Get Guardian on GoogleBy Adekeye Adebajo
The Democratic tsunami that recently swept the party to victory in the United States (U.S.) Congressional elections – from the former slave plantations of the South to the grassland prairies – winning both the Senate and the House of Representatives, represents a stunning repudiation of President Donald Trump’s policies over the last two years. The Democrats are projected to win at least 54 Senate seats to the Republicans’ 44 (with two undecided); and 255 House seats to the Republicans’ 166 (with 14 undecided), as Trump’s national net approval has plummeted to -27.
Master of chaos and cruelty
Trump is a delusional president who has acted like a naked Emperor, constantly musing about running for an unconstitutional third term. He has fiddled while Washington burned, touting grand projects like an Arch of Triumph, a White House ballroom, and renovating the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial, even as millions suffered a cost-of-living crisis, and his majority in both houses of Congress crumbled around him.
Trump has also been a master of chaos and cruelty. He has enacted the largest ever cuts to the social safety net for the poorest Americans, with food aid cut by four million people in the last year, and 10 million people expected to lose their healthcare by 2034. Spending cuts are estimated at $1 trillion. In stark contrast, the U.S. president successfully pushed tax cuts of $1 trillion for the richest 1% of Americans.
Furthermore, 114 of America’s largest corporations paid no taxes in 2025 including Elon Musk’s Tesla which enjoyed tax-free profits of $5.7 billion. Trump has further avoided curbs on AI juggernauts like OpenAI and Anthropic despite the potentially existential threat such lack of regulation poses to humanity. The climate denialist U.S. president has also done great damage to America’s standing in the multilateral system through illegal military interventions in Iran and Venezuela, and massive aid cuts. This vote was thus a total rejection of Trump’s thoughtless vandalism.
The crumbling coalition
This electoral defeat was also, in many ways, an overwhelming rejection of the hateful, white supremacist Trump-led Make America Great Again’s (MAGA) efforts to make America white again. The president and his obsequiously spineless acolytes, Vice President, JD Vance, and Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, have consistently sought to deny five centuries of genocidal Western “civilisation,” while divisively seeking to portray America as a Christian white-heritage country. These polls decisively proved that MAGA racists cannot turn back the clock of history in the world’s most culturally diverse melting pot.
Instead, these elections saw the U.S. elect its first Muslim Senator in Michigan, Egyptian-American, Abdul El-Sayed (only four Muslims have ever been elected to the House); Texas’s first Latino Senator (James Talarico) and first Hispanic governor (Gina Hinjosa), and California’s first Latino governor (Xavier Becerra). Also elected were the first Native American Senator (Peggy Flanagan) in Minnesota; the first female Native American governor (Deb Haaland) in New Mexico; Georgia’s first black female governor (Keisha Lance Bottoms); and the first openly gay Senator (Chris Pappas) in New Hampshire. Hakeem Jeffries is also likely to become the first black Speaker of the House. Trump had mocked El-Sayed as a jihadist member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and derided Talarico as “Talafreako,” while JD Vance condemned El-Sayed as “very, very evil,” suggesting that America’s pervasive Islamophobia will not disappear overnight. This spiteful bile, however, backfired as spectacularly as the Trump-instigated efforts to gerrymander electoral districts in Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio in favour of Republicans, while seeking to suppress the black vote across the South.
With Democrats blamed for high grocery prices and high inflation in 2020, many Americans had incredibly gambled on the now 80-year old Trump, a foul-mouthed former real estate mogul with a chequered business record. In a disastrous first presidential term (2017-2020), Trump was impeached twice, before an inglorious fin de régime saw him rousing a rabble to storm the U.S. Capitol in a vain bid to reverse his election loss to Joe Biden.
Just two years after Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, many supporters have developed buyer’s remorse, with 75% of Americans feeling that their country was going in the wrong direction. Republican losses were thus widespread even in areas that Trump had won easily two years ago. Democrats scored unprecedented victories in traditional Republican strongholds like Texas, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maine, and Iowa.
Democrats also won white working class voters in Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Ohio. The 46% of Hispanics who had backed Trump in 2024, plummeted to 30%, as his ICE storm troopers arrested, brutalised, and deported their relatives and friends. Trump’s 24% black male vote similarly collapsed to 12%. A majority of the 45% of adult voters identifying as Independents supported the Democrats, as did 70% of young people. Democrats also won a majority of gubernatorial races for the first time in two decades. But only 29% of Americans view Democrats positively, so this is more a protest vote than a resounding endorsement of the party.
This election outcome further represents a massive defeat for the heartless, avaricious Trump-supporting Big Tech executives who sought to buy a Republican victory by massively outspending Democrats. Musk spent $400 million supporting Republican candidates, with half of this amount disbursed to Texas, where he relocated his businesses to escape California’s taxes. The South African-born trillionaire has received over $1.6 billion in tax incentives and more than $100 million in government grants from the outgoing Republican administration. The popular backlash against the building of electricity-guzzling data centres by tech giants also hurt Republicans. These huge tech campaign contributions were supplemented by Trump’s $400 million Super PAC, but all to no avail. People Power still trumped Big Money.
The economy, tariffs, and the war
Economic fragility at home resulting from the reckless tariffs of a directionless Trumponomics, coupled with a deeply unpopular war in Iran, have proved to be the president’s undoing. The most expansive tariffs in a century alienated friends and foes alike, without notably returning jobs and manufacturing to America. Instead, these tariffs have harmed low-income families, farmers, and small businesses. Trump insensitively dismissed this affordability crisis as a Democratic “hoax,” while quixotically declaring an economic “golden age”. This is despite grocery and electricity prices having risen by 2.7% and 5% respectively, amidst a $2 trillion federal deficit.
Trump’s illegal war against Iran further drove up gas and diesel prices for American consumers. He seemed naively to have believed that his country’s status as the world’s largest oil exporter would spare it from higher oil prices. His theatrically incompetent defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, was utterly unprepared for Tehran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz. As a result of this war, domestic petrol prices shot up to $3.46 a gallon, even as 30-year mortgage rates passed 7%.
Twilight of a trickster
It is unlikely that Trumpism will survive without Trump. He is the irreplaceable heart and soul of the MAGA movement. Americans have now unequivocally voted to check his excesses, and Democratic-led Congressional investigations are expected to probe how Trump raked in a $2.2 billion fortune in his first year in office, wielded constitutionally questionable tariffs, and started a ruinous war with Iran. This election has badly exposed the president as the fraudulent trickster he has always been, peddling magical illusions and quack cures. Trump clearly lacks the self-reflection and political astuteness that enabled presidents Bill Clinton (in 1994) and Barack Obama (in 2010) to recover from similarly crushing mid-term defeats. In the end, his tariffs and tax cuts, warmongering and wanton illegalities, have left him a lame duck two years before the end of his monarchical presidency.
Prof. Adebajo is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.
