It was just before 3am when Donald Trump entered a crowded Manhattan ballroom, greeted by chants of “USA! USA” and theme music from the Hollywood film Air Force One. On stage, two red “Make America great again” (Maga) caps were mounted in glass cases like holy relics.
That was the scene 10 years ago this week when Trump, a businessman and reality TV star, stunned the world by beating Hillary Clinton to the White House. A decade later an unlikely president is serving an unlikely second term. But in the wake of a humiliating vote of no confidence in last week’s midterm elections, he now enters an endgame wracked with uncertainty.
“Trump is about to get even weirder and, sadly, more dangerous,” tweeted Clinton, who has been a wry commentator on the Trump years, predicting that the president will deflect blame, become more unhinged, demand even greater loyalty from Republicans and potentially launch fresh attacks on Iran.
Political obituary writers have been swift to describe him as a lame duck, defanged lion or cornered animal in the wake of the midterms. Democrats’ 13 percentage point victory was the second biggest of any midterm election since 1942, and the party conquered the Republican bastions of Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas.
The causes of the Republican rout were plain: an eight month war in Iran that sent fuel prices soaring, persistent cost of living pressures and a backlash against masked immigration raids that turned deadly in Minneapolis.
The 80-year-old president’s response has swung wildly between conciliation, aggression and farce. He told the CBS network’s 60 Minutes program that his deportation push was “too tough” while declaring that no amnesty would occur and appointing immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as White House chief of staff.
He publicly invited the job of White House press secretary to “violent fighter and warrior” Dana White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), brought him into the briefing room to play out the scenario, then insisted it had all been a joke. He threw his weight behind the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who survived an impeachment resolution brought by a maverick Republican in Congress.
All the while he has retreated into architectural vanity projects, including a White House ballroom and triumphal arch in Washington, and increasingly wayward rhetoric that included ruminations about men’s posteriors, speeches punctuated by strange guttural sounds and a lengthy social media post about comedian Bill Maher.
Miles Taylor, founder of Defiance.org, a non-profit aimed at countering government corruption and abuses of power, agrees with Clinton’s analysis about the finale of the Trump show. He said: “It will certainly be weirder because Donald Trump was always going to end the administration with the bottom of the barrel appointees.
“Like any wannabe autocrat, you end up in the figurative bunker at the end of the regime with the most hardcore loyalists, which tend to be the people who are willing to contort themselves into whatever shape the leader wants. These are the people who have no scruples and are willing to carry out the president’s most extreme edicts and, in some cases, are the ones who have been goading him for almost a decade to do the most extreme things.”
Miller is the prime example. He has championed expansive presidential power, branded the Democratic party a “domestic extremist organisation”, advocated suspending habeas corpus to speed deportations and asserted that the US has a right to Venezuela’s oil and Greenland’s territory. He supplanted Susie Wiles, whose more measured approach had been seen as a potential restraint on Trump’s darkest impulses.
Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, said: “In my experience with Stephen, he was a guy that was all too willing to walk up to the line of the law and then leap over it and dare the courts to rein us in. That was literally the type of thing he said to me on multiple occasions.
“One of my biggest fears about this next two years is: will Donald Trump cause the ultimate constitutional crisis by defying judicial orders, including from the supreme court, if he doesn’t get his way? I see it as very possible because he’s got a team around him that might be willing to make the case of why that would be justified.”
There is another way for an embattled president to seek a place in history: foreign policy. Presidents approaching the end of their time in office have often turned to diplomacy and international affairs as a means of burnishing their legacy. After Democrats suffered heavy losses in the 2014 midterms, Barack Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba, secured a nuclear agreement with Iran and helped broker the Paris climate agreement.
Trump has already placed an emphasis on global affairs since returning to the White House last year. Even as Democrats prepare to rein in the president when they take control of Congress in January, Trump will retain considerable latitude to pursue his ambitions on the world stage, from Iran and Israel to Ukraine and China.
Taylor commented: “What he did in the first two years on the foreign policy front could potentially pale in comparison with what he does in the latter two years and that’s saying something because he launched this war in Iran.
“But here are things to look for. Does Nato survive this period? Does the United States actually try to go seize more territory? Both of those are things that Donald Trump has talked about doing and been walked back by advisors on over the course of two terms. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore.
“But then there’s other areas of the world that might be worried about Trump administration inaction being just as bad or worse than Trump administration offensive action, if the Russians try to seize more territory and if the Chinese take Taiwan. On the world stage I would warn our allies, it’s about to get very, very bad. And I would say to our adversaries, this is probably the luckiest two years you’re ever going to get.”
Despite the historic losses, there is little sign of a Republican revolt against Trump. On Capitol Hill this week the party effectively killed the attempt to impeach Hegseth while also electing Jim Jordan, a pugnacious ally of the president, as its minority leader for the next Congress. Most Republicans who survived the midterm bloodbath are from safe red districts and staunchly pro-Trump. The outcome could be more Maga, not less.
Olivia Wales, a spokeswoman for the White House, said via email: “President Trump will continue to enact his commonsense, America First agenda that has delivered the most secure border ever, the largest working-class tax cut in history, the lowest murder rate since 1900, the sharpest drop in prescription drug prices in more than 60 years, and a stock market that has hit record highs.
“As the President said, he is willing to work with anyone who wants to strengthen our economy, lower costs for American families, protect our national security, and improve the lives of hardworking Americans. If Democrats choose to pursue radical-left policies, they are choosing to work against the best interests of the American people.”
Some commentators believe that, given Trump’s ideological fluidity, a deal with Democrats might be possible.
Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Stanford, California, said: “If Trump wants to work with Congress, the question is what do they have in common? If I’m running the Democratic caucuses right now, I might think 70-30 or 80-20 is what I want in terms of a compromise, because the president wants to sign something to show he’s still relevant.”
Whalen suggests an intriguing parallel: “Is Donald Trump at his heart really that conservative, or will he turn out to be a little bit more of a moderate Democrat? Similar to [former Republican governor] Arnold Schwarzenegger here in California, where he gets chastised, and then in his second term, he’s governing very much like a moderate Democrat.”
Others suspect that Trump, who has placed a red baseball cap saying “veto” on his desk in the Oval Office, indicating his willingness to block Democratic legislation, intends to go out with all guns blazing. Newt Gingrich, a former House of Representatives speaker, predicts an aggressive counter attack rather than a chastened administration winding down.
“I recommend everybody read Trump’s book The Art of the Comeback, which explains what he’s like when he’s right at the edge of being destroyed, pivots and rebuilds overnight,” Gingrich said. “You have to assume that he and Stephen Miller are methodically thinking through the comeback. I suspect the State of the Union [address] will be chock-full of things that the American people want that the Democrats will be taunted about passing.”
For Democrats, the uncertainty of whether Trump will offer a fight or flight response poses a conundrum. Speaking at the Center for American Progress thinktank in Washington this week, congressman Jim Himes said: “We just don’t know which Donald Trump is going to show up. Is it the dealmaker, or is it the Stephen Miller pugilist? On any given day we’re not going to know which president is sitting in the Oval Office.”
For Rick Wilson, a veteran political strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, the president has crossed a threshold into volatile decline. “The impulsivity has come not only from his age but from the understanding now that he is an island unto himself,” he said.
“He doesn’t have that enormous backstop of congressional impunity to work from. That is going to make him do a lot of lashing out and things like we’ve seen the last few days – going to the podium in the press room and just riffing.”
Wilson believes that Trump has reached his “fat Elvis” phase. “He’s trying to recapture the old magic. He’s trying to get back the old mojo and it just isn’t quite there. The crash out of his approval, the loss of his congressional shield wall and the lack of any adult supervision around him now – it’s a toxic combination where he’s going to feel desperate and angry and crazy.”
While Trump grapples with immediate constraints, political gravity is already shifting toward the presidential succession in January 2029. JD Vance, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Texas senator Ted Cruz were all quick to weigh in with opinions on what went wrong in the midterms. Former state governors Glenn Youngkin and Chris Christie are among other potential contenders.
Can Trump endure sharing the stage in 2028? Wilson foresees a messy spectacle. “He has been the centre of that political gravity for 10 years now. Because he’s the devil, he’s going to go in and piss on Vance one day and raise him up the next. He’ll piss on Marco [Rubio] one day and raise him up the next. He’ll try to be the kingmaker.”
