Donald Trump is as much a collection of images as he is a president. Picture him descending Trump Tower’s golden escalator in 2015 to announce his first run. Raising a fist after being clipped by a bullet in Pennsylvania. Listening to Marco Rubio whisper in his ear to say that a ceasefire in Gaza was close. Serving Happy Meals out of a McDonald’s drive-thru window or manning an all-American garbage truck during the campaign.
But his recent snaps are iconic for all the wrong reasons. One has Trump standing behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as everyone else rushes to help a man who had fainted during a press conference. Trump stares wanly ahead, oblivious or uninterested in the scene beside him.
Another recent image shows a grinning Trump at a Great Gatsby party at Mar-o-Lago on the very night the government shutdown meant those in poverty did not receive cheques to buy food. The event was themed “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody”. Forget poetry vs prose: Trump governs in pure metaphor. Then there are the two dozen pictures he posted of the renovated Lincoln bathroom in the White House, made from, in Trump’s own words, “polished, statuary marble”. This was, he claimed, “very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln”. For the first time in a while, Trump seems nonchalantly detached from what is actually going on in America.
It’s not a shock. Trump has never been very excited by mundane politicking. He gets his kicks from the spectacle that power brings. A round of golf in West Palm Beach has always carried more allure for him than working in the Swamp for the weekend. Nor is he one to affect kindness, or to dumb down celebrations with an eye to seeming more like the people. This is part of what makes him “authentic”. He is clearly very proud of his new bathroom and ballroom too, and Trump has always got a lot of pleasure from Louis XIV-style interior design, along with gaudy parties and the scantily dressed women who attend them.
He hasn’t put much time into getting Congress to reopen the government, though. Instead, he took his longest trip abroad since January with a sojourn through East Asia. The South Koreans even gave him a replica of the golden Cheonmachong crown. It is a very nice headpiece, to be fair to the president.
But you have to ask: is Trump still actually interested in any form of domestic politics? I don’t mean governing via social media posts or foreign policy. A stream of foreign leaders still passes through the White House each week, and keep in mind that at some point the Nobel Peace Prize committee will have to convene once again. What I mean is: does he still care about the fight to win over public opinion in order to secure election victories for Republicans?
One reason the president seems more detached from domestic matters is that, unlike in his first term, he has a team that anticipates his demands and so governs in his stead. By all accounts, Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, has imposed order. Karoline Leavitt has turned the press briefing room into a personal imperium. (Note the prevalence of women and gay men in Trump’s White House.) Beyond the role of commander-in-chief, the right to appoint the officials who run the government is atop the list of the most important presidential powers. Get it right, while demanding a big dose of imposed fealty to keep the troops in line, and the president can sit back.
It wasn’t like this in his previous administration. By this point in his first term, Trump had lost his national security adviser, press secretary, chief of staff, another press secretary, chief strategist and secretary of health and human services. The only major departure this time around is Mike Waltz, his national security adviser, who added a journalist to a Signal group chat about plans to bomb Yemen. We’ve all done it. And Waltz wasn’t even shown the door: he was made UN ambassador. Nor was he replaced: Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, took on the job. Trump presides over an unchanging, close-knit set of officials.
And yet the feeling in Washington DC is that this is not a moment for Trump to bask in his unchallenged power. The vibe has shifted. The Democrats are celebrating their wins in last week’s elections, in which they took the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey and the mayoralty in New York. Watching Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani look down the camera on stage at Brooklyn’s Paramount Theatre on election night and tell Trump to “turn the volume up”, I thought that here was a speech as equally devastating for Mamdani’s enemies as Trump’s usually are for his. The theatrical power that Mamdani wields is a requisite for winning political battles in this Trumpian age.
Which is why those who hope to succeed Trump were a little perturbed after election day. The question irking Republicans is whether they can win when Trump is not on the ballot, as he wasn’t last week. That matters for the midterms next year, and the presidential election in 2028, assuming Trump doesn’t stand. The usually bullish heir-apparent JD Vance seemed rattled when he posted that it was “idiotic to overreact to a couple of elections in blue states”, followed by what you might judge as a rebuke to the president: “We need to focus on the home front”.
It might seem surreal to say, but, compared to the past decade, Trump may be gradually fading from the scene. The question – always – is what comes next.
[Further reading: Nick Fuentes leads Maga into the anti-Semitic gutter]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear