Death knell for the Trump era has rung

I moved to Ireland in the autumn of 2008, weeks before Barack Obama’s election as US president. Having come here partly to escape George W Bush’s United States, I found myself celebrating Obama’s victory with many Irish people who, it turned out, shared my obsession with American politics. On the Wednesday after the election, I was surprised to discover just how many others here had lost sleep watching its results. I didn’t experience the same sense of collective elation again until last Wednesday morning when the results of the midterm elections became clear.

If 2008 promised the arrival of a new United States with the election of an African American president, 2026 saw that promise realised. The midterms brought the election of the first Muslim and first Native American woman to the US Senate, the first Latina governor and of more black governors than had been elected in the country’s history, including the first African American woman. Democrats won by reassembling the Obama coalition, winning back young voters and Latinos while turning out African Americans in large numbers.

These midterms repudiated Donald Trump just as thoroughly as 2008 did Bush. The scale and geography of the Democratic victory was staggering. Since 2024, the swing towards Democrats is estimated to be around 15 points, the largest since 1974 when the Watergate scandal discredited Republicans. Despite all the gerrymandering in the run-up to the election, Democrats stand to have an advantage in the House of Representatives not too far off two Democrats for every Republican. They regained control of the Senate too, flipping at least seven seats and possibly nine (it may be some time before we have the results in Alaska and Mississippi). Democrats won in states where they have rarely been competitive such as Kansas and South Carolina, winning even Texas by double digits.

In the victory celebrations, it was easy to forget that Trump is still president for another two years. He can do a lot of damage in that time, even as a lame duck without Congressional support. But his effort in his second term to remake American politics around his radical Maga agenda has ended in abject failure. It ran aground with his unpopular war on Iran, his shameless corruption, his economically destructive tariffs and his anti-migrant policies’ flagrant cruelty.

Trump has been a double-edged sword for the Republican Party, which he reshaped to an unprecedented degree around his own person. He won two of the last three presidential elections by gaining the support of many Americans who don’t typically vote. There is a grain of truth to Trump’s claim that Republicans lost on Tuesday because he wasn’t on the ballot.

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The president’s ability to punish any politician disloyal to him has enabled Republicans to exert a rare degree of party discipline. And yet, with no one within his party who could stand up to him, Trump faced too few of the normal political constraints on his actions. The unpopularity of his policies has been evident for some time, and yet he pursued them anyway. No Republicans, including presumed heir apparent JD Vance, could restrain their mad king.

In addition, Trump’s meddling in Republican primaries clearly hurt his party’s chances. Popular incumbent Senator John Cornyn may have lost in Texas anyway, but he certainly would have done better than Trump’s choice, the scandal-ridden Ken Paxton. By picking Darline Graham to replace her brother Lindsay Graham when he died earlier this year, Trump nearly single-handedly lost the South Carolina Senate seat. It quickly became clear that she was grossly unprepared to hold national office.

Throughout his life, Trump has never cared about long-term consequences. He takes what he wants and leaves a mess for others to clean up. He got what he wanted from the Republican Party – the adulation he desired as the world’s most powerful man while enriching himself and his family by billions of dollars. But when he steps down two years from now he will leave a party in deep disarray.

[ The lights begin to go out on Donald Trump’s volatile and frequently terrifying reignOpens in new window ]

It is difficult to see how any Republican can be a strong candidate to succeed Trump as president. Any contender will face the nearly impossible task of simultaneously appealing to Republicans still loyal to Trump, Maga Republicans disaffected with Trump and swing voters who just decisively rejected Trump. Will the Republican candidate embrace his legacy? They’ll be damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

Yet while Trump reshaped the Republicans around himself, Democrats benefited this midterm by not being associated with any one individual. All Democratic candidates turned Trump into a lightning rod and made the cost of living a central issue. But otherwise, they tailored their message toward their constituencies. The Democrats’ big tent trounced the Republicans’ cult of personality.

Democrats could do this only because, anomalously in the US, the opposition party has no leader between presidential elections. But Democrats will have to choose their leader soon enough. The conflict between its progressive and moderate wings, which was suppressed in the common cause this midterm, will certainly erupt within the Congress they now control and in the primary battle to win its Presidential nomination in 2028.

The scale of the midterm victory should give Democrats the courage to dream big. They should be thinking not only about winning in 2028, but about how they can build a sustainable majority that can defeat all the Donald Trumps to come. Democrats largely squandered their chance to remake American society after Obama’s election, leaving the door open for Trump. They cannot afford to do so again.

Making American society more democratic will be difficult because it requires taking on the interests of obscenely wealthy Americans in a way that has not been done since the days of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The effects of AI – which will lead to job losses, the degradation of work and a possible economic recession if its speculative bubble bursts – make doing so even more imperative. Democrats must be serious about, as newly elected Texas Senator James Talarico said in his victory speech, “unrig[ging] the economic system that only works for the top 1 per cent.”

Trump has two more years to trash American democracy and whoever comes after him will have to clean up the wreckage. Yet, like Obama’s election in 2008, the Democrats’ historic midterm victory allows us to imagine a different future for the US. The death knell for the Trump era has rung.