President Trump, all-powerful loser
The most inexplicable thing about president Trump is how much political control he has over the Republican Party, and how poorly he has used that leverage for policy gain.
He has a massive influence in Republican primaries, and has used that to purge the party of various Members over the last decade. There isn't an organized anti-Trump GOP faction on the Hill anymore, and that's largely of Trump's making. Almost all the members who voted to impeach or convict him are gone. We could bicker over exactly how much power Trump has over the party, but it seems arguably as much or more as any other president in history.
On the other hand, his policy record—especially on anything he needs Congress to do—is one of significant failure. To wit:
Jonathan Bernstein has been cataloging (here, here, here, here) all the ways the president has lost in public policy debates during his second term. It's an impressive list of failure. He loses votes constantly in the legislature. They completely ignore his budget proposals. The don't confirm his nominees. They won't ratify in law his executive actions. They laugh at his foreign policy. They are cool to his war.
Gabe Fleisher describes this as the "sandcastle" presidency, built on executive orders that will wash away and have little lasting impact and, even setting that aside, roughly 2/3 of his executive policy pronouncements simply never happen.
These past few weeks have been particularly striking. He easily won purge attempts against Senators Cassidy, Senator Cornyn, Representative Massie, and a bunch of Indiana state legislators. But the Senate passed war powers legislation, and the House pulled the legislation to avoid it passing there too; Trump's ballroom/security funding is in deep trouble. His "weaponization fund" is already tied up in the courts, but probably will be killed by Congress first. They refused to pass the SAVE Act, or kill the filibuster to do so, as demanded by Trump. A judge pulled his name off the Kennedy Center, and he threw a fit. He's pulled multiple nominees from consideration in the Senate. And his FY27 budget appears to be headed for the same fate as his FY26 request: the garbage can.
What gives? Some theories, most of which have been floated for years at this point:
Trump doesn't care. He's consolidate party power, but doesn't really have much interest in using it to achieve policy goals, because he ultimately doesn't care about policy. It's a personalist administration in the strongest sense. He doesn't want personal control over policy, he just wants everything to be about him. Get your way on the budget? Boring. Get your face on the $250 bill and have a MMA match on the White House lawn? Exciting! If Trump is going to burn political capital, he's going to do it for personal goals.
Trump is really bad at wielding power for policy influence. Some of this is just political malpractice. How else can you explain the absolutely moronic timing of the announcement for the "weaponization fund?" Just wait a month until the reconciliation bill is gone, instead of exposing it to a must-pass spending bill that also has your core priorities in it! The other half of it is a corollary to not caring. Cross Trump at a personal level—come at him about Epstein or vote to remove him after January 6—and you will pay the price ASAP. Ignore his budget proposal? You are unlikely to hear from WH leg affairs. Members notice this stuff, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
Trump's policies and proposals are so dumb/toothless, they are easy to ignore. I'm with Bernstein that Trump doesn't actually get all that much more or less than most presidents. You are going to lose a lot when you are in the White House, whoever you are. But most presidents are pretty darn good at (a) asking for things that are gettable; and/or (b) generating their policy ideas from within party priorities. So they lose by omission rather than defeat. Trump does neither, and so he ends up out on an island talking about invading Greenland and threatening to not sign any more bills until the SAVE Act passes, which in turn gets ignored and leaves him standing there in the cold. It's classic Neustadt theory: if you want to look powerful, start by making sure you win, and do it by making sure the things you propose are gettable.
Trump's a secret genius. This theory is popular among Trump supports and occasionally Democrats. Trump isn't losing, you are just missing the big picture! He didn't actually want to cut agency budgets with DOGE, he just wanted to purge federal employees. His on-again, off-again tariffs aren't absurd and arbitrary, he's just using them as negotiating leverage with China! He's not making it up as he goes along with the endless Iran ceasefires, he's cleverly waiting them out. He didn't want to invade Greenland, it was just a negotiating ploy! I've got news for you, Trump is not a policy genius. This is just the clever fallacy.
Trump is an unpopular lame duck. Trump's approval ratings are garbage, and in danger of being a huge drag on the party in the midterms. His control over the GOP primaries and his weird status as a second-term president but only in his first-Congress of his term mask the fact that he's in the 6th year of his presidency and the juice has run out. Like most 6th year presidents, his ability to get anything out of Congress is waning. He's not unusual, except that he carries grudges. The side of the equation where he gets nothing from Congress is more or less normal.
In the past, I've argued that Hill Republicans used negative agenda setting to defuse Trump's policy proposals. That is, they don't outright reject his ideas. they simply ignore them. The advantage is that this is invisible; if you never take a vote on something, there's nothing to attack. I think this still explains a lot.
It also fits well with Trump's personalist agenda and their approach to it. The one thing Republicans know not to do is go on the record voting against Trump personally. That's a death sentence. It's not hidden and it hits Trump exactly where he hates it most.
The equilibrium in all this is relatively straightforward: There's a set of things Trump and congressional Republicans agree on: border security and defense spending, tax cuts, business deregulation, and energy policy. All that gets more or less smoothly thrown into the Big Beautiful bill. Beyond that, Trump proudly proposes all sorts of policy nonsense, most of which Hill Republicans ignore and little of which Trump actually cares about achieving. Simultaneously, Trump does all sorts of overtly corrupt and/or ethically shady things, and Hill Republicans have to turn a blind eye, since overt action to stop it would result in furious blowback.
The stuff that gets caught in the middle is the actual policy stuff that only Trump really cares about (reducing federal employment, installing tariffs) and the personalist stuff that requires or implicates congressional involvement (ballroom security money, weaponization fund money). These things become flash points of conflict, which balloon out of control precisely because of some combination of reasons #1-#3 above.