The United States has voted in the mid-term elections and the result has been a real blow for Donald Trump: the Democrats have recovered the House of Representatives and also the Senate, where they already have 54 seats secured, and they have won in states where Trump won by more than ten points, such as Texas, Ohio, Iowa or Kansas.
The first reaction on the Republican side was that of Donald Trump with a tweet: “I was not on the ballot and, if I had been, we would have won by a landslide! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” was what he said despite the fact that analysts assure that the punishment was precisely for him, since he entered the elections with 33% approval.
Trump, a very “strange” “lame duck” after the ‘midterms’: the rise of Stephen Miller
What do these results mean for the Republican Party and for Donald Trump’s remaining term in office? Blas Moreno explains in The World Order of Julia in the wave that, when a president reaches the end of his term and has the legislature against him, he is often called a “lame duck”, that is, “someone who no longer has the capacity to carry out his political agenda.” But, in Trump’s case, “he is going to be a very rare lame duck because, instead of being intimidated, he is going to try to be even more aggressive with many executive orders that go over Congress and with many vetoes. In fact, he has already said that he will be known as ‘Mr. Veto.'”
This means that if Congress proposes something, it will say no, it will return it to the House, which will have to approve it with more qualified majorities, which will lead to a political blockade that will make the situation in the United States become “even more angry, polarized and complicated.”
In this context, the rise of Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff and the architect of Donald Trump’s immigration policy, is understood. A man who, as Blas Moreno explains, “has a reputation for being radical, efficient and quite dangerous”: “He is going to run internal politics, which tells us about how Trump is going to want to do the next two years: very harsh, very controversial and tough.”
The race for the presidential elections begins: this is how Republicans and Democrats arrive
As for the Republican Party, the race for the 2028 presidential election and the succession of Donald Trump has already begun, which promises to be a very big fight between classic conservatives, such as Marco Rubio, and the hard wing of the MAGA movement (‘Make America Great Again’) in the figure of JD Vance. Because Vance has already distanced himself from Trump just one day after the electoral defeat, when he blamed the Iran war for the result: “It is the first shot in that war for power after 28.”
On the other side, there are the Democrats, who find themselves with a victory, but also with a lot of work ahead of them. Among the new faces are James Talarico, a former teacher and Presbyterian seminarian who has been the first Democrat elected senator from Texas in 38 years, defeating Ken Paxton and with Elon Musk dedicated to his rival’s campaign: “He has spent half a billion dollars supporting the Republican candidacy.” Talarico is a “religious man who quotes the Bible, but who is capable of mobilizing many people to change politics in the United States.”
Another of the names of the Democratic Party is Adam Hamilton, senator from Kansas, a state in which the Democrats had not won for almost 100 years. That senator is a Methodist pastor who is accused of being a “left-wing woke” and who responds that “Jesus Christ would also be woke,” as a way of prioritizing the religious vote. These two names “tell us about the fight that opens in 2028 between the most moderate people in the party and the most progressive.”
John Ossoff, the Democrat who is compared to the Kennedys
Probably, Blas Moreno explains, the lesson is that in a country as enormous and diverse as the United States, the winning strategy is to go with a different candidate in each place because “everything doesn’t work everywhere.” But it is true that there is beginning to be “rumor” about who could be presidential in 2028 in the Democratic Party. One of them is Talarico and another name that resonates strongly is John Ossoff, the senator from Georgia, a man who is compared to the Kennedys in terms of charisma, communication skills, youth, energy and renewal.
“There are many new people in that party and we will probably see that internal fight to see who runs for president in two years,” concludes Blas Moreno. Furthermore, they add that in these two years, the Democrats will have to demonstrate that it is not enough to give you power, but that you have to use it in favor of the people: “Investigations of the president, impeachment, etc. We will see how they use that power.”
