Donald Trump could plunge Washington into a historic ‘lame duck’ crisis if he loses his grip on Congress but clings to power and refuses basic oversight, political reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have warned in a stark new analysis aired in the US this week.
For context, the alarm was sounded during a discussion on MSNBC, where New York Times correspondent Haberman and New York Times politics reporter Swan walked through what they see as the very real prospect of a second-term or end-of-term Donald Trump simply refusing to play by the rules that normally contain a weakened presidency. Their concern is not just about policy or politics, but about whether the basic machinery of accountability, from subpoenas to hearings, can function at all if the White House decides to stonewall everything.
Donald Trump And The Spectre Of A ‘Lame Duck’ Showdown
The news came after MSNBC anchor Katy Tur pressed Haberman on Trump’s self-image and what that might mean if he faces electoral setbacks and a hostile Congress. Tur framed the worry bluntly, asking whether a man who believes he is ‘the most powerful person [who] has ever walked the Earth’ will even agree to leave office when the time comes.
Haberman, drawing on years of reporting on Donald Trump, sketched out a scenario that should sound familiar to anyone who watched his first term but with the dial turned up. In a lame-duck period, once midterm voters strip a president’s party of control in the House or Senate, the incoming majority traditionally unleashes a wave of subpoenas, oversight hearings and investigations. That is the normal, sometimes ugly, give-and-take of American politics.
What Haberman fears is that normal goes out the window if Trump is the one on the receiving end.
‘We talk about this a fair amount in a presidential cycle, in a lame duck term, which this is,’ she said, noting that when an unpopular president’s party loses Congress, ‘what follows is a lot of subpoenas and oversight, hearings and so forth’. She said Democrats would be almost certain to launch that kind of scrutiny if they gained the House, the Senate or both.
Then she posed the question that has Washington lawyers quietly sweating. What happens if an entire administration just shrugs at Congress and walks away.
Haberman pointed out that previous clashes over executive privilege, under both Barack Obama and Trump, tended to be limited to particular documents or a handful of witnesses. ‘What we haven’t seen before is what happens if a sitting administration across the board does not respond to those subpoenas, does not supply witnesses,’ she said.
If that defiance becomes total, she argued, Congress’s ability to enforce accountability becomes ‘pretty hamstrung’. Lawmakers have no holding cells of their own, she reminded viewers. They can vote to hold officials in contempt and refer cases to the Department of Justice, but in a Trump administration the DOJ would be ‘led by a Trump appointee’.
In other words, the referee would be on the president’s payroll.
A Justice Department Under Donald Trump’s Personal Control
Swan pushed the point further, cutting in to stress that Trump would not just be installing any loyalist at Justice. ‘And not just a Trump appointee,’ he added, ‘Trump’s own former personal lawyer.’
That detail matters. A Justice Department run by a longtime personal lawyer would collapse the thin line between the president’s private interests and the government’s legal firepower. Oversight referrals from Congress could, in theory, land on the desk of someone whose career depends on protecting Donald Trump, not the constitution.
Haberman’s argument, boiled down, is that the traditional checks on presidential power, already strained by Trump once, could become close to meaningless if he chooses to ignore them across the board. On paper, Congress still has subpoena power, contempt resolutions and the ability to cut budgets. In practice, if the executive branch will not hand over witnesses or documents and the courts move slowly, the whole thing starts to look like an elaborate performance.
It would not be the full-blown constitutional crisis some Trump critics casually predict, but it would be a grinding confrontation with no easy finish line. And it would drag the US political system into weird, untested territory.
Republican Calculations And The ‘Colossus’ Of The Party
For starters, none of this plays out in a vacuum. Swan argued that much depends on how Republicans in Congress choose to react, and his verdict on their likely bravery is not flattering.
He noted that the Senate has, at times, operated ‘in a slightly different way than the House’, mainly because Trump has ‘so aggressively alienated a few senators’. A handful have been willing to cross him. But Swan quickly undercut any hope that a critical mass of Republicans will suddenly rediscover their spines.
He pointed out that those who oppose Donald Trump inside the party tend to end up retired, defeated or replaced. ‘You know when it turns out, when you run them into retirement and defeat them and run opponents against them, they don’t tend to retain their loyalty,’ he said, almost wryly. Most of the high-profile Republicans who broke with Trump, he added, are ‘out of the job after the election’.
In Swan’s view, that track record is the real message to sitting lawmakers. ‘This idea that, like, Donald Trump is losing all his power, I don’t know. I kind of question that a little bit,’ he said. ‘He’s still in the Republican Party, he’s still the colossus and he still ends people’s careers. So, we shouldn’t get like too delusional about that.’
If you put those two arguments together, the picture is not pretty. A president convinced of his own invincibility, a Justice Department loyal to him personally, and a Republican Party afraid of being wiped out by a single angry post or primary challenge. It is not the stuff of calm institutional restraint.
US law enforcement and Congress, of course, are not powerless. Contempt referrals, court orders and public pressure still matter. But as Haberman and Swan made painfully clear, if Donald Trump decides to treat a lame-duck period as a stage for one last test of strength rather than a glide path to departure, the real stress test will be on everyone else.
Nothing is confirmed yet so everything should be taken with a grain of salt, but the question Tur posed on air, ‘Will he even leave office?’, no longer sounds like wild cable chatter. It sounds, awkwardly, like a live issue serious people are gaming out in advance.
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