American voters just delivered a once-in-a-generation rebuke of a sitting president and his movement.
They handed his political opposition, the Democrats, control of the US House and the Senate in the same night. And they did it in deep red places like Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, states that haven’t sent a Democrat to the US Senate in decades. By the early hours, Donald Trump was telling the New York Times he would accept the results while blaming Fox News, bad candidates and Greg Abbott, who he decided had “become a RINO [Republican In Name Only]”.
I was in the White House the last time Trump lost part of Congress, in the 2018 midterm elections. What followed was chaotic, vindictive and more dangerous than what came before.
Here’s what to expect out of Washington in the weeks and months ahead.
1. The President will purge parts of his White House and cabinet
Trump cannot take blame. In two and a half years working under him, I never saw him do it. And in the weeks after the 2018 midterms, he pushed out his chief of staff John Kelly and lost his defence secretary Jim Mattis, along with a string of others deemed insufficiently loyal or simply convenient scapegoats. A repeat may be on the way. According to recent reporting, Trump has eyed axing his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, as well as his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who is being set up as the Iran War fall guy. Surely others will follow.
But buckle up. The purge after 2018 didn’t produce a more cautious White House. If anything, from my vantage point it produced a more radical one, because the people who left were the ones who occasionally said “no” in our private meetings with the president. The same will happen now. The adults who remain will be thrown overboard, and their replacements will be chosen for one quality only, which is that they’ll never tell him he’s wrong.
More from Miles Taylor
Trump once raged at me over the midterms. Now I’m helping to bring him down Trump told me a trick from his business days. He’s using it to destroy good men Behind closed doors, Trump showed me a heart ruled by cold, hard cash2. Democrats will gear up for the biggest investigations in Congressional history
In 2018, Democrats took the House and spent two years digging into a presidency that was, frankly, amateurish in its misconduct. This time they will have both chambers, subpoena power in the Senate as well as the House and a target list that includes nearly every major department and agency in Washington. These won’t just be symbolic hearings.
I have been in regular communications with top Democrats on the oversight committees in Congress, and what they have planned has no parallel in American history. None. The investigations will be sprawling, relentless and fact-driven. And there are early discussions about how to bring in auxiliary talent, including former prosecutors, ex-FBI investigators and other experts who’ve run complex anti-corruption investigations.
Supporters react during a midterm election night watch party for Texas Democratic Senator-elect, James Talarico (Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)3. Those who bent the knee will run for the hills
For two years, Americans watched elites bow to Donald Trump out of fear or avarice. Corporate America, the big law firms and half of Washington’s lobbying class found ways to make peace with him, even when many had stridently opposed him in his first term. They cut deals to avoid his retribution, wrote cheques for his White House ballroom and signed settlements that looked to a lot of us like protection money. The self-debasing logic of capitulation made sense when Trump controlled all the levers of power in the capital. It looks very different this morning.
Robert Garcia, who will chair the House Oversight Committee in January — the main investigative committee in the chamber, shared a two-word post last night as the results rolled in: “Lawyer up.” I spoke with him recently, and his targets will include the Trump family’s business dealings, corporate corruption, abuses at ICE and the Epstein files. The companies and firms that cosied up to this administration will soon have to explain their decisions under oath, and several that I’ve talked to are quietly panicking.
4. Republicans will start abandoning him
Watch the “lame duck” session closely. Over the next few months before Democrats officially take power, Republicans will start to break from the White House. In particular, GOP candidates who’ve lost their races will have far less loyalty toward the man who cost them their jobs and cost their party its power. Even before polls closed, his own allies were texting people like me that the Iran war had sunk the midterms and the President lacked the discipline to deliver any sort of coherent closing argument.
Republican Senator Jon Husted wells up while speaking alongside his wife, Tina, as he lost to Democrat Sherrod Brown (Photo: AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)Trump has already responded by pointing the finger back at them. He posted that Republicans would have won “in a landslide” if he’d been on the ballot. This, of course, was despite the fact that Trump spent weeks campaigning and telling his people to pretend he was on the ballot. That seems to have been the problem — voters very much made it a referendum on Trump. Now he doesn’t want ownership of the loss, and outgoing Republicans will surely remember that as the White House presses them to cement Trump’s agenda in the three months before they’re out of power.
5. Trump will re-focus on foreign policy, with potentially disastrous consequences
As I wrote on Tuesday, presidents constrained politically at home tend to set their sites abroad. While many seek out new accords and legacy-cementing diplomacy, Trump will retreat to his grievance factory. He will return to his quest to diminish or even dismantle Nato, punish European countries he sees as insufficiently loyal, and weigh in favourably on the side of the world’s autocrats, with lasting repercussions for the western world. Allied capitals are already bracing for more erratic behaviour than usual and a president who seems keen to abandon Ukraine and to double down on a disastrous war in Iran.
Miles Taylor has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, national security commentator and democracy reform leader. Follow all of his US politics coverage here
But he still won’t have free rein. A Democratic Congress will control the power of the purse and consider shutting off funds for Trump’s wayward foreign policies. What’s more, a few moderate Republicans who’ve lost their races because of Trump may suddenly find they’ve lost their loyalty to him, potentially joining hands with Democrats in constraining Trump’s field of action. That won’t necessarily stop the President, but for the first time in two years, there will be people in Washington able to slow him down.
Last night, America delivered an indictment against the sitting president. What comes next will be a public “trial” that I expect to be as raucous as it is unpredictable. And one thing that is now absolutely certain: Garcia will get his wish. Everyone will be lawyering up.
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