The summer of 2025 has been the Summer of Donald.

When Seinfeld ran an episode about the “Summer of George,” it was ironic: George Costanza sat in his easy chair doing absolutely nothing so long that his legs atrophied. But Donald Trump’s summer of 2025 has been anything but inactive. Our 79-year-old president, a year removed from an assassin’s bullet and with lame-duck status and the loss of his party’s House majority possibly looming, has acted like a man racing the clock. Day after day after day, he has announced or teased some new initiative, more or less without regard to whether these are things within his constitutional powers to do or his actual powers to make happen. At every turn, he has reached for leverage — investigations, tariffs, firings, defundings — to bend governments, institutions, and individuals to his will. It hasn’t always worked, but it has always mattered more than any counterforce.

With the Democrats prostrate, Congress all but retired from lawmaking, the Supreme Court off for the summer and ill-disposed to slow him down, Trump has dominated American politics in ways without parallel. We have seen presidents exercise more sweeping powers in the past (Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson come to mind), and presidents whose personalities and personas consumed a lot of the oxygen in the room (such as FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama), but none who have so utterly crowded out the rest of the political system. The Democrats are by no means dead, but they have been completely unable to affect their own fate: all they can do is wait for Trump to burn out, and (if you’re Gavin Newsom) try to ride his coattails as a “reply guy” (in social media parlance), responding to Trump with mimicry, mockery, and the sincerest form of flattery. About the only Democrat who has been able to make any news independent from Trump is Zohran Mamdani, and he has accomplished this mainly by means of open extremism that crosses communism with antisemitism in novel combinations of awfulness.

This is, for now, good for Trump. Time will tell if it backfires on his party and his successors, but then Trump has never been one to worry much about what messes he leaves for others. It’s certainly not healthy for our political system. But if you were waiting for the one and only remaining option to change the subject, we have today’s news that Taylor Swift just got engaged. If we’re going to have a king for a while, at least we will get a royal wedding, too.