Finally, the Beginning of Trump’s End
In recent decades, the second terms of American Presidents have not ended well. Ronald Reagan had the Iran-Contra affair; Bill Clinton, after attempting to cover up his affair with a former intern, became the first chief executive impeached since the mid-nineteenth century. George W. Bush capped off two terms marred by the attacks of September 11th and his invasion of Iraq with the 2008 financial crisis.
The scandal for which the second term of Donald Trump will go down in history may not have even happened yet. (Or maybe it has and we just haven’t found out about it.) But, on the eve of midterm elections whose results will shape the final two years of Trump’s tenure, it’s worth noting that, in reëlecting him in 2024, the United States created a different kind of problem for itself: a President who is himself the crisis.
The new Congress, no matter how blue it is, is highly unlikely to change that. The Constitution’s requirement of a two-thirds super-majority to remove a leader guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors is an all but insurmountable barrier in a country that has become as divided as this one. Trump, America’s only twice-impeached, twice-acquitted President, has already proven that point in his first term. According to most recent polls, Democrats are right now dreaming of, at best, a Senate majority in the low fifties, and they may not even get that.
But elections are another, arguably just as powerful, constitutional constraint on any President, this one included. And with only hours to go until we know the results of the 2026 midterms, I cannot overemphasize the extent to which Political Washington—the Ds, most of the Rs, the polling wonks, the press—believes this time is different for Trump. Forget the hedging and careful ass-covering embedded in so many election forecasts and trust me on this: the campaign obsessives in the capital really think that this may finally be the Big One. Even more remarkable, if Trump’s rejection materializes as they expect, it will come at the hands not of the Democrats who loathe him but as a result of millions of Republicans in large swaths of red America voting to renounce the President, his reckless policies, and, in a number of high-profile cases, such as the Texas Senate race, his handpicked candidates.
I admit to finding these predictions hard to accept. Ten years of Trump dominating our politics has killed my ability to convince myself that there is still such a thing as an unambiguously positive outcome in an American election. Trump’s defeat in 2020—which was both predicted and predictable—proved that even an across-the-board loss on Election Night might not be decisive with a President willing to do anything to contest it. So please accept all the usual caveats. It may well be that the smart money is wrong again, and that the margin of error in all those Senate polls was the thing to watch rather than the tenuous one- or two- or three-point leads for Democratic candidates in tossup races from Alaska to Maine.
The bigger question, in any event, may well be Trump’s reaction to the electoral rebuke that looks to be headed his way: How far is he willing to go to back up his claims of a “rigged election” with actions designed to make it so? He’s become the perpetual X factor in our politics. There are many proponents of the theory that the only way to stop Trump from plunging us into another national crisis by seeking to overturn the election is with a Democratic wave so enormous and all-encompassing that there is no plausible way to claim that it didn’t happen. Just how big is that, I wonder? This is not something that Nate Silver’s election forecast can predict.
And let’s say he does lose, and lose big. How much more will he be able to destroy before something—age, his fellow-Republicans, the A.I. doom machine whose apocalyptic possibilities he has been so steadfastly ignoring—stops him?
Trump himself has been making the strongest possible case for his party’s impending defeat. If, at the beginning of this midterm campaign season, he had set out to sabotage the Republicans, he probably could not have done it better: starting an unpopular and notably unsuccessful conflict with Iran, imposing costly tariffs, and launching a trade war with Canada. All of which have driven up prices for Americans, when the signature promise of his 2024 campaign had been to curb the inflation that sank the Biden Presidency.
But it’s not the price of fuel so much as the cost of his own political arrogance that appears to have weakened Trump, who has mocked the concerns of those most affected by his rash actions while at the same time insisting that the election should be singularly focussed on him and his record. Typical was his comment the other day, while campaigning in Georgia on behalf of two embattled statewide candidates who are now quite likely to lose. “I don’t give a damn,” he said, referring to the naysayers about the American economy. “We’re making a freakin’ fortune.” It might as well have been the epigraph—or should I say epitaph?—for his entire crooked, let-them-eat-cake Presidency.
Which brings us to his final appearance of his final campaign, a closing speech on Monday afternoon which channelled that same Marie Antoinette vibe—if, that is, the condemned queen had been a disoriented octogenarian who fancied herself an expert on granite. With hours to go until the election, Trump chose to appear at the National Mall, in front of the Reflecting Pool, whose costly botched renovation over the summer has become a symbol of the President’s obsession with remaking America’s capital to suit his personal vision of imperial grandeur.
His plan, it soon emerged, was not to debunk concerns about his indifference to the electorate but to double down on them. For the first twenty-three minutes of the speech, Trump’s closing argument came down to an extended justification for how he had, however belatedly, finally won—not the war in the Middle East but the fight against algae in the Reflecting Pool that had defeated so many of his predecessors.
After digressions to cover the many homeless encampments he’d closed and the rusty pipes he’d vanquished, the President did spend an obligatory few minutes making his electoral case to the country, which revolved around the need to insure that communists and jihadists and gender-mutilating Dumocrats did not come to power and mess up this golden age of our nation all over again. As for Iran, he argued, “It’s not a war—we’ve done very little fighting.” Perhaps my favorite part of the event was when the President called his Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, to the stage to make a few remarks about the pool renovation. “Today is a day of gratitude to President Trump,” Burgum, who, in a previous life, was a wealthy businessman and two-term governor of North Dakota, said. I found myself wondering, if and when the wave sweeps in, whether it will mean that the members of Trump’s Cabinet won’t have to say stuff like this anymore.
Eventually, Trump closed his speech as he began it, with a pitch for all the unfinished projects he still wants to take on with his remaining time in office. He’s got a golf course—“world championship” level—and the biggest, most beautiful triumphal arch anywhere to build. Ten long years ago, Trump started out his political career promising to Make America Great Again. But maybe it was always going to come down to this, with the leader of the free world bragging about steam-cleaning Washington’s statues and “re-grassing” its parks.
If this week’s election represents, at last, the beginning of the end, well, the end can’t come soon enough. ♦