Posted on Monday, December 1, 2025
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by Barry Casselman
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President Donald Trump does not have to, and he will not, face the voters again on an election ballot.
The term “lame duck” usually has only a negative connotation, and its coin has only a face with declining power on its obverse. But what is on the reverse side of this coin?
The answer is, in his particular case, an opportunity to shape and sculpt how history will regard his presidency. While his political party faces a huge vacuum to be filled on Election Day 2028 and immediately beyond, President Trump now has a much longer-term concern — namely, his historic legacy.
In many ways, his unprecedented comeback from defeat in 2020 and the astonishing domestic agenda in the first months of his second term have cemented his domestic policy legacy. While many political battles remain on healthcare and immigration policy, President Trump has secured the border, brought down Biden-era inflation, and locked in middle-class tax cuts secured in his first term.
Along with these victories, he has devoted special focus in his second term to securing a more peaceful world. President Trump’s accomplishments in this area might help secure his legacy as a great president. Voters usually care more about the economy and domestic policy. Historians, however, often focus on foreign policy.
No less a historian than Newt Gingrich recently wrote that Trump could go down as the “third most important president after Washington and Lincoln.” Former Speaker Gingrich is Trump’s friend, but he is also a serious historian and knows that a president who brings an end to several chronic and violent wars receives more than one year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Such a president earns a long-standing legacy as a consequential world figure.
President Trump’s strategy on foreign policy is a twofold expansion of his key second-term goal of requiring equitable trade relationships with our allies, partners, and adversaries. By establishing and bolstering our economic power, the U.S. is able to broker conflicts between nations by creating economic and security incentives to cease violent warfare.
This has been relatively easy in wars between smaller nations in Asia and Africa. In conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, it can produce much-needed ceasefires, but more permanent settlements are problematic and elusive. Hostility between Israel and its jihadist Muslim neighbors, between Russia and Ukraine, between India and Pakistan — not to mention between China and Taiwan — will take more time to resolve than can be accomplished in one or two U.S. presidential terms. But President Trump has made clear progress on many of these fronts.
He has also gained friends and allies in South America, which has been shifting to the political right. These strengthened relationships are critical as China continues to make efforts to expand its influence in America’s backyard.
Regardless of the challenges that remain, to have had a positive peacemaking impact on so many areas of conflict in one short time frame is an enormous and historically unprecedented achievement — and something grander and more consequential than just a Nobel Peace Prize.
Although he will not be on the ballot in next year’s national midterm elections, President Trump still has a political stake in the outcome — specifically keeping Republican control of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. He does not want to be preoccupied by his appointments being blocked by a hostile Senate or fighting off another impeachment in the House.
For this reason, he continues to be currently occupied with relationships he has with GOP members of Congress, senators and conservative journalists who oppose some of his foreign policies.
At the same time, he can indulge his trademark knack for publicity-seeking and media dominance by hosting socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in the White House with unexpected genial hospitality.
Some observers were confused by this, including his good-naturedly encouraging Mamdani to call him a “fascist” — but old PR pro Trump knows who comes out on top with most voters when a Marxist calls someone a fascist. He also knows he controls the money that any mayor of New York City will need from the federal government.
Once the midterms are over, and presuming that Republicans still have control of Congress (not at all a certainty at this point), the GOP leadership, and especially those who want to succeed Trump as president, will have to especially assert themselves on domestic and economic policies going forward, past 2026.
President Trump will no longer be chasing voters, but he will be pursuing history.
Barry Casselman is a contributor to AMAC Newsline.
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