The midterms crack the myth of the untouchable Trump

WashingtonThe electoral campaign for the midterm elections is coming to an end and marks the beginning of Donald Trump's political decline. Although it is not the first time the Republican seems to be heading down the path of ostracism – as already happened with the attack on the Capitol – this time it seems that Americans have taken note. A good part of society that decided to give the tycoon a second chance has encountered a much more aggressive rebound effect: Trump returned to the White House with a plan to erode the checks and balances on his power and has applied it methodically.

The almost two years of his second term have reinforced the messianic, untouchable airs he managed to forge during the 2024 campaign: first, with the Supreme Court ruling that recognized his presidential immunity, and then with the Butler assassination attempt, which he used to set himself up as someone chosen by God, miraculously saved to fulfill the historical mission of saving the United States. Trump has been governing driven by this fiction that he told his followers, and that he has also told himself, but which has cracked in the face of a reality much older than him: the party that is in the White House usually fares poorly in the midterms. And although Trump likes to compare himself to Theodore Roosevelt – who did have good results in the midterms while he was president – everything points to him not being an exception.

Two days before the election date, the Republican party has already accepted that it will lose the House of Representatives and Trump continues on tour to try to mitigate the electoral blow. Especially to curb the Democrats' advances in the race for the Senate, which is very close in key states like Michigan and Texas.

The president plans to travel to Kansas and Iowa, two Republican bastions, which due to the rising cost of living and the tycoon's unpopularity have also become contested races for the Senate. Two states that had always been loyal to Trump now threaten to punish him for how his tariff policies have punished rural bases.

Play defensively

Last-minute efforts are only the culmination of a campaign strategy that, for the first time in a long time, has forced Trump and the Republicans to play defense. The president, accustomed to harsh words and to being the one who always strikes first, has found himself having to contain the damage. By mid-October, the major super-PACs linked to the Republican party—the platforms through which candidates are funded—had already begun to withdraw from key races for control of the House of Representatives to concentrate money on battles for the Senate, such as the one in Texas.

Trump, who has governed as if he had practically no institutional limits, has encountered for the first time the exhaustion of a much more ethereal element: that of his political capital. The unrest over the rising cost of living and the polls that had already placed the president at a peak of unpopularity since the beginning of the year have crystallized into a reality that is slipping out of his hands. Trump believed that the loyalty of his followers was the result of a kind of idolatry towards his person, but behind the blind faith there was, deep down, only the promise of change. And now that the horizon the Republican preached has arrived, the promise has not been fulfilled.

Control of the party

Beyond having repercussions at the polls and in Congress, the evaporation of this political capital is also fracturing Trump's control over his base. In 2024, the tycoon culminated the transformation of the Republican Party into his own party, and he did so because the formula for success depended on his person. Now, legislators and members of the party do not see in the president a snake charmer with whom to get votes, but rather a millstone.

The first symptom of wear was clearly seen with the publication of the Epstein papers, a major campaign promise that Trump tried to forget when he reached the Oval Office, but which he had to fulfill due to pressure from the base. The American president's relationship with the pedophile surfaced again with new details –such as the dedication that he wrote for his 50th birthday– which especially impacted a sector linked to conspiracy theories.

The Epstein papers serial caused an unthinkable divorce between Trump and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had been one of the tycoon's most loyal figures. Greene left her seat as a deputy, but opened a space through which other dissident voices within Trumpism have begun to slip: Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky –who will no longer be re-elected–, presenter Tucker Carlson, and former counter-terrorism director Joe Kent.

In August, this small group sat down by candlelight with the intention of opening a new path. Carlson shared the photograph of the scene on social media and wrote: "The MAGA movement has been betrayed. All of us have been. The time has come to open a new path". It remains to be seen whether the loss of electoral strength this November 3rd will also leave a new space where the American president's dissidents can take advantage to begin building the future of Trumpism after Trump.