Republicans are fast-forwarding through the next month, referring to President-elect Donald Trump as the president long before his transition with President Joe Biden is over.
But although Democrats are upset by Biden’s disappearing act, Trump’s early assumption of power has created political risks of its own.
Democrats, including senior congressional leadership, have urged Biden to use his presidential powers, regarding everything from immigration to student loan debt forgiveness, while he still has it. Instead, Biden has ceded the limelight to Trump as the president-elect is greeted with more optimism and open-mindedness than 2016 amid a stock market surge, being named Time’s Person of the Year, and high-level meetings with foreign dignitaries.
For Democrats, such as Democratic strategist Jim Manley, a long-term aide to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Trump ignoring another political norm, this time that there should only be one president at a time, should not come as a surprise.
“The real president has largely been largely MIA for months, providing little to no leadership, while Trump is conducting foreign policy from his club of misfits and grifters down in Florida,” Manley told the Washington Examiner. “[Biden] and his team allowed Trump to walk all over them, and as of right now, they are staggering into the inauguration in January with little to no juice.”
Away from Washington, D.C., and outside of the Beltway, Iowa Democratic official Charles Comfort, an at-large member of the Oskaloosa City Council and vice president of its school board, conceded he had “honestly more or less forgotten” about Biden.
“Which is sad because he does have quite the legacy, but I would say now is just fading into the background with a whimper,” Comfort told the Washington Examiner. “Hopefully Democrats get their crap together for 2026 and realize that America is so fed up with their current policies, positions, that they put a man with no interest other than to build his own wealth in charge of the nation.”
Republican strategist Douglas Heye, a former Republican National Committee communications director, agreed that Biden has “essentially been absent from the world stage for a while now.”
“We may occasionally see him, but actually hearing from him has become a rare event,” Heye told the Washington Examiner. “Trump has no presidential powers yet, but Biden has left a vacuum, and if there’s anyone who knows how to fill a vacuum, it’s Donald Trump.”
Another Republican strategist Duf Sundheim, a Trump critic, concurred that “power abhors a vacuum” and “an incredibly feeble administration coupled with a very aggressive Trump” “has led to one of the most assertive power plays by a president-elect in U.S. history.”
“Many believe Trump will be more effective this time around,” Sundheim told the Washington Examiner. “They feel he did not expect to win in 2016, and now he appears much more organized.”
To that end, Trump has named all of his presumptive nominees for Cabinet-level positions in his second administration, except for the chair of his White House Council of Economic Advisers. He has also sat down with a long list of CEOs, from Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos, Apple‘s Tim Cook, Alphabet‘s Sundar Pichai, and Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg to TikTok‘s Shou Chew, and world leaders, from French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prince William during a trip to Paris for the reopening of Notre-Dame to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago in Florida after promising to impose 25% tariffs on Canada if it does not do more to stop the export of fentanyl into the U.S.
In sum, a third Republican strategist, Cesar Conda, Sen. Marco Rubio‘s (R-FL) former chief of staff, described Trump as having the “most impactful post-election and pre-presidency period in American history.”
“He has forced other countries to make changes to their policies, such as Canada, which now pledges to beef up their border or face massive tariffs,” Conda told the Washington Examiner. “He has negotiated investments in our economy by foreign companies such as Japan’s SoftBank, which pledged $100 billion in U.S. job creation.”
Although a post-election stock surge has been somewhat mitigated by this week’s Federal Reserve report concerning interest rates and inflation, polling suggests the public is more positive about the prospect of Trump’s second administration. For example, a Marquette Law School Poll published this week found 53% of respondents approved of Trump’s first term, an increase from 50% last month.
But that goodwill toward Trump may not last long, with this week’s drama over short-term funding for the federal government to avoid a partial holiday shutdown on Saturday serving as a reminder of the president-elect’s first term after he and Tesla, SpaceX, and X CEO Elon Musk opposed a bipartisan deal negotiated by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance called on Johnson to address the debt ceiling in the legislation.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, for instance, has criticized Trump, Musk, and Johnson for creating the funding “mess” “to pave the way [to add] $5 trillion to our national debt.”
“That’s what this decision does,” she told reporters during her briefing on Friday. “You’re talking about tax cuts for billionaires, slashing Social Security, slashing Medicare, slashing [early childhood education and health program] Head Start. Congressional Republicans did what they did because of what the president-elect said and what Elon Musk said.”
Regardless, Jean-Pierre was repeatedly questioned about Biden’s lack of leadership during the funding negotiations, aside from telephone discussions with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
“All Americans need to know that Republicans are getting in the way here, and they are the ones who have created this mess,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is not the first time we’ve been here, and the president has had this approach before. He understands how Congress works. He’s been around for some time. He understands what strategy works here to get this done.”
“The president is the president of the United States, and he is leading,” she added. “You’re hearing what I’m saying, right? I speak for the president of the United States. … I’m speaking directly for him.”
Since last month’s election, Biden has traveled to South America for his last G20 and APEC summits and the first presidential tour of the Amazon, in addition to this month’s trip to Angola and next month’s counterpart to Italy and the Vatican. His administration, too, negotiated a ceasefire deal between Israel and Lebanon in November. Domestically, Biden has pardoned his son Hunter, pardoned or commuted the sentences of another 1,500 people in the largest act of clemency in a single day, and forgiven another $4.28 billion in federal student loan debt for 55,000 public employees for $180 billion for 4.9 million borrowers since 2021.
But for Comfort, the Iowa Democrat, Democrats’ road back to relevance is hindered by the reality that, whether he likes it or not, “a majority of Americans voted for Trump and MAGA.”
“If and when their policies fail, then hopefully the Democrats have a cohesive plan to give the keys back to mommy and daddy, put misbehaving children in timeout, and then fix America,” he said. “But unfortunately, I would consider the current state of the Democratic Party to a home where mom and dad are divorcing. One parent is going to be tough and strong for the betterment of the kids, and the other is going to let the kids walk all over them and give them what they want so they can all stay best friends, and that simply will not work.”
