This Sunday will mark ten years since Donald Trump won his earthquake 2016 presidential election victory, promptly turning world politics on its head as a result.
But instead of celebrating the anniversary, Trump will likely spend the rest of this week in a deep sulk, as his decade-long project looks to be in tatters.
It’s difficult to overegg the scale of the president’s defeat to the Democrats in the US midterm elections yesterday.
And despite his insistence this morning that he would have bagged victory if he had been on the ballot, there can be no doubt this defeat belongs to him.
Trump told Americans to pretend they were voting for him. If they did – as seems likely – they responded by delivering clear majorities for the Democrats in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Texas has elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1988. Kansas did the same, for the first time since the 1932 election, when Franklin D. Roosevelt first entered the White House.
A few of the other notable ‘firsts’ from this election: the first Muslim US senator. The first openly gay US senator. The first time more than one black state governor will be serving at the same time. All a showcase for the country’s diversity.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: this is a monumental rebuke to a deeply unpopular president from US voters.
Nor is it necessary to analyze the reasons for this spectacular failure in more than a single sentence. Trump promised to lower prices, but instead he sent them soaring by launching a war in Iran without any clue how to get out of it.
So where does he go from here?
The awkward truth is nowhere, for now. Trump is still not quite halfway through his four-year term as president and will be sticking around until January 2029.
But where he previously enjoyed an almost resistance-free glide through his first year and 11 months in office, thanks to a Republican House and Senate willing to bend to his whim, things are about to become more tricky.
The Democrats in the House of Representatives and the Senate shouldn’t have any trouble blocking the president’s legislative agenda.
Trump will still be able to sign his much-loved executive orders, which don’t require the approval of Congress, but these are far more limited than a formally enacted law and he’d face a much stronger effort to undermine them.
He can also forget about the prospect of getting any hardcore Maga Supreme Court judges to fill seats that might open up in the next two years.
And perhaps most troubling for the president is the prospect of multiple congressional investigations being opened up into his family’s crypto dealings, his tariffs, Elon Musk’s Doge, and any number of other issues.
On the other hand, Trump has promised not to give the Democrat-controlled Congress an easy ride too.
His new favourite word, which can be found stitched on a red baseball cap posted to his Truth Social site this morning, is ‘veto’.
As president, he is entitled to block any laws passed by Congress. The only way to override that is by passing them with a majority of two-thirds or more, which could be a tall order in such a divided legislature.
It all looks like a recipe for political gridlock – something that will cause immense frustration for Trump after almost two years of free rein.
Since it became clear that the Democrats were set for a significant victory in this year’s midterms, there have been uneasy whispers about how the president might behave when he has nothing left to lose.
Many of those concerns have been focused on one thing: the potential for escalation in Iran. Such a move would, of course, have major consequences for the UK and much of the rest of the world.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today program this morning, long-time Trump pal and boss of Newsmax Chris Ruddy said he reckoned there was an ‘80% chance’ of military action.
He said: ‘I don’t think we’ve ever mobilised the amount of military personnel and equipment and arsenals to a theater and not used it, so I think he will use it.’
Beyond the enormous ramifications for the world economy, it’s hard to imagine a world where that would not deal a serious blow to Republican hopes of retaining the White House at the 2028 presidential election.
Already, the prospects of Trump’s vice president JD Vance to secure his party’s nomination appear to be slipping – though there are few alternatives who could successfully shake off any association with the president.
In the meantime, the Democrats will be looking for a candidate who won’t fumble a strong opportunity. Could it be Georgia senator Jon Ossoff, whose eloquent takedowns of Trump have gone viral? Or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most prominent face in the party’s left wing?
The last time Democrats achieved such a thumping midterm victory against the Republicans, it was 2006 and George W. Bush was on his way out. (Though it’s worth saying, today’s success completely eclipses that.)
That achievement set them on the road to the White House two years later, after picking junior senator for Illinois Barack Obama as their candidate. Who will step up this time?
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