fleeting nature of life.

One positive side effect of this tossing and turning is that it also helped give me some perspective on just how very temporary our current Trumpian moment actually is. In fact, I think there are many things about where we are at this moment in time that will make it unusually temporary and fleeting, more so than the start of other presidential terms. While that may be hard to process or accept during these difficult early days, I think I can make a good case for it.

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Here are five ways that our current, very Trumpian moment will prove to be fleeting:

1. Trump's winning coalition is unreplicatable

Trump narrowly won in November 2024 by adding an oddball coalition of anti-establishment, fringy voting blocks to his MAGA base. This includes RFK Jr. anti-vaccine types, libertarians who wanted a pardon for an obscure dark web drug dealer, single issue voters angry at Democrats over the Israel-Hamas war, Tulsi Gabbard fans, low propensity voters who like Joe Rogan and/or Elon Musk, etc. It is a bizarre grouping specific to this moment in time, transactionally cobbled together with promises of pardons and major administrative roles, and has no possibility of becoming a long-term political force.

This is not just conjecture on my part. In swing state after swing state, every Republican not named Trump significantly underperformed the top of the ticket. Democratic U.S. Senate candidates actually won in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. Even though Democrats lost the key Senate races in Florida, Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas, the Republican candidates underperformed Trump in every single state. No other Republican could replicate the Trump coalition—it was only him.

Now that we have some distance from it, honestly the whole thing feels like we lost in November to a flash mob. The fleeting, one-off nature of Trump's coalition is one of the reasons why Democrats are likely already back ahead of Republicans nationally.

2. Trump is already a lame duck

Unlike every other president since Grover Cleveland, Trump is the first president to take over after a transfer of power and start as a lame duck. Every other president who has taken over the White House from someone else at least had the possibility of securing another term in office. Add in the fact that Trump is 78 years old and you can understand why a 52-year old movement conservative like Rep. Chip Roy isn't afraid of him. In fact, Roy actually stopped Trump's first major legislative foray back in December, and did so in the face of a threatened primary challenge from Trump.

Having a major legislative effort brought down by a member of your own party even when you threaten that member with a primary challenge is not the kind of thing that happens to presidents when they are starting their terms in office. It is, however, the kind of thing that can happen to lame ducks. Quack, quack, quack, Donald.

3. Trump will do more unpopular things in his first 100 days than any other president, dragging down his temporarily elevated favorable rating

As I mentioned in my Thursday article, "Seven reasons to stay calm," Trump is currently enjoying an improvement in his favorability ratings, just like every president does after they win an election. However, his ratings are historically low for a new president—hovering below fifty percent. Meanwhile, he is doing some pretty unpopular things that will hasten something that also happens to every president: their favorable ratings revert to normal a few months after they are sworn in.

For example:

• Acquiring Greenland is unpopular.

• Pardoning the January 6 rioters is opposed by Americans by a nearly 2-1 margin.

• Raiding schools to look for undocumented immigrants is even less popular. 

It has only been two days, and we can already add some more things to this list. While getting Pete Hegseth confirmed as Secretary of Defense may be a successful show of force by Trump over Senate Republicans, the confirmation process made Hegseth very unpopular. Now, Hegseth is going to be a lodestone around Trump's neck. Also, if RFK Jr. significantly curtails childhood vaccinations—which many of his top advisors are still pushing him to do—that is going to be extremely unpopular and make Trump look terrible.

It will not be long before Trump's favorable rating drops from its current net negative of just one or two percentage points to the more typical long-term average of net negative 10-12 percent—or perhaps even lower. 

4. Trump's major legislative initiative is to temporarily extend the temporary legislation he passed in his first term

Trump's primary legislative goal during his final term in office is to extend the tax cuts he passed in late 2017 for another five or 10 years. In other words, he is looking to temporarily extend his earlier, temporary legislative achievement. He will probably pull this off, but there is a real chance might not.

Trump is not creating, or dismantling, some major, long-term government program. He is, instead, basically just trying to make himself look good while he is in office. His entire project is temporary in every way.

5. Trump is governing by executive order, but every executive order he has made can be overturned—and most probably will be, soon

Finally, as I also noted on Thursday, Trump's early days have been dominated by what feels like a record-breaking flurry of executive orders. However, by their very nature all executive orders are temporary. Future presidents can just reverse anything Trump does via executive order with executive orders of their own. In many, if not most, cases, this will probably happen to Trump's executive orders before the decade is out.

While this does make me conclude that executive orders should be a more important part of presidential campaign discussions in the future, it doesn't make anything Trump is doing right now—outside of pardons—permanent.

Just like it doesn't feel all that long ago that I was taking my soon-to-be-high-school-student kid to the local children's museum on nearly every day off, it won't be very long until Trump's executive orders are no more. This is also the case for Trump's winning coalition, his roughly even favorability rating, his time in office, and his major legislative achievement. All of these things are going to come to an end before you know it, and we will all be left wondering where the time went, just like I was doing as I tossed and turned in my bed on the night before my birthday earlier this week.