With Democrats in power, Trump may be under siege and lose his dominance over the Republican party – but his id will relish the prospect of fighting
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Donald Trump posted a document on social media this summer by a supposed historian that compared him with, among others, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. That now seems fitting: the US president has himself fought one battle too many, and appears to have brought about his own destruction.
Tuesday’s US midterm elections were a thumping, shellacking and extinction-level event rolled into one. Ruby-red Republican strongholds once deemed safe toppled like dominoes. Democrats won Senate seats for the first time in Kansas since 1932, in Texas since 1988 and in South Carolina since 1998.
The House of Representatives and Senate had flipped from one party to the other in the same midterm just three times since the second world war – in 1946, 1994 and 2006 – but now it has happened again, ensuring that the US Congress will be a bulwark against Trump’s expansion of executive power.
The president, who swiftly noted he was not on the ticket on Tuesday, is the architect of his own lame duck status. Indeed, having spent months repeatedly urging voters to pretend he was on the ticket, he could hardly have done any more to sabotage his own party. In 2024 he won the presidency promising to lower prices and end foreign wars; his tariffs added to upward pressure on prices, and his ill-starred attack on Iran pushed them higher still.
Then there was Trump’s wild and bizarre campaign, which consisted of long and rambling speeches about architectural projects, outbursts of vile Islamophobia and musings about the “ass” of a Republican senator from Ohio. It culminated at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where he declared victory in the war on algae.
The voters said: enough is enough.
Now for the Republican postmortem. According to exit polls from the Associated Press, voters said the cost of living and government corruption were their two top issues. Trump, who was purported to be an economic populist, had flaunted his self-enrichment and fancy ballroom even as people struggled to put food on the table. It was too much even for some in his supposedly rock-solid base.
How will Trump cope with this new political reality? Is this the beginning of the end?
From January, Democrats will have the power to block legislation, launch investigations into Trump’s administration and thwart his judicial and senior government appointments. Life could suddenly become uncomfortable for the likes of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, or Big Tech leaders such as Elon Musk. Democrats might even consider impeaching Trump for a third time.
That potentially leaves the president under siege – a diminished figure mired in Washington gridlock and reduced to wielding a veto pen, which he had already starting threatening to use on Tuesday evening.
However, it must be said that Trump paid little attention to Congress during his first two years in office, apart from the passage of his Big, Beautiful Act of tax and spending measures. He has acted unilaterally on tariffs and military strikes on Venezuela and Iran. Like his predecessors, he will surely continue to pursue foreign policy as a legacy project, an alarming prospect for the world.
He will also push on with his other obsession: giving Washington a radical makeover with a new White House ballroom, a triumphal arch and more gold. Congress might take the view that this is a relatively harmless activity to keep him occupied compared to the havoc he could be wreaking elsewhere.
More threatening to Trump than any Democratic investigation is the inexorable march of time. The race to succeed him in 2028 begins now.
This president is psychologically ill-equipped to deal with the prospect of the national spotlight leaving him to focus on JD Vance, Marco Rubio and other potential candidates.
That shift could also eat away at Trump’s cult-like dominance of the Republican party and the Maga movement. He has shaped the party in his own image for a decade and it will not easily snap back. But members of Congress picking through the wreckage of Tuesday may well conclude that Trump is a creature of the past – and their survival depends on placing the right bets on the future.
Every swing of the electoral pendulum gets over-interpreted. Trump’s two presidential election victories were seen as a fundamental shift in America, even though he never achieved 50% of the national popular vote. His defeat in 2020 was hailed as the end of the Trump era, only for him to rise from the political dead four years later.
Anyone re-proclaiming the end of that era after Tuesday’s landslide should remember that the president is not yet halfway through his second term, and that his id will relish the prospect of fighting Democrats.
A wounded Trump who feels he has nothing to lose over the next two years might turn out to be the most reckless and dangerous of all.
