Donald Trump, Lame Democrat? - Newsweek
President Donald Trump may be red today—in both party and face after the brutal repudiation of his presidency in yesterday’s midterms—but it wasn’t always so.
When Trump married Melania Knauss, as she was then, in Palm Beach in 2005, his old Democratic friends, the Clintons, were among the guests.
Trump was registered as a Democrat from 2001 to 2009. He gave to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaigns, and his foundation gave $100,000 to the Clintons’. In a 2004 interview, he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer: "In many cases, I probably identify more as Democrat."
He had returned to the Republicans in 2009, and for good by 2012, after Democratic President Barack Obama famously used The Lion King to roast him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner.
Trump has at various points in his life registered as a Republican, Democrat, or independent, showing a chameleon’s instinct for adapting to the political environment.
That was on display last night as Democrats emphatically secured majority control of the House and Senate.
Speaking to Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump said he had already spoken to Democrats as the results rolled in, and that he was ready to work with them to "make sure things go well for our country."
Trump touted his veto power, though he added: "But I don't want to be just sitting there for two years vetoing everything. They want to see things happen too."
He made similar comments when he phoned in to Fox News and CBS News, telling the latter: "My message is, congratulations to the Democrats, and I look forward to working with you for the good of our country."
This is the lame duck president speaking. But perhaps he’s really a lame Democrat.
Trump’s method has always been threat, then pivot. Markets call it TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out, a label coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong in May 2025 after a run of tariff climbdowns. Trump rejects the label: "It’s called negotiation."
We had a preview of the latest threat on Election Day, before polls closed, when Trump said that if Republicans lost he would become "Mr. Veto."
There is precedent for Trump working with Democrats despite his party colors. In September 2017, Trump overruled Republican leaders to take Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi’s three-month debt-ceiling deal.
There’s also a deeper and perhaps more surprising overlap between Trump and a Democratic Party moving toward the kind of economic nationalism that MAGA had stood for.
Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent democratic socialist who caucuses with the Democrats, welcomed Trump’s move to take a 9.9 percent stake in Intel as an idea he had proposed three years earlier.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, who campaigned against Trump in 2024, cheered his auto tariffs. Trump’s January call for a one-year, 10 percent cap on credit card interest echoed bills co-sponsored by Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Even on abortion, the president whose appointees helped end Roe v. Wade told House Republicans that month to be "a little flexible" on the Hyde Amendment to land a health care deal.
And after meeting Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s democratic-socialist then mayor-elect, last November, Trump said: "We agree on a lot more than I would have thought."
Then there are the incentives that cut both ways. In January, Trump warned his party that if it lost the House, Democrats would "find a reason to impeach me." Hakeem Jeffries, the likely next speaker, has ruled nothing in and nothing out.
Removal needs a two-thirds Senate vote Democrats cannot muster alone, but no president has ever been impeached three times. Subpoenas are all but certain.
Representative Robert Garcia, the incoming Oversight Committee chairman, has promised investigations into the Trump family’s business dealings and what he calls the cover-up of the Epstein files.
A president signing bills with Democrats makes an awkward impeachment target.
Trump’s legacy is also fragile. The Supreme Court struck down his signature emergency tariffs in February, and much of what survives is executive action a successor can undo.
Without Democrats, his legislative presidency effectively ends when the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027. But with them, Trump could sign things that outlast him and buy back some affection from the voting public, if that’s even possible.
His $2,000 tariff dividend never materialized. On the campaign trail, he promised $5,000 checks for all but high earners if Republicans held Congress. They did not, so any payout on that scale now needs Democratic votes.
Perhaps this is the first deal to be done. Democrats say they won by focusing on the real issues affecting Americans, chief among them the cost of living. Raining taxpayer money on a grateful public serves Democratic politics and Trump’s ego.
And Trump has little left to lose at this point. He is 80, has conceded that the Constitution bars him from a third term, and faces no primary.
Washington has spent a decade calling Trump transactional, often as an insult. A president with no election left to win is as transactional as politics gets. Add to that the self-styled dealmaker in chief, and perhaps the Trump unleashed many fear is actually the unlocking of his inner Democrat.
The strongest objection is, naturally, that Democrats simply will not let him. They rode a blue tsunami—a huge rebuke of Trump—and most of their voters want accountability, not bipartisanship.
Jeffries promised on election night to "bring accountability to those who have visited unprecedented corruption on this country." Garcia’s statement was two pointed words: "Lawyer up."
They have spent months gathering evidence for the investigations that follow this moment.
When eight members of the Senate Democratic caucus broke ranks to end last fall’s record shutdown, progressive groups called for Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step down.
No 2028 hopeful wants to be photographed at a bipartisan signing ceremony with Trump. He may not want one either. He claimed the rout was no hit on him, and his aides have spent months planning to govern around Congress. Time to see if those plans work.
So Trump can choose to be a lame duck fighting against the blue tide—or a lame Democrat that floats on it.
