When Democrats began referring to Elon Musk as “President Musk,” their goal was transparent: get under the skin of an insecure president-elect by saying Musk holds the real power in their relationship. The strategy wasn’t subtle, but it worked just as intended. Speaking at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in Phoenix on Sunday, Donald Trump couldn’t help rebutting the claim that anyone but him is in charge. “He’s not going to be president, that I can tell you,” Trump said. “And I’m safe. You know why he can’t be? He wasn’t born in this country.”
You never need a Ph.D. in psychology to understand Trump’s motives and fears; he puts them right on the surface. His almost comical obsession with showing everyone how strong and manly he is — in this case, insisting that he couldn’t possibly be under the thumb of the world’s richest man — plainly derives from a terror that people will see him as weak. But just days before he’s about to take power, that’s exactly what he is.
Look at what happened in Trump’s return to legislative dealmaking. As Congress moved to avert a shutdown to begin his second term, Trump failed to get what he wanted at every step.
Again and again Trump’s ham-handed attempts at strength only wind up looking weak.
It began with a bipartisan deal that would fund the government through March, giving the new Republican Congress time to craft tax and budget bills to its (and Trump’s) liking. But after Musk posted his opposition to the deal, Trump rushed to say he, too, was opposed to it.
After the deal collapsed, Trump then tried to avoid a debt ceiling increase in his first year, a move designed to limit leverage for both Democrats and anti-government members of his own party. First he called for the debt ceiling to be abolished, but when House Republicans wouldn’t go for that, he pivoted to suggesting it be suspended for two years. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., dutifully offered a new funding bill with that provision — and it went down to defeat as 38 Republicans voted no.
When a spending bill finally passed Friday, it didn’t include the debt limit suspension Trump had demanded. As NBC News reported, “On Wednesday, Trump had threatened to primary ‘Any Republican’ who voted for a funding bill without a debt limit extension; on Friday, 170 House Republicans did just that.”
This pattern — Trump makes demands, Congress says no, Trump does nothing — was precisely what characterized his legislative efforts in his first term. There wasn’t a single instance in which he bent Congress to his will or negotiated his way to a win when the outcome was in doubt. His only significant legislative accomplishment was the 2017 tax cut for the wealthy — a foregone conclusion given that Republicans controlled both houses. By contrast, among his blunders was the longest government shutdown in history, which ended only when he caved and gave up his demand for funding for a border wall.
That’s not to say Trump can’t exert control over his party or successfully punish those who oppose him. He often does. He has ended the careers of Republicans who stood up to him, intimidated some in the news media and — with the help of conservative Supreme Court justices — managed to evade legal accountability for all manner of misdeeds. But because he has such a simple-minded understanding of how power and politics work, again and again Trump’s ham-handed attempts at strength only wind up looking weak.
The problem is that madness isn’t strength; it’s just mad. It’s apparent in his standard negotiating strategy: He makes bombastic threats, then waits for everyone else to give in, never bothering to learn what they’re after or how he might persuade them. So he says he’ll bomb every enemy, sue every critic and destroy everyone who opposes him. One might have to take the threats seriously, because it’s always possible Trump will do what he says. But most of the time he doesn’t. Trump has long spoken of the value of being a “crazy guy” in negotiations. His approach recalls Richard Nixon’s “Madman Theory” of foreign policy: Convince your enemies that you are erratic and irrational, and they’ll step carefully to avoid setting you off. The problem is that madness isn’t strength; it’s just mad. Take, for instance, the pronouncements Trump has recently made about seizing the Panama Canal, annexing Canada and taking control of Greenland: when they don’t happen, he just looks like a fool. Similarly, after the 2024 election, Trump will have a governing trifecta and his first popular vote victory. But the entirely unnecessary spending showdown destroyed whatever momentum he could have had entering the White House. When a genuinely strong president sits in the Oval Office, everyone in both parties knows that when he makes either a threat or a promise, he’ll keep his word. No one trusts Trump on either count. For him, strength is about bluster and dominance. He will always be the loudest person in the room, and he treats every interaction, whether between people or between countries, as a zero-sum contest for supremacy in which there will always be a winner and a loser. But his recent failure to bend Congress to his will foreshadows a difficult four years for dealing with his own party, let alone the rest of Washington. In the wake of the near-shutdown, it seems that Trump’s second term could look almost exactly like his first term. Republicans will pass another tax cut — much of which would extend the previous tax cut — because nothing is more important to the GOP. But after that, things could get messy. With a razor-thin House majority and dozens of Republicans ready to make trouble over spending bills, it would take a shrewd negotiator or a president of genuine strength to successfully navigate the legislative minefield. Donald Trump is not going to be that president.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
