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We are in uncharted territory with Donald Trump, an egomaniac who has just suffered the most unambiguous rebuke of his entire political career. You know the story by now: Democrats won everywhere, in all levels of government. MAGAdom has been purged from the very infrastructure of this nation; its necrotic worldview evicted—by force—everywhere from Senate offices to teensy commissionerships. As of this writing, it seems likely that the state of Mississippi will soon be represented by a lefty senator, which exceeded even the wildest fantasies of wine moms nationwide. Trump, if he wasn’t already, is a lame duck, here to run out the clock on the great mistake of his presidency—looking increasingly somnolent in press conferences, covered in weird bruises, exhibiting various old-guy tendencies, and so on and so forth. Everybody is wondering what comes next. Will Trump, waning in stature as he is, attempt to exert what’s left of his influence over the 2028 Republican nomination process? Will he try to go for a third term? Is he going to spend the next two years browbeating MAGA acolytes who distance themselves from him? Is he just going to be focused on Ballroom Stuff from here on out?
Many paths stretch out before us. But I have an oracular vision of what lies ahead. For the remainder of the term, Trump is going to be a liberal, and he’ll recall the previous decade of his life like a bad dream. Seriously, we’re on the cusp of Lib Trump.
Hear me out. I know a lot of you find what I’m arguing preposterous. And by a lot of you, I mean all of you. Trump has achieved great success as a nativist firebrand. He is compulsively feted by obsequious right-wing agents, and was originally swept into power amid a tide of our nation’s worst impulses. Flattery is the only language he’s ever understood, and as such, moderation sounds like a tall order. It would require, no doubt, a monumental usurping of his demeanor. But seriously, you can already see the signs. Let me make the case.
First things first: When I say Lib Trump, I am not saying Woke Trump. There is absolutely no reality where Trump evolves into an abolish-the-police die-hard. He won’t be adding his pronouns to his bio anytime soon; the septum piercing isn’t coming. Antifa Trump is a force too incomprehensible to be summoned into this mortal plane, even though it would be really, really funny. Instead, what I am talking about here is Trump embracing the same principles that made him a liberal in the 1990s, when he belonged to a milieu of New York City rich guys for whom inert Democratic partisanship was basically guaranteed. I am talking about the version of Donald Trump who invited Hillary Clinton to his wedding, who lined the pockets of midlevel bureaucrats for more favorable casino regulation, who touted his pro-choice bona fides on Meet The Press, and who—by and large—never seemed to care about politics much.
Lately, I’ve started to wonder if the president misses that version of himself—even while he was still riding high, and MAGAdom was nearing its apex. The first crack in the facade was when Trump attended this summer’s NBA Finals, between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs, in Madison Square Garden. A lot of people were disgusted that Trump seemed to be using such a joyous sporting event as a glorified campaign stop, but that only scratched the surface. From my eyes, Trump looked like an idle big-city socialite absolutely burned out on the stresses of D.C. living—someone who ran for president mostly to get the feds off his tail, and was now bored by the job. Because seriously, when was Trump happiest in his life? I promise you it wasn’t in either 2017 or 2025. No, the closest his frayed synapses ever came to registering pleasure was when he was doing stuff like this: lounging in a luxury box with the landed gentry, watching a basketball game he surely does not care about, dishing out sloppy downtown gossip with the well-heeled liberals he abandoned more than a decade ago.
Frankly, if you ignore all of the abject cruelties dispensed by the administration and focus solely on the man himself, we’ve been trending this way for a while now. The president is in decline. That much is obvious from the digression-heavy rallies and elliptical diction. There have now been numerous photo ops from the Oval Office where Trump looks basically unconscious. Naturally, the one topic that seems to rouse the president back to life is his many D.C. terraforming campaigns—be it the arch, or the reflecting pool, or that aforementioned ballroom—all remnants of his purest self: a builder of ugly things that he inexplicably thinks are beautiful. He is not a policy guy, or even a politics guy anymore. There is a near-zero chance that Trump is huddling with his aides, developing theories on how to save the MAGA brand. Just listen to Trump speak on the phone with Bret Baier on the night of his party’s historic drubbing! There’s none of his characteristic piss and vinegar. Baier asked him if he’d accept the results—hardly a guarantee—and Trump responded with, “Yeah, sure.” This is a man staring down the end of his era with a half-shrug and an early bedtime. His heart just isn’t in it anymore.
Now, you may say that the just-announced promotion of Stephen Miller—he of the many brutalizing ICE raids, and a border-wall absolutionist—to chief of staff raises some doubts about the viability of Lib Trump, and is a sign that the final two years of his presidency will be an attempt at escalating his previous tendencies. More quasi-fascist tweets, more masked thugs terrorizing cities, more reflexive cruelty from the man in the chair. And like, sure. I don’t have a strong counter to that: He now has a hat that says “VETO.”
But what I will say is that, maybe for the first time ever, Trump appears to be in a conciliatory mood. In an interview with Ross Douthat on 60 Minutes last Sunday, Trump conceded that his hard-line immigration hawkishness was perhaps “too tough.” Douthat didn’t even need to prod him much. The president admitted it out of hand, laying the blame at the feet of the far right, articulating something you could call regret about the many waiters and landscapers who were deported solely to showcase the administration’s ruthlessness.
Does Trump actually feel a pang in his soul? Who can say. But what I do know is that the only political skill the president ever possessed was a honed instinct for things that are popular on an unspoken granular level—be it stimulus checks, or the rollback of daylight saving time, or a pervading exhaustion with wokeness, the latter of which he expertly capitalized on in 2024. Well, now Trump has been confronted with the overwhelming truth that he—and his policies—are unpopular. And at least for the moment, he appears willing to adjust.
Of course, if Trump ever goes Lib, the Republicans in Congress and elsewhere will surely distance themselves from him. They have a party to maintain, after all. But you know what? All of that was going to happen anyway, regardless of the flavor that 2027 takes. We’re about to enter a protracted period of reckoning for MAGAdom, where—in order to survive—the movers and shakers in the American right wing will need to find ways to shield themselves from the rotting stench coming off the Trump brand. Republicans have little to gain from the president anymore, and as such, he doesn’t owe them anything. (Trump admitted as much in the 60 Minutes interview, floating the idea that he may stay uninvolved with the forthcoming presidential nomination process entirely.)
And in that sense, maybe this is the only opportunity Trump will ever have to become a broadly liked majoritarian figure. I think, deep down, that is always how he imagined his presidency, long before he spun up a political tidal wave that changed the face of the nation forever. What if he wielded his one-of-a-kind charisma in the name of torpid liberalism? A Schwarzenegger-style moderate? It would heal the nation, and also his soul—finally included by the Washington intelligentsia he so clearly learned to hate. Trump would no longer need to launch a war against the Kennedy Center in order to be welcomed inside. He could yuk it up with Wolf Blitzer at the Correspondents’ dinner in bow tie and dinner jacket. He would be free, at last, of all the artifice and contradictions that propelled him to such unearned significance. There actually can be a happy ending to this horrible story. All Trump has to do is Go Lib.
