Yesterday, November 3, 2026, the very long, very expensive and exhausting electoral campaign for the midterm legislative elections in the United States finally ended. Today, however, the electoral campaign for the 2028 presidential elections unofficially begins. The American political cycle is perpetual, unbearable. Congressmen risk their seat every two years, but in order to keep it they have to win primaries first. So they spend 80% of their day campaigning. The senators have six years, so they have a little more leeway. But for presidents and candidates there is practically not a second of respite. And the starting gun has already sounded.
The midterms, with record spending on ads and record early participation, with 57 million votes, are very important for many reasons. Because they can give control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats. Because thousands of appointments come from here in state legislatures, supreme courts, and gubernatorial positions. Because they have been the most expensive in history. But, above all, because they have been a plebiscite on Donald Trump. Not only about his Government, his economic management or corruption (the most important issue for many voters according to several surveys), but about his future and that of the MAGA movement.
In almost all legislative elections, the party of the president who occupies the White House suffers wear and tear and pays a price, and the polls anticipated a very severe one. The big question this week is whether it is a high enough price to truly turn Trump into a lame duck, the expression used in the Anglo-Saxon world for a president at the end of his second term, with no options to repeat, when he seems inevitably destined to get rich selling his memoirs, play golf and give some talks.
The problem is that Trump is not like the others. He is already a millionaire, he already plays golf every week and it is clear that he is not going to give up continuing to talk. The main difference with its predecessors, however, goes further. In the United States there are no political parties like in Europe, but Trump has turned the Republican Party into something very similar, under his control and that of his family (his daughter-in-law is one of the co-presidents). He and his closest circle decide appointments throughout the country. And the leader harshly punishes those who are not loyal or enthusiastic enough. The senators and congressmen, national or state, whom he targeted for standing up to him, all lost in internal primaries. And the base case for many is that, even if he retires in 2028, and it remains to be seen what he tries, he will try to continue maintaining control from Mar-a-Lago.
However, now part of the game changes. Trump has turned the midterms into a referendum on him, his popularity and his ability to mobilize. And the United States is wondering these weeks if we are facing the turning point of the MAGA movement, which has been greatly affected in the last year. Steve Bannon, who was Trump's main guru in 2016, foresees a "civil war" within the Make America Great Again world due to the consequences of these legislative elections and the war in Iran. Many very important figures in the last decade, such as Tucker Carlson, have publicly broken with the president and denounce his drift, especially in foreign policy. Several of the most furious defenders he had on social networks or in the Lower House of Congress have declared war on him.
There is undoubtedly a feeling of the end of the cycle. Within the MAGA universe there is frustration and more and more people are saying loudly that a historic opportunity has been lost, an opportunity that appears only once every several generations. Trump had managed to bring together an impossible coalition between the richest men in the world, the most important figures in the technological world, the evangelists, part of the libertarian movement, the rednecks, the followers of conspiracies, the insurrectionists, those exhausted by the woke, those angry about border management, those sunk by inflation, those most irritated by identity issues and the cultural wars. Also those who simply got tired of traditional politics and had fun with the most extravagant president of contemporary times. Even the Latinos took their side. But that coalition does not seem to have withstood the Iran war, the delusions of grandeur, the rampant corruption, the enrichment of Trump and his family, and the tariffs.
With the country enraged by prices, Trump has dedicated his final rallies to obsessively talking about the ass or beauty of his senators or professional footballers. He spent Monday talking about his reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Or he castled himself by saying that he "didn't give a damn" about the complaints of those who lament the cost of diesel because the country and its oil friends are making millions.
Fox News is the president's favorite network. Just yesterday he called a live program in the morning and spoke for almost five minutes without interruption. It is the most watched cable channel in the United States, but its ratings have fallen drastically in recent weeks, which has generated speculation about the discouragement of the audience, almost entirely Republican. The year-on-year decline in viewership is so sharp, almost 20%, that the head of the show, Lachlan Murdoch, had to address it this Monday in the presentation of quarterly results, assuring that it was due to "viewer fatigue" in the face of the political cycle.
In recent hours, the former director of the FBI in Chicago has accused the Trump Administration of pressuring him to investigate the president's political opponents and making him a "scapegoat" after a major federal case against anti-ICE protesters failed. It is likely that many more will follow in their footsteps if the Democrats regain Congress and can begin investigations that were impossible these two years. In the podcasts and streamings of the main conservative influencers they talk about going to jail, investigations and the need for pardons. Trump himself dropped it again on Monday, in an interview in The New York Post, saying that he was considering mass preemptive pardons for some of his top collaborators or figures like Elon Musk. "I would do it if necessary, of course. I wouldn't even think about it. I would do it. I did it for those of January 6," he said, referring to the 1,500 convicted of the assault on the Capitol whom he forgave on his first day in office.
Another sign that things are not going as Trump would want is that he has stopped answering the phone to journalists. After the first bombings in Iran, in February, the president introduced a media novelty: dozens of daily mini-interviews. It didn't matter who called him and whether his phone was in circulation a lot: he answered for three or four minutes. Now, those same interlocutors say that he has not responded to their attempts for weeks. Symptoms of a change of cycle, of era, or the prolegomena of something darker.
On Monday, an interview with the outgoing governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, one of those who sounds like a possible candidate in 2028, went viral. He was a rival of Trump in the past, but the two more or less reconciled. But yesterday he clearly distanced himself, saying that Republicans should stop blaming Joe Biden for the price of gasoline and openly assume that it is the fault of the Iran war. He also criticized important Trump appointments, such as that of the already dismissed Kristi Noem. Something that would have been unthinkable before.
A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll, released in September, found a nine-point drop in the proportion of Republicans who identified with MAGA compared to March, from 77% to 68%. Without it, the Republicans can win, but there cannot be a movement like the one experienced during the last two decades. There is no possible replacement for something like this.
On Sunday night, in Kansas, after 30 rallies in 32 straight days, Trump brought out his most melancholic side. "We've been doing this for 11 years, and there has never been anything like it, and there probably never will be. There will never be so many people. There will never be the same feeling (...) I'm ending it tonight. This has been it," he concluded. He was talking about the campaign. Or maybe not.
