U.S. President Donald Trump attends a maternal health event in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 11, 2026. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein
Bulwark White House Correspondent Andrew Egger says President Donald Trump is a shock artist who knows how to catch an audience’s attention. But these days, Egger says Trump is using his best talent as a Band-Aid.
“Donald Trump is, above all, a showman. While he’s plainly slowing with age, he has certainly not lost his ability to deliver near-daily shocks with his attacks on good government, ethics, and taste. But the nature of those shocks has been changing lately,” Egger wrote in the Tuesday edition of Bulwark. “More and more, they’ve seemed calibrated to obscure a harsh truth: Not yet two years into Trump 2.0, the administration’s momentum has ground to a halt.”
If the year 2025 for Trump was a flurry of energy and deed, 2026 is a slow, wrenching tug at futility and loss.
“This period of Trump’s furious maximalism seemed to die in Minneapolis early this year. It has stayed dead since,” said Egger. “Instead, Trump has spent the first half of 2026 mostly just fighting to keep stuff from sliding away from him. Simply reauthorizing funding for ICE and the Border Patrol turned out to be an enormous, sweaty legislative lift. So was maintaining his tariff regime after the Supreme Court ruled huge portions of it unconstitutional. Ditto maintaining his government’s ability to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreigners — a typically uneventful legislative renewal Trump managed to capsize with his clownish appointment of hatchet man Bill Pulte to a top intelligence role. His top 2026 legislative priority, the elections grab-bag Save America Act, is a running joke that the Senate will never seriously consider. Other major initiatives, like the $1.776 billion ‘anti-weaponization fund,’ barely made it past the announcement stage before blowing up in the face of furious public opposition.”
Instead, the things that occupy Trump this year are “just a sideshow to the major policy work,” said Egger.
“He has become obsessed with the minutiae of his self-aggrandizing monument building, from his Freedom250 birthday bash to the Kennedy Center to the East Wing Ballroom to the reflecting pool to his planned triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery,” said Egger. “And even that isn’t all going to plan: A judge’s order that his name come off the Kennedy Center has provoked a world-historical hissy fit, with Trump declaring the institution dead and installing an apparently permanent cover over the building’s facade rather than allowing it to be seen with his name removed.”
Egger said Americans should take heart by Trump’s apparent lack of accomplishment this year, even if he insists on plastering his failure over with disconcerting behavior and national embarrassment.
“It’s perfectly natural to remain outraged at Trump’s ongoing parade of obscenities: It’s not fun, exactly, to see him and his people squee and gibber while a bloodsport fighter hoots that ‘MICHELLE OBAMA IS A MAN!’ from a fight cage erected preposterously on the White House lawn. But these circuses aren’t just intended to trigger the libs and titillate his base — they’re designed to distract both camps from how little the president is actually getting done these days,” said Egger.
“Compared to where we were last year, it’s a damn good start,” he said.