There’s an old expression in sports that always applies to the losers: “playing out the string.” A team playing out the string has been eliminated from the playoffs but keeps on going simply because there are games on the schedule. A baseball team well under .500 plays out a lazy September series on the road and fulfills its obligations to the fans — and collects paychecks — even though the games no longer have any meaning.

It’s too soon to say Donald Trump, as the American president, is playing out the string, but there was a whiff of that sort of inevitable failure in his State of the Union address last night. Most Americans didn’t pay attention at all, and if they did, they’d find the usual Trump — the inanities, the absurdities, the wild boasts, and the outright lies that have come to define his decade of lording over the American political scene. “Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it,” bragged Trump, very much the insult comic running through his tired material. “People are asking me, ‘Please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore, we’re not used to winning in our country. Until you came along, we were just always losing, but now we’re winning too much.’ And I say, ‘No, no, no. You’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re gonna win bigger than ever.’”

And scene. Trump is a president with an approval rating below 40 percent. There is little evidence to suggest his rating will ever rebound much. There may now be a lower floor than in the first term. The Trump administration’s savagery in Minneapolis destroyed the popularity he had enjoyed on the issue of immigration. His advantages on the economy are gone, too, as Americans confront a K-shaped recovery that has thrilled the rich and left much of the rest of the country with higher costs and a meager job market. Of course, since 2015, just about any pundit who underestimates Trump is bound, eventually, to face humiliation. It’s easy to suggest that this time will be like all the others. Trump has certainly been unpopular before. He was ostracized after January 6 and counted out during the brat summer of 2024. Many politicians and commentators believed he would destroy the Republican Party instead of refashioning it in his own image. And betting against Trump has typically been a fool’s game.

What’s different now is the passage of time. This year, Trump will turn 80. He is a second-term president — he is in his final term, no matter how much he indulges in the idea of illegally seeking a third term. The Constitution won’t stop Trump — he has little regard for the rule of law — but political gravity probably will. If Trump can’t improve his standing in the next few months, Republicans are going to be swamped in the midterms. Democrats are very likely to flip the House and could make a serious run at the Senate. This will make Trump’s 2027 even more perilous. His goodwill with the American people is gone, and there are signs that the grip he maintains over his own party could start to slip. Indiana Republicans bucked him on his redistricting scheme, and other rank-and-file Republicans, staring up at the final Trump years, could start to cast about elsewhere for leaders — or find that it’s in their interests to finally defy the president.

Of course, liberals have hoped many times in the past that the GOP would “wake up” to Trump and toss him aside only to find he is unmovable. But as his rambling State of the Union speech demonstrated, Trump’s great enemy is time. In 2019 or 2022, there was so much potential for the future of Trump. He was a first-term president or a former president gearing up for another run at the White House. A Republican thinking two, three, four, or even five years ahead had to consider Trump and calculate whether any opposition to him was worth it politically. The answer was always “no.” The political graveyard was stacked high with anti-Trump Republicans or Republicans who dared, in particular instances, to face off against him. Mike Pence was the vice-president of the United States, and now he’s a ghost within his own party.

Those days seem to be coming to an end. Republicans are beginning to understand that the second term of Trump has offered almost nothing to campaign on this fall. Inflation hasn’t eased up enough. The tariffs are messy and expensive. The immigration regime is violent and alienating. The safety-net cuts punish the working class and poor. In his first term, Americans were largely optimistic about the economy. That world is gone. In defense of Trump, there are macroeconomic factors that he alone cannot fix, beginning with the stubbornly high prices of housing and groceries. But he’s given no indication he’d care to fix them. Solutions are absent. Instead, in his State of the Union, he pretended the problems didn’t exist or blamed the Democrats.

A weakened Trump, of course, is still a dangerous Trump. We do not know what he and J.D. Vance might be plotting for 2028. Perhaps they’ll rerun the 2020 playbook and hope for a more successful outcome. All scenarios have to be considered. As Trump’s hand weakens on domestic affairs, he’s increasingly turned to sowing chaos abroad. He has flirted with the full-scale occupation of Venezuela. He’s threatening war with Iran. He can light the world on fire without congressional authorization.

That, ultimately, may be his legacy, unless he somehow decides to restrain himself. An American president playing out the string is a little different from a baseball team. He can still kill a whole lot of people.