A Midterm Verdict on Trumpism: A Presidency Unmoored or Unleashed? - Newsweek
For the third time in 10 days, voters around the world are delivering a verdict on the boundless presidency of Donald Trump. The first two — where Trump’s pick Flavio Bolsonaro lost in Brazil’s presidential election on October 25 and then two days later when Benjamin Netanyahu salvaged his tenure as prime minister by hitching himself to Trump — were split decisions. Now, the U.S. midterms are offering a final judgment on just how much of Trump’s once seemingly limitless ability to reshape the world remains: It was no Israel and went far beyond Brazil. In a night that was firmly approaching "Blue Tsunami" territory, the House flipped around 10 p.m. on the East Coast. The Senate was called just before midnight, and not in Trump's favor. Democrats held seats in Georgia and New Hampshire, flipped both North and South Carolina, Maine, Iowa, Ohio as well as Texas and even Kansas, which has not sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century.
Meanwhile, at the White House, Trump was setting the tables for the blame game. "I wasn't on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter," he posted to Truth Social. In the final stretch of the campaign, Trump pleaded repeatedly with Republicans to "pretend, please, that I'm on the ballot." They didn't. But Democrats did.Elsewhere, the verdict was even more decisive. "This is the collapse of the president's party on live television," said CNN's John King, giving voice to the murmurs of GOP strategists, relayed to analysts and pundits on TV and social media, that any chance of stemming the tide of Democratic gains was quickly becoming insurmountable. Lakshya Jain, a political data analyst and partner at Split Ticket, called the early results "an absolute massacre for Republicans.""The American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame duck President Donald J. Trump," said Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff in a defiant victory speech Tuesday night.
The idea of Donald Trump as anything but omnipotent seemed almost incomprehensible two years ago when he returned to power in a dramatic comeback victory and immediately began bending the world to his will. He killed off USAID and other arms of America's soft-power NGO complex, sparked a global trade war with punitive and sometimes incomprehensible tariffs that sent foreign leaders scurrying to Washington looking to make deals. And all that before he mused about annexing Canada, invading Greenland and blowing up boats in the Caribbean.Now, faced with an historic midterm repudiation at home, where does it leave the most powerful man in the world with two more years in office?
For the better part of a year, Latin America kept handing Donald Trump the election results he wanted. Argentina stuck with the party of its brash president, Javier Milei, last October after Trump’s Treasury Department engineered a $20 billion economic backstop that Trump then threatened to pull if voters went the wrong way in legislative elections.In Honduras, voters chose right-wing Nasry Asfura by a point after Trump endorsed him and threatened to cut off aid if he lost. Chile elected Jose Antonion Kast. Peru went with Keiko Fujimori. Colombia handed its presidency – again by a single point – to Abelardo de la Espriella, who swept into office with Trump’s “complete and total endorsement”.
With the inclusion of elections in Costa Rica and Bolivia, that made seven straight conservative wins across the region, and leaving Brazil – the one Trump wanted most. Ahead of that vote, he had hit the largest economy in Latin America with 50 percent tariffs and sanctioned the judge who had prosecuted his former ally, Jair Bolsonaro, whose eldest son, Flavio, was running against the populist left-wing incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But in the end, it wasn’t enough.
As Americans headed to the polls Tuesday to deliver their own referendum on Trumpism, Flavio had absconded to Florida – with Trump telling him he could stay “as long as he wants” – and Lula was preparing for his historic fourth nonconsecutive term. The Trumpian influence that had carried through 18 months of Latin American elections had run out of gas in the streets of Sao Paolo.
Meanwhile, Israelis were preparing to hold their own elections, the first since the Hamas-led terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. An embattled Benjamin Netanyahu lost his majority but remains in the game as of this writing – potentially as a caretaker prime minister – and Trump went on Truth Social to take credit for keeping him there. In the 10 days since Brazilians and Israelis voted with Trumpism implicitly on the ballot, it would be U.S. voters' turn to have their say on their own leader. And that say came in unmistakable fashion Tuesday night. As Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, put it on X: "If you are watching this and just have a passing familiarity with elections, just understand you're seeing something special, a 100-year flood. Easily the worst election for a party since 1974."
The question of whether such a disastrous night for Trump and the Republicans signals the sundowning of the Trump era is one that will be floated in think pieces across the Western media come Wednesday morning. In a recent appearance on the Ezra Klein Show podcast, forecaster Nate Silver said the midterms could “mark the end” of Trumpism. Silver’s last forecasting model before Election Day showed an 8-in-10 chance of Democrats winning the Senate, making him among the most bullish pundits on the possibility of a true “Blue Wave” election.To be sure, with Democrats set to control both chambers of Congress, the president’s domestic agenda will certainly be curtailed. Hakeem Jeffries, the likely speaker of the House come January, has offered a laundry list of bills he would like to pass even if they stand no chance of passing a closely divided Senate (to say nothing of the president’s veto pen). Jeffries, and other top Democrats, have been less vocal about how they would plan to rein in a White House they consider lawless and out-of-control, though it would likely include launching investigations, holding hearings and issuing subpoenas compelling both administration officials and outside allies – think Elon Musk – to testify under oath.In a potential sign that Trump knows what's coming, he told Politico in a late-night phone call that he was open to working with his Democratic opposition. "I have a right to veto everything," the president said. "But I don't want to be just sitting there for two years vetoing everything."Speaking to supporters late Tuesday, a triumphant Jeffries did not tip his hand on whether his caucus would take such an opening, saying only: "I learned very early on that a setback was nothing more than a setup for a comeback. Today begins the great American comeback."
But whether a Democratic Congress can circumscribe Trumpism on the world stage, where presidents generally enjoy more freedom of motion even in a divided Washington, is another story entirely. And whether Trump himself is still that force of nature in global politics is a question that, as recent elections around the world have shown, is beginning to have its own answer.
Take Brazil, where Flavio Bolsonaro chose not to seek an endorsement from Trump in the runoff stage of that race despite his family’s long-running alliance with the American president. Trump endorsed Flavio’s father, Jair, multiple times during the elder Bolsonaro’s presidency and 2022 reelection campaign. Jair returned the favor with an endorsement of his own, remarking that “God willing, I will be able to attend” Trump’s second inaugural. (He did not, as his passport had been seized ahead of his sentencing to house arrest for instigating a coup.)
Running against Lula, Flavio took more of an arm's length approach to the U.S., seeing his father’s American ally as a potential liability in a country where Trump is unpopular. It did not matter. Lula, having narrowly lost in the first round of voting, staged a remarkable comeback of his own by, among other things, defending Brazilian sovereignty against a U.S. administration that showed a knack for meddling in the domestic affairs of its neighbors.
Lula also railed against Trump’s tariffs on Brazilian exports that he called “unfair” and politically motivated. Addressing supporters after his surprise victory, Lula said “Brazil is no one’s backyard,” in an apparent dig at Trump’s influence over Latin American politics. Still, Lula’s victory is tempered by the fact that conservatives made sweeping gains in the legislature. The country’s right wing will remain a force to be reckoned with long after its allies in Washington exit the stage.And Flavio, for his part, did need Trump in the end – if only to grant him a last-minute visa so that he could flee with his family to Miami following his loss. Trump called the Brazilian elections rigged, but otherwise appeared to lose interest almost immediately.
"Lula’s reelection challenged Trump’s image as a wrecking ball laying waste to progressive parties in Latin America," said Benjamin N. Gedan, who served as South America Director on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. "He portrays himself as a regional kingmaker, but he is unpopular both in the United States and throughout the region."
In Israel, the results of recent elections were less clear cut. Netanyahu’s bloc holds 53 seats, short of the 61 seats needed to form a governing majority in the Knesset. A deadlock would keep Netanyahu in place as a caretaker, at least until new elections are called. But even that result was widely seen as a win for the embattled prime minister facing a corruption trial and mounting questions about the security failures that led to the Oct. 7 attacks that attack killed some 1,200 people in Israel and kicked off a bloody war in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of people, made the enclave all but uninhabitable and led to the hemorrhaging of support for Israel abroad.
But Netanyahu and Trump never wavered in their mutual, public support throughout that war, or the one that would follow in Iran. Both men cut spots endorsing the other, with Trump calling his Israeli counterpart a “great warrior prime minister” and partner in executing the Iran conflict despite multiple reports during the execution of the initial Iran bombing campaign that Trump had grown exhausted with Netanyahu. Unlike in Brazil, Trump took credit almost immediately for helping Netanyahu and his bloc avoid a clean loss at the polls. If there is anywhere in the world where a full-throated Trump endorsement can prove to be a net gain for a politician or party struggling at the polls, it would be Israel in 2026. As Tuesday's results showed, the same could not even be said even in GOP strongholds across the U.S. Trump himself appeared to intuit as much, musing in an phone call with Fox News Tuesday morning that he would move to Israel and become prime minister if Americans ever grew tired of him. By nightfall, it was clear they had.
Trump's successes in buttressing Netanyahu were also not replicated in Hungary, where a Trump endorsement combined with an unusual in-person visit from the sitting vice president failed to drag Viktor Orban over the finish line earlier this year. Orban’s opponent, Peter Magyar, won the April elections in a landslide. And in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s deft handling of the trade war sparked by Trump and his increasingly apparent disdain for his American counterpart has vaulted the soft-spoken, technocratic prime minister to the highest approval ratings in Canadian history.
Perhaps the best argument for Trump’s ability to inject himself into foreign elections for the benefit of the party or politician he is seeking to help remains in Argentina, where the $20 billion financial lifeline personally engineered by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent helped President Javier Milei’s party win a decisive victory in legislative elections last year. In global politics, as in everything, money still talks.
When asked by Newsweek about Trump’s foreign policy agenda post-election, a White House spokesperson said “Democrats want to return to weak foreign policy that put America last, but President Trump and Republicans will always fight to put America First.”
With Democrats in control of the Senate, they will have the power to hold up the president’s appointments. But without a two-thirds majority, the president still holds veto powers and is largely unconstrained as commander-in-chief.
The tentpole of Trump’s second term foreign policy remains the war in Iran that he began on February 28 in partnership with Netanyahu. Back in June, when that war remained in a “kinetic” phase, both the House and Senate voted to end the hostilities, using the War Powers Resolution to rebuke the sitting U.S. president ahead of an election that increasingly put the war and its effects on gas prices front and center in voters’ minds.
Five months later, the conflict remains unresolved. Trump – with Netanyahu’s support – has telegraphed an interest in restarting the war as soon as the midterms were over, while still leaving room for last-minute diplomacy. The administration called the War Powers vote unconstitutional after telling Congress in May that the war was “terminated.” It would be the closest the legislative branch would get to checking Trump’s powers to wage war without the buy-in of either chamber.
The summer War Powers vote laid bare the difficulties of Congress, no matter which party is in charge, to stop a conflict overseas – even one the majority of Americans have never supported. With the House changing hands, Democrats will get the power of the purse and thus new ways to attempt to force an outcome to the combat phase. But the war, it seems, will go on unless or until Washington and Tehran agree to end it.“The president has threatened publicly to renew the conflict with Iran, and reports have leaked about the Pentagon developing plans,” Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Newsweek. “The U.S. is also putting the pieces in place to renew the conflict. Another Patriot battery arrived in Israel, and the Wall Street Journal reported that a large amount of munitions was sent to the USS Washington. I think the president will give negotiations some time because he always hopes to negotiate a settlement. However, the two sides are far apart, and I don't see a good solution.”
Still, a Democratic House could attach legislative riders to appropriations bills — such as the continuing resolution to fund the government that expires on December 11— prohibiting any federal funds from being used for military operations in Iran. Democratic lawmakers, like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, have even suggested blocking the “must-pass” Pentagon budget, known as the NDAA, unless it includes “ironclad” restrictions on the conflict.Rep. Carlos Gimenez, a Republican representing Florida’s 28th district and a supporter of Trump’s actions in Iran, told Newsweek that while Congress controls funding – “and that matters in foreign policy and national defense” – the president would still have substantial authority to “conduct diplomacy and respond to threats,” suggesting Trump would not be moved to curtail the war just because Democrats took control of Congress.“I would expect him to remain assertive,” Gimenez said.
Michael O'Hanlon, director of research for the Brookings Institution's Foreign Policy Program, agreed that a changing of the guard in Congress will be unlikely to have a huge impact on the use of force in Iran. “It is more likely to have influence and impact on budgets for everything from military modernization to the Golden Dome to foreign aid,” he told Newsweek.
Pentagon budget aside, there are also the lawsuit, subpoena, and impeachment strategies. Holding a majority will theoretically give House Democrats the legal standing to file a federal lawsuit challenging the president's war authority without congressional declaration. The House Armed Services Committee, which will likely be led by ranking Democrat Rep. Adam Smith in the new Congress, might launch investigations into troop casualties and munition shortfalls. Some Democrats have already floated the idea of impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or even Trump himself over the war. If Hegseth were to be impeached or forced to resign, a Democrat-controlled Senate could conceivably hold up the confirmation of a new defense secretary unless Trump makes concessions on the war.
But even then, the attempts to end the war via Congress might be a fruitless endeavor. An unbowed Trump could dare Democrats to shut down the government, or defund the Pentagon, forcing the opposition into a game of chicken over national security. Or he could just ignore them. After all, the 80-year-old president is a term-limited lame duck who never much cared for bipartisan dealmaking to begin with. Will a Democrat-controlled Congress change that dynamic?
With President Trump entering the fourth quarter of his two terms, there is a paradox at play in the homestretch of his presidency. In domestic matters, Trump never had much of a legislative agenda beyond tax cuts. He has governed by fiat, and executive order, which gives him the appearance of being an active president even if most of those orders are likely to be unwound if a Democrat wins the White House in 2028.
On the global stage, however, Trump knows that neither his own popularity nor a divided government are requisites for being a figure of history. The daring capture of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro in January, the withdrawal of the US from 66 international organizations, the shifting state of play in the Strait of Hormuz all will remain facts regardless of Tuesday's midterm thrashing. Trump has already reshaped the world in his image. Why would he stop now?“The president’s behavior is more likely to get worse before it gets better,” said Damian Murphy, senior vice president of National Security and International Policy at the progressive Center for American Progress Action Fund.“If his erratic approach to the campaign trail is any indication, we should all be worried about an even more unbound president on the world stage.”
Murphy is not alone in that concern, which is shared by many Democrats as well as the isolationist wing of the GOP that Trump successfully played to in his 2024 victory promising no new wars. What does an increasingly erratic and unbound president do when he’s been rejected by voters at home while still commanding the world’s most powerful military?After Trump suffered losses in the 2018 midterms, the American Conservative, a right-wing outlet that argues for “realism and restraint” abroad, worried that the loss of the House would cause Trump to freelance more overseas. “When presidents have suffered political setbacks at home, there is a temptation for them to try to make their ‘mark’ abroad,” wrote Daniel Larison. “Trump is surrounded by hawkish advisers and Cabinet members that are likely to encourage Trump to do just that.”But Trump mostly did not do that, with the exception of approving the drone strike that killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani in early 2020. Then the Covid pandemic kept him busy at home, before Joe Biden swept into power promising an end to the Trump era.Eight years later, Trump proved Biden wrong – but the irony is that he is no longer surrounded by hawks like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Yet his second term has still been defined by his attempts to make his mark overseas in ways that might make the neocons of the Bush era blush. It's difficult to imagine the makeup of Congress changing his desire to be a Great Man of History. But as we saw in Brazil last month and Hungary in April, Trump’s ability to humble the world is a diminishing asset. And now he will continue on that legacy-building quest without the support of his own country’s voters.“I think most of the world has already reckoned with who Trump is and how he operates and what he stands for,” said O'Hanlon of Brookings. “And most of that won’t change even if control of Congress does.”
With additional reporting from Newsweek's Leonardo Feldman and Jesus Mesa.
