Donald Trump told voters to pretend he was on the ticket, even though he wasn’t. So they did.
The result of the midterm elections was a crushing defeat for his ruling Republican Party, and especially for Trump himself.
It was a repudiation of the past two years of the Trump presidency rather than a ringing endorsement of the Democrats.
A loveless landslide, if you like. Rather like Labour’s victory at home two years ago. Just as British voters chose to punish the Tories, Americans have decided that Donald J Trump has delighted them long enough.
Less a vote for Democrats, more a vote against an increasing deranged and delusional President. A man who promised to end ‘forever wars’ and slash the cost of living has done the opposite.
His war of choice on Iran has pushed the price of petrol, diesel and agricultural fertiliser through the roof. The knock-on effect has fuelled inflation, leading especially to sky-high food prices. Voters are hurting and exacted their revenge.
The result of the midterm elections was a crushing defeat for his ruling Republican Party, and especially for Donald Trump himself, writes Richard Littlejohn
Trump’s tariffs have jacked up the cost of imported goods, piling more pressure on household budgets. His insane vendetta against Canada, America’s northern neighbour, has disrupted supply chains in the auto industry and almost certainly contributed to the Republicans losing the swing state of Michigan to a hardline Muslim called Abdul El-Sayed.
Yet according to Trump himself, none of this is his fault. As Fox News was preparing to call it a night, after declaring Democrat victories in both the House and the Senate, the phone rang in the studio.
The President was on the line. He went into full Norma Desmond mode. She was the ageing, washed-up Hollywood star in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard who protested: ‘I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.’
Trump insisted he was still big, it was the candidates who let him down. Had he actually been on the ticket, the Republicans would have swept the board. He even blamed Fox News coverage of the election, despite the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s Right-wing TV network has been his staunchest broadcast supporter for the past 12 years.
On his own Truth Social platform, Trump wrote: ‘I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!’
By all accounts, the President had spent the evening increasingly isolated in the White House, watching the bloodbath unfold, as his staff deserted him to drown their sorrows in nearby bars, leaving finger food from the Cheesecake Factory untouched.
‘He’s watching Fox News, barely uttering a word and paralysed into silence,’ a source close to the President told the Daily Mail.
The President said that had he actually been on the ticket the Republicans would have swept the board, even blaming Fox News coverage of the election
His rambling, 25-minute midnight call to the network ranged wildly from melancholy to defiant, one minute offering to work with the Democrats, the next vowing to veto any ‘insane’ bill they sent to him.
Some of us saw this meltdown coming. Two weeks ago in this column, I wrote that Trump was riding for a fall. That was based not on the opinion polls or the view from inside the Beltway (America’s version of the Westminster Bubble) but on a straw poll among traditional Republican voters in a Cheers-style Florida bar. The consensus was that Trump had lost his marbles.
A shrewd friend of mine, who has run a serious US corporation and is a lifelong Georgia Bulldog Republican, predicted a bloodbath for the GOP (Grand Old Party) and laid the blame at Trump’s door.
On Tuesday night, before the results had been declared, he rang me. ‘It’s worse than I thought. Every word you wrote was bang on the money.’
Trump comforted himself with the turnout of the faithful at his Maga rallies. But independents and more thoughtful Republicans have tired of his increasingly bizarre and unpredictable antics.
Picking unnecessary fights with allies, sucking up to that dead-eyed tyrant Putin, renaming Lake Ontario ‘Lake America’, planning to build an Arc de Triomphe-style ‘Arc de Trump’ in Washington, sticking his own name on Palm Beach airport and the Kennedy Center. If he had a horse, he’d make it a consul, like the Roman emperor Caligula.
Ultimately, though, it was the war and the cost of living that tipped the balance, outweighing Trump’s solid achievements in sealing the southern border and growing the economy.
And even on the economic front, things are looking wobbly. Over the past three weeks, the AI bubble has been punctured, if not burst, wiping $5trillion – yes trillion – off share prices. To put that in perspective, that’s enough to wipe out Britain’s national debt and leave plenty for a fish supper on the way home.
Midterm meltdowns are not unknown. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all suffered similar half-time defeats, yet bounced back to win a second presidential term two years later. Trump, though, can’t stand again. He’s got nothing to lose.
So what comes next? As they used to say on the animated TV show Stingray: Anything can happen in the next half-hour.
Independents and more thoughtful Republicans have tired of Trump’s increasingly bizarre and unpredictable antics
The fear now is that Trump will go into full Horse-Loose-In-A-Hospital mode, thrashing out randomly at real and imagined enemies – especially if the Democrats carry out their threat to impeach him and investigate his family. The Prez is already being advised to ‘lawyer up’.
We should always be wary of using the Hitler analogy, but my shrewd friend worries that the last two years of a cornered Trump could resemble the Fuhrer in the bunker from the movie Downfall.
‘He’s crazy, capable of anything, even starting World War III.’
There will be plenty of gloating at Trump’s comeuppance on our side of the Pond. But we won’t escape the fall-out.
The turbulence on the US stock exchange will be reflected here, with potentially dire consequences for investors and pension funds.
If the war on Iran and the logjam in the Strait of Hormuz drags on, the cost of diesel – already hitting £2 a litre – will remain sky-high, crippling farmers and road hauliers and leading to even higher prices for just about everything.
There’s another reason we have no cause to gloat. More than 100million Americans turned out to vote this week.
Our own ‘midterm’ election was the Makerfield by-election, cynically engineered for the convenience of the Labour Party. It took just 25,000 votes to elect Councillor Burnham, who was then ushered in unopposed as Prime Minister without any reference to the wider electorate.
Unlike Trump, Burnham wasn’t even on the ballot at the General Election two years ago.
Yet he has already charted a course for the next ten years, opening the door for slavery reparations, rolling out the red carpet for tens of thousands of foreign students, granting indefinite leave to remain to 1.4 million migrants, and reversing Brexit.
He is preparing to align us with EU diktats and return us to rule by foreign judges, without any mandate whatsoever – in defiance of his promise at the Makerfield by-election and the 17.4million who voted Leave ten years ago. In the US they get to pass judgment on the President and his government every two years. Here, we don’t even get to vote for our Prime Minister.
What we saw in the US this week was the democratically-expressed will of the people in action. The far-Left here may be celebrating Trump’s discomfort but, compared to America, British ‘democracy’ is a sick joke.
