The standard rhythm in American politics is that the two main political parties take turns at government, with each winning many seats at the start of a new mandate only to see that support erode over time. A divided government follows a united government, and the cycle repeats itself. Even before President Donald Trump and his administration made the fateful decision to launch Operation Epic Fury against Iran, he was set to experience some sort of setback in the midterm season. Yet what could have been a stumble had become a spectacular collapse in his partisan fortunes. The Democrats surpassed many optimistic expectations and won both the House of Representatives and the Senate, inflicting unforeseen embarrassments in traditional red state strongholds like Kansas and South Carolina. As of writing, the Democrats have won at least 54 seats in the Senate and about 256 seats in the House.
The implications of the midterm elections are significant. In this short essay, I want to highlight three: that the institutional balance of power between the White House and Congress will become a point of fresh debate in the United States; that the strength of MAGA has been overestimated by supporters and critics; and that divided government in Washington will not make the country turn inward as much as it would allow some allies and partners themselves to turn inward.
The balance of executive-legislative power in the United States government
What is often missed in non-American discourse about that country is how unshackled the office of the presidency has become since at least the Second World War, going well beyond what the writers of the U.S. Constitution intended. Though they did want a strong enough federal government that would avoid the problems that came with the Articles of Confederation, they wanted it to be constrained. Hence the Constitution gives priority to Congress by devoting its first article to defining the roles and responsibilities of the legislative branch of government. The presidency comes second, with its powers presented in general terms that have left much room for interpretation. Still, that Congress controls the purse strings and would regulate trade and interstate commerce testify to its intended institutional primacy.
Yet the office of the presidency has grown in stature. Part of the explanation is technology. The presidency has advantages in its speed of decision-making, which make it an asset when dealing with foreign threats that can muster missile and nuclear weapons against U.S. territory and interests abroad. Indeed, the growth of presidential power came with the Cold War. Choices once deemed antithetical to the U.S. conception of itself became normalized. Prior to the Second World War, there had been no large and permanent standing army in peacetime, after all. The quartering of British troops in private residences proved to be so traumatic that the Founding Fathers found it necessary to devote the third constitutional article to ensure that nothing of the sort could happen again. A powerful army seemed antithetical to democracy and civic liberties.
Predictably, the expansion of presidential power brought with it abuses and set in train scandals that eventually moved Congress to reassert itself. The controversies surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the expansion of the Vietnam War into other parts of Indochina, the paranoid anxiety over government surveillance that culminated with Watergate, and the use of assassination as a foreign policy proved too much. Congress passed the War Powers Act in its bid to limit executive authority in using force abroad, whereas the Church and Pike Committees made recommendations to bring oversight to the intelligence community while curbing its activities.
These measures proved at best partly successful. Assassinations as a tool until recently faded from use, whereas both political parties admire the War Powers Act when they are not in power but tend to dance around it when they govern. More crucially, presidential power continued to grow, with Republican-friendly constitutional theorists going as far as proposing that the U.S. Constitutions envisions the president as being the unitary embodiment of the federal government, with the troubling implication that the president cannot be investigated by other parts of the federal government and can fire federal employees at will.
The Democrats’ electoral performance in the 2026 midterms will rekindle debates as to the scope of executive power and how it should be balanced by Congress. At the very least, a divided government will be a major source of constraint on the Trump administration. Studies indicate that divided government usually means fewer uses of force abroad. It is not hard to see why. Congress controls the purse strings and will demand oversight. Although the Trump administration enjoyed the narrowest majority in Congress since the 1930s, lawmakers were reluctant to use their institutional levels to curb its excesses—a reluctance that the Democrats are unlikely to share. A noncompliant executive branch will eventually experience problems if it cannot get appointments approved and budgets passed.
Thus, arguments that Trump will be at his most unpredictable and dangerous are just wrong. Setting aside the strange implication that it would have been better for him to retain a congressional majority, those arguments simply do not accord with either the historical record or the operating logic of U.S. political institutions. To be sure, he remains the president. He will have authority to use military force to a certain extent. The controversial assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020, after all, took place during a period of divided government. However, his ability to use existing trade law to justify sweeping, self-harming tariffs and to escape scrutiny over serious allegations of corruption will be circumscribed. The appointment of Stephen Miller as chief of staff may be pugilistic, but it is more bark than bite because it does not change the new institutional balance of power. In fact, Republican lawmakers should be especially alarmed by this decision because it further complicates their ability to send a positive message to voters ahead of the 2028 elections.
The frailty of MAGA
It has become almost conventional wisdom that the populist movement will remain a powerful and persistent feature of U.S. politics. Yet critics and supporters alike have overrated its novelty and, more importantly, its influence, confusing its loudness for its size. According to Nate Silver, those who continue to approve strongly of Trump amount to a fifth of the national samples. Those who disapprove are at least double. To call Trump polarizing is to make him out to be more popular than he really is. Indeed, Trump did not get back into the White House after a four-year interregnum because a large portion of the U.S. electorate saw MAGA’s light and became convinced of its wisdom. Voters simply did not like President Joe Biden amid the inflation at the time, and his Vice President, Kamala Harris, was too much in his shadow, when she was suddenly made the presidential nominee. Only a few years later, some of these factors appear manifestly in force to explain the Republican Party’s current misfortune: an ailing president unwilling or unable to do much about rising prices, with significant corruption seen as a distinguishing element of his administration.
Voters have clearly rejected MAGA. Well-known Trump ally and Representative Laura Boebert appears poised to join the wide number of Trump Republicans who have lost at the ballot box. Many of Trump’s handpicked candidates, like Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina, faceplanted. MAGA has proven to be a failure. It was too incompetent at government, and too corrupt at the elite level to keep its grassroots appeal. MAGA should be best considered to be the latest instantiation of the so-called Jacksonian tradition. There will always be a populist tinge to American politics: it existed before MAGA, and it will exist after. MAGA was more of a historical moment than some sort of new permanent reality.
A Madisonian will thus feel validated in our current circumstances: the country is big and its society is complex such that there will be many competing factions that will attempt to shape national politics in accordance with their political vision and economic interests. The remnants of MAGA will now have to set itself against more moderate forces at the political center, in addition to the various left-wing elements that make up the Democratic Party.
An inward turn but not in the United States
For U.S. allies and partners, they can breathe a collective sign of relief. Yet that is not to say that there will be a return to ‘normalcy’, whatever ‘normalcy’ means. After all, the last twenty-five years have seen many controversies in the transatlantic alliance that touched on the Iraq War and burden-sharing, to say nothing of the deep economic headwinds precipitated by the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, the Trump administration will be hamstrung in going about any new moves that would severely cramp NATO and any other treaty alliance. The window of opportunity for any large-scale troop withdrawals of the sort envisioned in the 1970s is closed again.
And so that brings me to the third point: the United States will not necessarily turn inward-looking even if the executive and legislative branches will be locked in a struggle to define the limits of sovereign power. If anything, a divided government will create a level of stability and predictability that had been sorely lacking in the last two years within the transatlantic community. The downside is that U.S. allies and partners might feel that they can pay less attention to shoring up their defence needs in order to attend to their domestic challenges.
2027 will be a pivotal year for elections. Early predictions for the presidential election in France point to victory on the part of Rassemblement National. Alternative für Deutschland has been making major inroads in German politics. The Conservative and Labour Parties in the United Kingdom have struggled electorally thanks to surging support for Reform UK. Parliamentary elections in Poland may mean more gridlock amid a persistent constitutional crisis over the status of the judiciary. High energy costs and a growing sense that the standard of living is declining have given the space for more extremist political parties to make headway.
European governments have already signaled that efforts to rebuild collective defence have reached a limit. The Spanish prime minister has already refused to countenance NATO pledges for greater defence spending. The Italian prime minister plans defence spending reductions in order to manage the country’s worsening fiscal situation. A British defence minister resigned earlier this year out of frustration that not enough investment was being made despite the threat environment facing Europe becoming more hostile. In Canada, which has made a point of its new commitment to higher defence spending, the government has failed to deliver a clear agenda for sustaining military expenditures at agreed-upon levels. Its recent National Security Strategy omitted any reference to potential threats and adversaries, preferring to emphasize instead ‘economic security’. Canada is already contemplating whether to break up its major planned purpose for new submarines. That Russia has been relentless in its attacks on Ukraine and pernicious in its campaign of sabotage and disruption across the European continent have not yielded the commensurate response from NATO.
If these trends were already afoot before the crushing blow that the Republican Party received in the midterm elections, then they will likely continue, if not deepen. Centrist governments and the mainstream parties that lead them will be anxious to do what they can to turn the tide against illiberal populist forces. Although the global right suffered a significant defeat in the United States, its fortunes at the national level will remain largely a function of local factors. French voters are unlikely to be moved by the ineptitude of populists in places like Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Those lessons lack vividness, and so they will have to learn for themselves the hard way.
The twilight zone
The Trump presidency may be as neutralized as it can be, U.S. allies and partners should resist complacency. Bomb threats have diverted flights across Europe several days after the midterm elections. Superstore freezers and blood storage facilities in France have been hacked and sabotaged. Russia continues to target Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones, oftentimes hitting schools and hospitals with impunity. For its part, the fundamental conflict between China and Taiwan regarding the latter’s political status shows no sign of abating, whereas North Korea is drawing lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War to finetune its own force posture. The twilight years of the Trump era will be anything but peaceful.
Even if divided government constrains the Trump administration and MAGA recedes in importance, governments across NATO still must prepare their societies for enduring conflict. Crucially, although Democrats have substantive disagreements with Trump and his fellow Republicans, they do have overlapping objectives within the transatlantic alliance. There is wide bipartisan consensus that allies must spend more on their militaries so as to be less reliant on the United States. Both parties prioritize regions other than Europe in their national security strategies. The worst that non-U.S. NATO can do is to pretend that Democrats’ support for Europe is unconditional.
Image credits: Unsplash
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