The 'honeymoon' is over as Trump keeps 'hemorrhaging political capital': analysis

In politics, the term "honeymoon phase" or "honeymoon period" is typically used to describe a period of support and good will a politician enjoys after winning an election.

President Joe Biden's "honeymoon phase" came in 2021. Biden enjoyed 61 percent approval in an Associated Press/University of Chicago poll released in February 2021, but his approval ratings subsequently plummeted when viewers grew increasingly frustrated over inflation.

Many pundits have said that President-elect Donald Trump, after narrowly defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, is enjoying the "honeymoon period" or "honeymoon phase" of his second presidency. But MSNBC's Steve Benen, in a December 23 column, argues that Trump is engulfed in chaos as he gets ready to return to the White House.

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"In theory," Benen explains, "Donald Trump could be enjoying his 'honeymoon' phase. In practice, the Republican keeps stepping on rakes."

That chaos, according to Benen, was evident during the recent battle to get a spending bill passed in Congress in order to avoid a federal government shutdown. Biden signed a last-minute bill into law on Saturday, December 21.

"Throughout his first term," Benen notes, "Trump had a habit of screwing up policy agreements with 11th-hour demands that didn't make a lot of sense, and last week’s developments suggested that the president-elect learned very little from those experiences. A stopgap spending bill was working its way through the legislative process on Capitol Hill, which generated very little interest from Mar-a-Lago — that is, until late Wednesday afternoon, when Trump published an item to his social media platform demanding that congressional Republicans add a debt ceiling increase to the bill."

Benen continues, "Failing to do so, Trump added, would be 'a betrayal of our country.' Roughly an hour and a half later, he published a follow-up piece, adding that any Republican who would be 'so stupid' as to approve a spending bill without increasing the debt limit 'should, and will, be Primaried.'"

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Trump's transition from president-elect to president, Benen stresses, has been mired in chaos.

"If this were a rare setback in an otherwise flawless transition phase," Benen writes, "it'd be easier to overlook. But the opposite is true: In the seven weeks since Election Day, Trump and his team have careened from one failure to another, as part of a pre-inaugural process that can only be described as shambolic. What’s more, by some measures, it's getting worse, not better."

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Steve Benen's full MSNBC column is available at this link.