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President Trump might not look smaller, but he is.

At home and abroad, among a significant majority of Americans that includes increasing numbers of Republicans, as well as in the eyes of foreign leaders, the president of the United States is shrinking by the day into a hapless peacock, a cartoon figure posting comic word balloons at all hours on the falsely labeled Truth Social network or bloviating for the (fewer and fewer) cameras by day.

Consider Trump’s losses and humiliations just over the past week:

But for the U.S. and Israeli delegations, formerly deferential diplomats at the United Nations mostly sat on their hands for Trump’s boastful and bullying annual address on Tuesday; at one apparent applause line, he seemed to pause for claps that didn’t come. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates over his objections (its hand forced by the inflation Trump’s tariffs and war have caused). The usually compliant Supreme Court killed his rule against mail ballots for the midterm elections. A federal judge blocked Trump (again) from putting his name on the Kennedy Center. Daily it seems, news stories quote once-supportive truckers and farmers breaking with him over the cost of fuel.

There’s more: A long-loyal Florida Republican, Rep. María Elvira Salazar, aired a campaign ad telling Trump that his immigration policies have gone too far and Latino supporters “feel betrayed.” Republican Senate candidates in Iowa and Michigan demanded that Trump end his stalemated war against Iran. The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee berated Trump on the Senate floor for kowtowing to China’s President Xi Jinping with this week’s state visit. And a Republican senator from Nebraska urged an investigation of Donald Trump Jr. over his business dealings and his recent wedding that a Russian oligarch bankrolled.

Sure, Trump still has unprecedented control over his party; he only recently ended several Republican officeholders’ careers by endorsing their foes in party primaries. But the primaries are over. More Republicans by the day are trying to distance themselves from a president who’s setting records for unpopularity with just about each new poll. CNN’s latest, conducted last week, found that two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance and believe, contrary to Trump’s claims, that the United States is losing the war against Iran. In another poll, from Fox News, two-thirds of voters said Trump had made the economy worse.

On the foreign stage, as evidenced by Trump’s failed applause lines at the U.N., leaders no longer compete for ways to play to his vanity. Instead, some are forming workarounds to achieve their policy ends without the conspicuously absent United States — on defense, trade, climate change and more. They’ve learned to discount his empty hyperbole, which is why there wasn’t a collective eruption at the U.N. on Tuesday when Trump suggested he might “annihilate” Iran.

To be sure, many don’t doubt he’s capable of that war crime. In fact, in the same address, Trump included among a number of false boasts one that’s all too real: about U.S. military strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that have killed numerous people — 234 to date — whom the administration claims, without evidence, to be drug-runners. These are illegal extrajudicial killings — actual war crimes.

Alas, as president, Trump might be a smaller man, but he retains a “crazy” amount of power, as he gushed himself last Thursday to an audience in the Mar-a-Lago’d Rose Garden. Why, he could even ban fishing and put Bass Pro Shops out of business, he told the billionaire founder of the........

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