By Tom Fowdy
The Republicans have suffered a wipeout in the US Mid-term elections.
Americans have voted with their feet, and the governing party has subsequently lost control of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives in a surprise turn of events that has even seen solid GOP states go blue in the Senate, including Kansas, South Carolina and Texas of all places.
There is absolutely no doubt that the White House had it coming. Even President Trump himself has admitted that his catastrophic war in Iran clearly hit his party in the polls. The botched conflict is deeply unpopular, across the board, having raised oil and fuel prices and of course constituted a betrayal of his "End to forever wars" messaging, which originally resonated so deeply with his core constituency. Attempts at superficial peace, including that with Russia and Ukraine, did not move the needle at all.
However, it is also important to not be naïve about American politics. First of all, it is a well-established trope of the system that during a President's second term, voters opt for the opposite party in mid-term congressional elections. This is not most about voters being "fickle" and "changing their minds" so easily; rather, it is more so about who is mobilised to turn out and vote, and who is not. American turnout is low, and the opposition party always benefits from mobilising the anger of those aggrieved with the current regime, whereas its own supporters may be discouraged and stay at home.
As a result, previous Presidents, including Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, to name but a few, were all hit with mid-term election losses of Congress. However, what does matter is the political character and momentum of which that new hostile congressional majority takes and the specific constituency that has propelled them to victory. For example, Obama lost Congress to a specific flair of aggressive fiscal conservatives who scathingly opposed "big government" in the form of "Obamacare" and such. In this instance, it appears that Democrat victories have been driven by the personal unpopularity of Trump, inflation, the Iran War, allegations of corrupt insider trading, amongst other things.
But again, will it change anything? My answer is no: Not a thing. In fact, in my opinion is it will only make things worse, much worse. Why? Because Donald Trump is now set to become a lame-duck President for the last half of this term, in a period of extreme US partisan and cultural division, and I believe that, because of this, great instability will follow. Democrats will not in any way serve as a check on US foreign policy, but will rather as past experience shows, become an enabler for more aggression and hawkishness precisely because the President now lacks the ability to coordinate his agenda in Congress with his own party. This will destroy what the extraordinarily unitary nature of the President's foreign policy over the first two years was.
On a domestic level, Donald Trump is now a man with nothing left to lose. He is now set to enter the final two years of his tenure as President, faced off with a hostile Congress. For him and his party, the current trajectory shows that when he leaves office, his unpopularity is going to ensure that the democrats win the next Presidential election. After all, Trump does not have a successor, and there is nobody else within the "MAGA" movement who carries the authority he does. If J.D. Vance is the Republican frontrunner, then in my personal opinion his prospects are not very strong because he has already been rendered as "unserious" in the eyes of public opinion, having become a meme and source of ridicule on the internet. Therefore, Trump and the Republicans are looking at the possibility that they will lose the presidency in these final years, and that his own legacy may be dismantled.
So, what do you do in that situation? The answer is that Donald Trump has nothing left to lose politically, and he will subsequently feel structural pressure to go all out and become more radical and aggressive than ever in attempting to fundamentally reshape the paradigm of American politics in a way which is irreversible. Facing off a hostile Congress, we should expect that the President will double down on aggressive executive-based actions and consolidate power wherever possible, using the Supreme Court's majority to his advantage by betting on legal challenges. Congress is not to be negotiated with, but bypassed, and we of course should expect some showdowns soon. His first administration produced a record government shutdown; we should expect more of the same.
Secondly, Congress will not constrain Trump on foreign policy; rather, they will make it worse. A fundamental role I have learnt of oppositional politics in Western democracies is that until it takes office, it is always MORE hawkish and NOT less. The Democrats, despite a growing left-leaning influence through demographic and social changes, are not an anti-war party in any way, and the Biden administration taught me that the hard way. Their criticism of Trump's foreign policy will be that he is not hawkish enough, as opposed to being too hawkish.
They will scathingly criticise Trump's attempt to curry favour with the Kremlin, or omit human rights issues in his dealings with China, although they may be a bit tougher on Israel. They will subsequently pass bills that are designed to disrupt and undermine his foreign policy agenda, which will create disjointed messaging and conflicted priorities. They will absolutely seek to strike a dagger through the heart of his "MAGA" approach to the world, thus forcing NeoConservatism back into the frame. This may mean that Trump may purposefully engineer conflict in order to steer back political control or score wins, or even escalate further regarding Iran, given military power is one area Congress is limited.
Thus, in conclusion, while many are cheering the "fall" of MAGA in the mid-term elections. I only foresee chaos. A lame duck Trump will try to immortalise his legacy in America, and we all know that a cornered Trump becomes an inherently dangerous one. The rest of the world will pay the price for it.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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