In the last decade, Donald Trump has become the central figure of the ultra-conservative movement. But he did not invent Trumpism. The Republican became the catalyst for a deeper phenomenon that began with the Tea Party during Barack Obama's first year in the White House and in the middle of the epicenter of the great economic crisis at the end of the 2000s. Trump is the symptom of a change in the political cycle that had much deeper and structural roots. Once the dog is dead, the rabies is gone, the saying goes. The president has been left wounded, but that does not mean the movement is as well.

Donald Trump's 2020 defeat did not bury Trumpism. It only made it take root. Evicted from the White House by a seven-million-vote margin, but by the thinnest of margins in a handful of decisive states, Trump incited his supporters to insurrection and, when the mob's assault on the Capitol failed, he retreated to his Mar-a-Lago mansion to plot his extraordinary comeback.

Robert Yale Shapiro is a doctor of political science and associate dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and specializes in American politics, public opinion, and political leadership. He speaks to ARA by phone from New York to assess the historic midterm elections that have given the majority of both chambers to the Democratic Party.

After the shock of the electoral defeat, Donald Trump finally reacts and opts for a hardline approach. The US president has announced that he is replacing White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and in her place promotes the hardliner Stephen Miller. The hitherto deputy chief of the presidential cabinet is one of the most extremist figures within the administration, the mastermind behind the campaign for mass deportations and the transformation of ICE into the tycoon's armed wing.

The electoral defeat in the midterm elections has placed the Republican Party before a mirror it had long avoided looking into: the reality beyond the White House. The fierce loyalty that Donald Trump has demanded and imposed upon his own has led to a blindness regarding what has really been happening these past two years in the United States. The immediate reaction amidst the shock has been to intone a mea culpa while pointing at the president and thinking about how to prevent the necrosis from spreading. Not even 48 hours have passed, and there have already been the first resignations and also leaks regarding possible departures, such as that of Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

The world has been watching the midterm elections in the United States. The defeat of Donald Trump and the Republican Party fills the front pages of the international press, some with very original headlines.

The real stress test for the Democrats will begin in January, once the new Congress has been constituted. The new representatives who will take their seats in both chambers will have two priorities. The first, more immediate, will be to initiate investigations against Trump and his circle. The second, more complicated, will be to prevent the party from ending up immersed in an internal war between the progressive wing and the moderate sector, more linked to the leadership. After the rejection of Trump has united the different souls of the party, there is a risk that power will separate them and the opportunity to build a political project of its own for 2028 will be lost.

The Democrats have dubbed their resounding victory in the United States midterm elections as bluenami. That is to say, a blue tsunami. It is an expression that makes Pol Morillas, director of CIDOB, smile before starting this interview on the ARA set. Morillas performs an urgent analysis of the significance of the midterm verdict, which is, above all, a loud and major rebuke for Donald Trump.

Trump had framed the midterm elections as a referendum on his record, and the result has been a resounding "no". Democrats have gained control of both chambers of Congress, while Republicans have lost states they had controlled for decades — even Texas. Neither the multimillion-dollar donations nor the backing of the tech oligarchs — the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who surrounded him at his inauguration less than two years ago, (it feels like twenty )— could save him.

A punishment vote that is also a vote of confidence. The blue tsunami in the midterm elections was triggered by the earthquake of the Republican defeat, following widespread disappointment over Donald Trump's unfulfilled promises. The Democrats' victory in both houses of Congress is the pendulum swinging to the other side but on the same axis: the desire for change in a country where more and more Americans see their purchasing power shrinking. It is no coincidence that the major issues that have defined these midterm campaigns are the cost of living and corruption. And beneath this surface, a strong anti-establishment sentiment.

It was 2016, these were not such extraordinary times in the world –perhaps they were gestating then– and a candidate Donald Trump felt invincible: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?" Trump was speaking more seriously than many of us thought. And we know the story since then all too well: a resounding victory in 2016, defeat in 2020 but with a forceful, massive and devoted assault on the Capitol, and an even more resounding victory in 2024. Having self-proclaimed himself chosen by the Gods, a persistent survivor of assassination attempts, that the Republican Party had mutated into the Trumpist Party was just a detail of this process of political egocentrism that has been experienced in the United States.

The blue wave has turned into a tsunami this election night, as can be seen on the map above these lines. Bluenami, as some U.S. media outlets dubbed it. While we await confirmation on the exact size of their majority in the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party has already secured control of the Senate. In the upper chamber, Democrats won all expected races and picked up surprising victories in states like South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa and Texas, traditionally Republican strongholds that flipped from red to blue in a protest vote against President Donald Trump’s policies. With counting still underway, the Democratic total has already reached 54 seats, three above the 51-seat majority needed (with just 50, they would have been left hamstrung by Vice President J.D. Vance’s tie-breaking vote), and they could still pick up a few more.

A divine punishment for a president who boasts of being God's chosen one. As if they were the seven plagues of Moses, the great Republican strongholds have been succumbing one after another to the Democratic wave of historic proportions. North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Maine and Michigan have already turned blue. Alaska is the last critical race to be resolved, but the Democrats already have a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The defeat for Donald Trump, who had framed these elections as a referendum on his own figure, is of massive proportions.

Millions of Americans are voting this Tuesday in midterm elections that have been lived as a referendum on Donald Trump, and which also constitute the ultimate test to see if American democracy can limit the absolutist aspirations of the president. The latest polls point to a blue wave, although Democrats remain cautious after promises in other elections failed to materialize.

The election day will change the configuration of Congress, but not many of the headaches with which the country is battling. Beyond having to deal with the new parliamentary arithmetic –and which at this moment looks complicated for the Republican–, Donald Trump will continue to have a war to resolve and inflation that does not seem to be contained.

The US president, Donald Trump, says he will suspend the 4 billion dollar annual economic aid that the United States sends to Israel. "Bibi [Netanyahu] and I reached an agreement to give him 4 billion dollars a year and months ago we reached an agreement to stop doing so," the Republican said this Tuesday morning in an interview on Fox. The leader released the announcement just as Americans are voting in midterm elections in which a good part of the Republican base has shown itself to be critical of the unconditional alliance between Washington and Tel Aviv.

The midterm elections are held every four years, coinciding with the halfway point of presidential terms, and usually harm the party in the White House. Beyond the referendum on Trump, this year's elections represent an opportunity to try to recover some of the guardrails on the executive branch that the Republican has eroded during the nearly two years of his term. With a conservative majority installed in the Supreme Court, if the Democrats manage to regain control of both chambers, they will have some margin to provide opposition.

It cannot be said that Donald Trump did not know. In the first days of the year, just after kidnapping Nicolás Maduro, the American president addressed Republican lawmakers at an annual event at the Kennedy Center in Washington. "They say that when you win the presidency, you lose the midterm elections. I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going through people's heads," he said then. Nine months later, Trump is probably still asking himself the same thing as the projections inflate Democratic hopes.

The midterm elections arrive at the end of a year that began at a fast pace: the military incursion into Venezuela and the kidnapping of the Chavista leader Nicolás Maduro, the murder of two American citizens at the hands of the ICE, the beginning of the Iran war, and the inability to put an end to another major war, that of Ukraine. All this happened between January 3rd and February 28th. Since then, the main single topic has been the campaign in the Middle East and, above all, the increase in the price of gasoline, which has done nothing but aggravate the cost of living for many households. These are the issues that will most mark the vote of American citizens in crucial midterm elections, which are also interpreted as a test for Donald Trump.

We find ourselves at the gates of the end of the Trump era, and this Tuesday Americans will decide how they want this end to be. If the polls get it right, Donald Trump will become a “super lame duck,” as Nate Silver, an electoral forecasting guru who popularized data analysis models in predicting results, claimed a few days ago in an interview with the newspaper New York Times. That is to say, in a president without political capital nor legislative support for the remainder of his term. Even the Republican Party, under his firm control, could begin to turn its back on him.