Taiwan’s president is not having an easy time of it at home or with the U.S.

With the exception of Israel, no foreign entity elicits as much bipartisan support in Washington as Taiwan. The self-ruled democratic island is David to China’s Goliath, a relatively small pseudo-country (the United States and much of the world don’t recognize Taiwan as a state) under constant threat from the Chinese Communist Party that has long striven to reunify the island with mainland China. If anything, Chinese President Xi Jinping is even more intent on reunification than his predecessors, ordering the People’s Liberation Army to have the military assets in place to invade Taiwan by 2027.

But that’s only the half of it for Taiwan’s political leadership. While Taipei’s relations with the United States remain strong at an institutional level, Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te has faced multiple speed bumps, internally and externally, that have raised alarms among Taiwan experts back in Washington. A highly polarized Taiwanese political scene, coupled with an unpredictable Donald Trump administration, has led to the fundamental question: Can Taiwan afford a business-as-usual mentality?

Internally, Taiwanese politicians are at one another’s throats. Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is at loggerheads with the main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT) and the upstart Taiwan People’s Party over everything from the defense budget to the basic functions of how the Taiwanese government should work. Despite Lai’s support for a hefty increase in military spending, partly due to the urgings of the Trump administration, the Legislative Yuan, dominated by the opposition, has stonewalled the request and in fact voted in January to freeze the defense budget by billions of dollars. Lai has called the parliament’s actions a deliberate attempt to block his agenda; the opposition says it’s merely an exercise in oversight.

The DPP’s frustrations with the KMT have boiled over. Sympathizers of the party organized a recall vote on one-fifth of the KMT’s lawmakers, hoping voters will kick them out of office and replace them with DPP representatives. But the effort failed. Every KMT lawmaker survived the recall effort, which means that Lai will either be forced to work with the opposition to get anything passed in the legislature or spend the remainder of his term as a lame-duck leader.