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Much of America views the congressional midterm elections on 3 November as judgement day for Donald Trump, when voters might give control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats and thereby hinder or cripple the President’s ability to do further evil to the world.
Trump was expected to do poorly in the midterms, as sitting presidents generally do. But it is his failing war against Iran, which is boosting prices and demolishing his reputation as a winner, that has done him what might just turn out to be fatal electoral damage.
If this is the case, we could be seeing the start of the unravelling of an extraordinary Trump-led counter-revolution which has sought to remake America in its own dark authoritarian image. For all his clowning and lies, Trumpism has the deadly serious purpose of transforming America as it was created by the Declaration of Independence in 1776, confirmed by the outcome of the Civil War (1861-65), and reinforced by the success of the New Deal in the 1930s.
Even Democratic optimists are nervous, as the possibility of the Republicans losing the Senate as well as the House is of very recent vintage. “If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will, then in some ways it would mark the end of the Trump era,” premier election forecaster Nate Silver told Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “If Trump has a bad night, as polls show, then he’s a super-lame duck.”
Not only will he be hampered and harassed by a vengeful Democratic majority in Congress, but power automatically drains away from a sitting president during his last two years in office as focus shifts to his potential successors.
It is the US-Israeli war on Iran that has made all the difference. A year ago, rising prices were damaging Trump. He himself said it after the 2024 election: “I won on the border” – that is, immigration – “and I won on groceries”, meaning prices.
Price inflation has continued to soar, but today the higher cost of fuel can be attributed entirely to Trump’s decision to attack Iran on 28 February. American voters almost always punish parties that engage them in foreign wars, so it is scarcely surprising if they blame Trump for a debacle that has left the much demonised Iranians and Houthis in Yemen strategically stronger than they were before the conflict.
Trump’s strength in the past was that he had fanatical core support – the so-called Maga base – but he also could assemble an electoral coalition broader than the traditional Republican reach. Barack Obama had been able to do the same for the Democrats. Most of the male white Trump fundamentalists remain on board, but it is his old coalition that has fragmented. Hispanics and young people, traditional Democratic voter cohorts who had rallied to Trump in surprising numbers in 2024, are massively redefecting, according to the polls.
Republican candidates who once piously invoked Trump’s name in their speeches to their electoral advantage today fear he has become a vote loser. In heavily Hispanic South Texas, an area with a population of 1.5 million, this Republican bid to play down the Trump connection has provoked a strange row.
This revolves around roadside billboards featuring a picture of the Republican House candidate, Eric Flores, standing beside Trump topped by the words “Trump Endorsed” and below the words “Support ICE!”. Only those who get close will see in smaller letters the message that this piece of political advertising is paid for the local Democratic Party organisation, which calculates that Trump’s name is now toxic among Hispanics, who make up almost a third of the Texas electorate. The Republican campaign has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Democrats demanding that the billboards be removed.
Sceptics argue that whatever setbacks are suffered by Trump, he will carry on regardless and simply ignore a hostile Congress. Conceivably he will even begin a third round in his war against Iran in alliance with Israel. But like Shakespeare’s King Lear, he may find that it is not only Republican candidates in South Texas who have a much less compliant attitude to rulers in decline than in the ascendant.
Last year there was a huge and shameful capitulation of powerful individuals and institutions to a triumphant Trump, as he hacked away at the foundations of American democracy. The notorious War of Independence traitor Benedict Arnold, who sought to betray his side to the British, used to be held up to American schoolchildren as the worst of unpatriotic side-changers. But the first year of Trump’s second term saw gaggles of modern day Benedict Arnolds – from business, academia, military, judiciary, media and beyond – bend the knee to a quasi-monarchical Trump and switch to what they believed was the winning side.
It would be deeply gratifying if all these capitulators and collaborators with Trumpism turn out to have bet on the wrong horse, though this might also be wishful thinking. One descriptive term for Trumpism is plutopopulism, and while Trump may be losing some of his popular appeal, he still has the backing of vastly wealthy plutocrats.
By late October, Elon Musk alone had contributed $445m (£332m) to the Republican Party at the local and federal levels. Massive donations do not automatically turn into votes, but they do help and might be enough to prevent a Republican wipeout.
Against this, the Democrats this time around are fielding many candidates who know how to make a speech, in contrast to the moribund and incoherent President Joe Biden and his uninspiring vice president – and the eventual Democratic presidential candidate – Kamala Harris.
This time around it is encouragingly different. More Democratic politicians know how to throw a rhetorical punch which connects with the target. This matters more than 30 years ago because speeches can be watched by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on YouTube and other platforms. This may be one reason why Democrats are at last cutting through and making charges of alleged corruption stick against the Trump administration.
Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff is a good example of this, telling an audience: “They promised to drain the swamp. Instead, it’s the most corrupt administration of all time, and everybody knows it. And while the crook President and his crook family rake in billions from all over the world, you pay more for everything. They doubled your insurance premiums and slashed Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich.”
This is rough but effective stuff. Possibly we are about to see the poisonous Trump tide recede to the benefit of Americans and the world at large. But not all arrows point in the same direction.
Suppose, despite the forever wars Trump promised not to wage and the corruption lapping through the doors of the White House, he remains in the ascendant. What does that say about Americans and America – and the future of the planet?
Further thoughts
I am depressed but not surprised that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outperformed the opinion polls and survived the general election on 27 October. Survival was all he needed to do, since he remains caretaker prime minister and, though his coalition bloc has lost its majority, he stands a good chance of rebuilding it through defections from a fragmented opposition or a unity government under his leadership.
His winning formula is the same as ever, which is to exploit Israelis’ fear of Palestinians at home and Arabs and Iranians abroad. The slogan of his Likud party in this election was “The Right or Palestine”. Israelis’ sense of insecurity has always been high and is higher than ever because of Hamas killing 1,200 Israelis on 7 October, 2023. This combines with the last round of the war with Iran earlier this year, when Iranian missiles were exploding everywhere and Israelis had to retreat to bomb shelters night after night.
Netanyahu’s strategy of no compromise with the Palestinians, or anybody else for that matter, has served him well for the last 30 years because it guarantees never-ending Israeli insecurity of which he is the political beneficiary.
His message to Israelis has always been that the Palestinian can be either ignored or utterly defeated, though his own career indicates the falsehood of this belief. First elected prime minister in 1996, he effectively ran against the compromise with the Palestinians embodied in the Oslo Accords. The door to power opened to him when Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an opponent of Oslo as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv in 1995.
Yet, although Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel for 18 of the last 30 years, the Palestinian issue has remained stubbornly at the heart of Israeli politics despite his efforts to marginalise them. His winner-takes-all policy has provoked escalating and unresolved crises at home and abroad.
Demonising the 2.1 million Palestinians who make up 21 per cent of Israel’s population has the practical advantage of ejecting them as players in the formation of the next Israeli government. They voted in unprecedented numbers in the election, winning 19 of the 120 Knesset seats, which means that 67 Knesset members just elected won on an anti-Netanyahu platform. Yet it is not only Netanyahu but the opposition who treat these Israeli citizens as political pariahs. As Haaretz puts it, the opposition chiefs nearly all “capitulated to Netanyahu’s fear-mongering campaign against the Arab-led parties, vowing not to join with the only force that could help them defeat him”.
The opposition to Netanyahu is a rag-bag of discordant parties and factions often led by opportunist leaders, so an Israeli who feels unsafe has every reason to opt for Netanyahu as a known quantity and a strong leader. Moreover, the opposition have no real-world alternative policies on key issues like Israeli relations with Palestinians and the war with Iran. The only glue holding them together is hatred of Netanyahu – and that was not enough on election day.
Netanyahu’s endorsement by Trump pushed up his support because Israelis know how much they depend on full American backing – and this dependence is greater than ever.
Over the years, Netanyahu’s toxic version of Israeli nationalism has progressively poisoned the Israeli body politic at every level to the point where recovery may be impossible. This election just might have been a turning point, but all the signs are that it was not.
Below the radar
I have long believed that selectivity in war reporting is more harmful and effective than fake facts and propaganda when it comes to misleading us about what is really going on.
Nevertheless, it came as something of a shock this week to realise that the Black Sea, one of the world’s great trade routes, is today more dangerous for ships and their crews than the Strait of Hormuz.
Since midsummer, Ukraine and Russia have engaged in swiftly escalating attacks on ships with drones and missiles that has largely stopped Ukraine’s once huge agricultural exports and Russia’s oil and grain exports through the Black Sea. Port facilities in and around Odesa in south Ukraine that once handled five million tonnes of grain exports a year are closed.
The media discovered the importance of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year and speak of it continually, but the Black Sea gets scarcely a mention. Shippers may risk vessels in the Strait of Hormuz because freight rates and profits are high but not in the Black Sea where they are lower. Their view of the dangers involved is shared by insurance underwriters who told the Financial Times that war risk insurance for vessels in the Black Sea was 15 per cent of hull value, twice the rate they charge for the Strait of Hormuz.
If shippers continue to operate at all in the Black Sea, they use older and less valuable vessels. The sea war has spread down the west side of the Black Sea to the Danube river ports with ships in waters off Romania and Bulgaria also being hit and, on occasion, sunk.
Cockburn’s picks
There is a mountain of reporting, analysis and commentary about the state of America in the run-up to the midterms, but I found a lengthy essay entitled “Another Country” by Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books from earlier this year the most clear-eyed and perceptive account of the great American crisis that I have read anywhere.
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