Trump's 'rupture' with two key allies has pushed him into 'lame duck' territory: analyst

As part of a discussion on Donald Trump’s address to the nation on Wednesday night, where he once again restated his stance on waging war on Iran, MS NOW’s Jonathan Lemire and “Morning Joe” regular John Heilemann agreed that two of his closest allies backing away from him is a sign that he is in the twilight of his political career.

As Heilemann, a political strategist, noted, no one in the White House could be happy about the headlines that followed the address, because it did little to convince skeptical voters that things are going well as they watch the price of fuel skyrocket.

“You know, John Lemire is someone who's pointed this out as much as almost anybody I know, Donald Trump is just not out among the people, very much the people of his party, the people of his coalition,” Heilemann told co-host Joe Scarborough. “And it feels as though he's not maybe even listening very much to MAGA media, which has turned against Laura Ingraham on Fox News, now suggesting that Donald Trump may not have the mental capacity to understand the foreign policy advice he's getting.”

“That is a sign of a rupture that has something to do with the fact that Trump is looking more and more like a lame duck,” he suggested.

“You have JD Vance now announcing that he's he's leaking to the press like crazy, that he was never for [war in] Iran,” he elaborated. “And now he's got a memoir coming out about his Catholic faith; we are into the 2028 presidential cycle now. “

“And I think you're right that Donald Trump, on some level, the combination of detachment and the sense of kind of fatalism about what's going to happen and if he's going to save himself in the midterms, save the party in the midterms, he's going to have to do it through things like the SAVE Act. And maybe with all this increasing talk, deploying ICE to polling places, those are the only –– he's not going to be able to turn this around in a conventional political way. That's the one thing I think he still knows.”

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