Americans vote today in the midterm elections of Donald Trump’s second term, with the whole US House and a third of the Senate on the ballot. The polls suggest Democrats are poised for big gains and possibly a takeover of Congress. If they’re right, readers in Britain should prepare for what comes next, because I’ve seen the preview.
A few weeks before the 2018 midterm elections, midway through Trump’s first term, I was summoned to the White House for a meeting that didn’t appear on any public schedule. It was a huddle of top agency heads, and the subject was what to do if Republicans lost the House of Representatives. The polls were pointing to a “blue wave” for the Democrats, and the president’s advisers wanted a plan.
What emerged from that meeting was sensible enough. The goal would be to keep the president focused on governing by treating the coming Democratic investigations as background noise. White House lawyers advised that they’d help stonewall where possible, cooperate where unavoidable but above all minimise the probes as much as possible so the president didn’t get sucked into them. It seemed to me that it was a strategy that depended entirely on Trump’s self-discipline, and anyone who’d spent time around him knew how that would end.
On election night 2018, Democrats flipped 40 House seats, their biggest gain since the Watergate era in the 1970s. I was with the president the following day, and his demeanour validated my expectations about whatever post-election “poise” White House staff were hoping for from the boss. In private, he was a grievance machine, venting about the investigations he knew were coming. Then he marched into the East Room for a press conference and warned that if the new majority used its subpoena power against him, he’d adopt a “war-like posture”.
The press conference lasted an hour and a half. It was like watching a drunk man waving around his steak knife at a dinner party. Staff cringed and averted their eyes as the spectacle lurched from presidential threats to gaffes and back again. Eventually Trump got into a shouting match with reporters. He railed against the political opposition. By that afternoon, he had forced out his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and by evening the White House had revoked the press pass of CNN’s Jim Acosta, who’d asked tough questions at the press conference.
A week and a half later, Trump was in arguably worse shape. I was back in the Oval Office to brief him on a bill he was about to sign, creating the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, America’s first dedicated civilian cyber defence agency, which we’d spent months pushing through Congress. He signed it, listened for perhaps a minute as we tried to explain what the bill actually was and then called the press in. Instead of cybersecurity, he raged about “witch hunts”, the investigations against him and the Russia “hoax”. He couldn’t hold the subject at hand in his head. The paranoia that was always there had become acute, almost to the point of being disabling.
Posters highlighting high food and fuel prices and urging people to vote in Dallas, Texas (Photo: Ricardo Arduengo/AFP)What followed over the next two months is instructive. He pushed out his chief of staff, John Kelly, and his interior secretary. He announced a withdrawal from Syria that nobody had planned for, which prompted the resignation of his defence secretary, Jim Mattis, within a day. He triggered a government shutdown over Christmas that ran for 35 days, then the longest in American history. He asked aides whether he could fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve while markets suffered their worst December since 1931. Many of us began to sense that the presidency was coming off the rails — and that’s when Trump still had advisers who’d say “no” and an upcoming re-election bid, which kept him at least partly in check.
Neither restraint exists now. Trump cannot run again. The people around him were chosen for loyalty. And Democrats are preparing to investigate far more than Trump’s collusion with Russia. They’re signalling far-reaching probes into the Trump family, pardons of the wealthy elite, prosecutions of his critics, taxpayer-funded vanity projects, questionable foreign deals and more. Trump appears rightfully worried about spending the rest of his life under subpoena and watching his legacy taken apart.
So I expect him first to do whatever he can to deny, delay or disrupt a handover in Congress. That includes contesting close counts, pressuring state officials over certification and pointing his Justice Department to take action in districts he claims were stolen. Much of that may fail. If it does, he’ll get angrier and seek more drastic remedies. I’ve joined former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt in warning about the possibility of Trump invoking what are known as presidential “doomsday” powers to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
The US President speaks during during an election rally in Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday (Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty)In the aftermath of these midterms, we could see a resurgence of the ideas his own people have temporarily talked him out of. This range from a wider “counterterrorism” campaign aimed at domestic political opponents to more direct action to shut out or shut down news outlets he dislikes. What’s more, a president who feels backed into a corner at home often goes searching for a new stage abroad. Ex-Maga figures like Tucker Carlson have warned that Trump could order a nuclear strike on Iran, a claim the White House dismissed but which tells you plenty about where his former allies believe his head is. Meanwhile, I expect Nato’s future to come back into play and that Trump will abandon Ukraine more abruptly than anyone is prepared for.
I believe he’ll fight hardest for the things that look most trivial: the White House ballroom, the triumphal arch he wants across the Potomac, the reflecting pool he’s had painted American flag blue. They’re easy to dismiss as sideshows, but they’re not. On Monday afternoon, in what his aides had billed as his closing argument for the midterms, he stood in front of the reflecting pool and spoke for more than 25 minutes about the pool, his new granite helipad on the White House lawn, the soaring arch he says he’s building in honour of himself, the public golf course he’s ripping up and the troops he’s put on the city’s streets … all before he got round to mentioning the election.
He sees those projects as his legacy. Democrats have made them a priority precisely because they’re the most visible symbols of alleged corruption in this administration — of the misuse of power and taxpayer dollars for self-aggrandisement in a way we’ve seen from no American president in history — and I expect him to defend those vanity projects to the point of potential law-breaking and in defiance of court orders. It sounds absurd to think America might face a constitutional crisis over monuments to one man’s ego. Yet there’s a good chance that’s what happens.
In any other administration, a lame-duck president would be thinking about how to secure a few more legislative wins through bipartisan cooperation and exploring ways to cement other policy victories, including passing the torch to a capable successor. But Trump will rage against the dying of the spotlight. He can’t imagine losing it, so he’ll find any way possible to keep it. And for those exhausted by all of this, I’m afraid it doesn’t stop here. Once the midterms are done and the investigations are opened, the conversation in Washington will turn to 2028 and a taboo question: Will Trump leave voluntarily? Either way, it will not be quietly.
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