A year on from Donald Trump’s reelection, the president who promised a “new golden age” for Americans often seems more concerned with foreign policy than he does with domestic affairs.

I’m sure that’s not true from an “inside the room” perspective, but to the outside observer, it frequently feels like Trump’s more interested in chasing a Nobel Peace prize and reveling in the pomp and ceremony of state visits to countries obliged to indulge his monarch fantasy, than with the business of running the country he was elected to manage.

Ostensibly, last month’s globe-trotting was in the service of securing trade “deals” for the benefit of American farmers and manufacturers, but the souvenirs Trump came away with after touring Asia (Shinzo Abe’s putter encased in glass and a replica of a gold crown excavated from a royal tomb in South Korea, to name a couple) were more tangible than the commitments he secured in a series of non-binding MOUs with regional leaders.

And then there’s the administration’s obsession with heavy-handed dominion over Latin America by way of what, whether Trump realizes it or not, is a rerun of last century’s Cold War interventionism, an effort which in almost all cases contributed to the misery and suffering of locals whose political self-determination was subjugated to Washington’s efforts to keep communism out of the western hemisphere.

Back at the ranch, the US government shutdown is now the longest in history by several days and Trump’s so concerned that he dozed off in his chair during an Oval Office event convened to tout the administration’s plan to reduce the cost of weight-loss drugs. While Trump nodded in and out, Dr. Mehmet Oz regaled the media about, ironically, sleep loss. At one point during the event, an attendee fainted. Trump stood up and stared vacantly at the cameras. Netizens took to labeling the incapacitated man, who lies on his back with his feet in the air while Trump looks off blankly in the other direction, “America.” Andrew Harnik captured the moment in an already famous still shot for Getty.

I’m hardly the only observer to suggest Trump’s zeal for running the country’s diminished at least relative to the enjoyment he derives from pursuing moonshots like peace in the Mideast and a grand bargain with China. “As he arrives back in Washington, the gold-plated receptions abroad are giving way to a shuttered government and deepening voter anxiety about the economy,” The Wall Street Journal wrote, when Trump returned last month from his whirlwind jaunt through Asia. “The split screen sheds light on why Trump has turned much of his second-term attention to foreign policy.”

On some days, I wonder if Trump’s at a loss for what to do next. He wanted to institute the closest thing possible to one-man rule in America and less than a year into his second term, he more or less has. There are troops in the streets of blue cities, Mike Johnson’s demonstrated a willingness to keep one chamber of Congress shuttered indefinitely, the Supreme Court regularly rules in Trump’s favor on the shadow docket effectively letting him carry out his agenda with the Court’s blessing in lieu of legal proceedings that could last months or even years and, most importantly from a psychological perspective, he’s made himself synonymous with the American presidency in the same way (albeit obviously not to the same degree) as the autocrats he admires around the world.

What now? That’s the question Trump seems to be grappling with. “No kings” protests aside, Americans have given over the country, and Trump seems genuinely unsure what to do with it. It’s almost as if, now thoroughly exhausted with the everyday rigors of republic maintenance, voters said to Trump, “You know what? Take it. Democracy’s too hard and we’ve got better things to do anyway. Like eat and watch football. The country’s yours. Good luck.”

And, so, what do we see? Apathy and paralysis. The white columns in the figure below show the average of ADP private hiring, Revelio’s attempt to replicate the government’s jobs report and the suspended NFP release (through August). The red line’s the three-month average of that average.

When Trump took office in January, the simple moving average of those three job growth tallies was 150,000, give or take. It was down to just 22,000 before the NFP calculation went dark for the shutdown.

For employers, the problem’s not the consumer, who’s still spending for now. The problem’s uncertainty which, I’d gently note, Trump surrogate David Zervos called a “hoax” earlier this year, right before the labor market data rolled over. It’s not a hoax, folks. Employers don’t know what to expect, so they aren’t hiring. The latest Challenger release suggested the seasonal hiring impulse this year will be the weakest since at least 2012, when the firm started tracking the data.

Meanwhile, consumers are as dejected as they’ve ever been. The juxtaposition between household moods and household spending — i.e., the disparity which came to be known as the American “vibecession” — remains, which is to say there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest the consumption impulse, bifurcated and “K-shaped” as it most assuredly is, will suffer a hard-stop moment imminently. But there will come a point when spending catches down to the national mood if the latter continues along its current lamentable trajectory.

The figure above shows the average of the Michigan sentiment headline (which very nearly hit a record low in the preliminary read for November) and the Conference Board’s confidence measure. Colloquially speaking, this ain’t workin’.

Trump’s net approval rating on the economy is now negative to the tune of more than 13ppt, according to the RCP average. That figure for inflation specifically is a disastrous -25ppt.

Regular Economist/YouGov polling shows Trump’s net approval rating on inflation, which was -3ppt in early February, was nearly -30ppt midway through last month. Remember: This is a president who campaigned, in part, on the prior administration’s exceedingly poor inflation track record. That same polling routinely shows inflation’s the number one most important issue for voters.

I suppose this is obvious, but outside of ad hoc measures to address prices for certain goods, there’s no plan, and even if tariffs don’t ultimately hurt, they certainly don’t help. Somebody, somewhere has to pay the damn things, and the ISM price indexes suggest American firms are writing checks.

The figure above shows you the ISM services price gauge, which kissed 70 in the latest release, plotted with YoY CPI. The implication’s clear: Trump could be looking at an inflation pickup in 2026, and that’d clash with his determination to force the Fed into more rate cuts.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to escape the notion that Trump, having achieved what he set out to do in terms commandeering American government, doesn’t have any post-coup ambitions. He had the blueprint (Project 2025) for instituting a Viktor Orban-style illiberal democracy, and the blueprint worked. But it doesn’t look like anyone had a roadmap for what comes later.

Trump needs controversy and tension to fuel his internal fire but with Steve Bannon’s “zone” now “flooded” to the point of inundation, apathy seems to be setting in. For Trump, for his supporters and even among a lot of his detractors.

The national mood feels as somnolently sullen as Trump napping, miserable, through an afternoon Oval Office event. I’m not sure where we go from here, but to this observer, Trump’s starting to look like the dog who caught the car.