Rejected at the Polls, Trump Races to Wall Off His Power

The verdict was not ambiguous. Voters handed Donald Trump and the Republicans a thumping in the midterms and stripped the GOP of its grip on Congress. A government that answered to the people it governs would take the hint. This one is doing the opposite: with the clock running before a new Senate seats in January, the administration is racing to wall off its power from the electorate that just rejected it.

Start at the top. Rather than change course, Trump is doubling down on everything that lost him the midterms. The clearest signal is personnel. He is replacing chief of staff Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller — pushing out the first woman to serve as chief of staff and leaving behind an overwhelmingly male leadership team. Miller is no caretaker: he is the architect of Trump's mass deportation campaign and the public face of its immigration policies. The promotion of this loyal partisan firebrand is no gesture toward the country that just voted; the BBC frames it as readying for a battle that sets up likely clashes with Congress.

Then the courts. The point of a lame-duck session is to run out the string, and the Senate's Republican majority understands exactly what it is buying. Once Democrats take control in January, Trump could struggle to secure another judicial confirmation — so the judges are being pushed through now. A president repudiated at the polls is spending his final weeks of a friendly Senate stacking the courts before the incoming majority can stop him.

The same logic drives the legislative rush. With the elections in the rearview mirror, the Senate is barreling ahead on a major energy and infrastructure permitting bill in the lame duck. Lock it in before the new majority can weigh in. That is the pattern: every lever that can be pulled before accountability arrives is being pulled now.

Not everything is going through. A federal judge has blocked, for now, construction of Trump's triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery — a monument to himself going up as the Justice Department bleeds, with two more top officials resigning from the department. The vanity project and the exodus tell the same story about a presidency turning inward.

The weakness carries abroad. The sweeping midterm defeat has weakened Trump at home as he loses control over his war with Iran, and the Republicans who once championed that war are now scrambling to distance themselves from it. Even his own party smells it: RNC co-chair K.C. Crosbie is challenging Trump's handpicked chairman Joe Gruters after the loss of Congress, a move that has angered the White House and that she laid out in a Thursday letter to the RNC's 168 members. Power that cannot win elections begins to fracture from the inside.

And the opposition? Democrats, restored to the majority, are already signaling restraint. Rep. Gwen Moore says affordability is "top of mind for all Americans" and that the party's agenda should not be, first and foremost, impeachment. Whether or not that is the right call, it concedes the terrain: the administration entrenches while the opposition debates its manners.

Here is who pays. The judges confirmed in these weeks are locked in before the new Senate can reach them. The permitting legislation, once passed, binds the people who arrive in January and the communities who live with what it builds. The man now running the White House built the deportation machine. A rejected government is spending the last light of a friendly Senate cementing decisions the electorate just tried to reverse — and when power insulates itself from the vote, the cost lands where it always lands: on workers, tenants and migrants.