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Washington: The temptation after a Democratic victory at today’s midterm elections – if that is indeed what transpires – will be to parse the results as Americans turning the page on Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. But that could be a dangerous mistake.
At the 2018 midterms, during Trump’s first term, Democrats gained 40 seats and took control of the House of Representatives. Americans removed Trump from office two years later, and, amid an onslaught of criminal charges, he seemed destined for the dustbin of political history.
As we know, voters felt otherwise. Trump achieved a bigger victory in 2024 than 2016 – despite, and possibly because of, everything Americans knew about him and his policies.
Their vote was not necessarily a wholesale embrace of Trump the man, but a rejection of the Democrats after four years of Joe Biden. The Trump agenda at the time – lower prices, no new foreign wars, tariffs, closing the border and dismantling the “woke” agenda – carried the day because it appealed.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull notes Trump won a genuine majority for “his ‘America first’ views, his protectionist views, his view that America should use its power to extract the best deal for itself, and his views that America should not be overly concerned about its allies”.
Trump himself may be historically unpopular – and that will impact today’s results – but the factors that led Americans to support him twice are still there. Arguably, it is not so much that voters have moved away from Trumpism, but that he let them down.
“In a sense, you could say Trump’s political problems today are caused by him abandoning key elements of MAGA,” Turnbull told this masthead last week in New York.
“One of the key parts of the MAGA agenda was no new foreign wars. This is a guy who was seeking the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a guy who railed against George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He talked to me and Lucy [Turnbull’s wife] about it once. He was obsessed about this.”
Trump played the populist card in 2024, and Democrats have played it in 2026. The party’s key election message has been about affordability: that Trump’s tariffs, trade disputes and war with Iran mean you are paying more for petrol and groceries.
That is true – petrol prices are higher than usual, though not as high as their all-time peak in 2022. Australians, who depend on imports, also pay much more for petrol than Americans.
If it is the case that affordability is the big issue at this election, then, as with foreign policy, it is not so much that voters are abandoning their populist positions as judging that the president and his Republicans have not fulfilled them.
Most US states beat nearly all European countries on median income. So it is striking that the cost of living has become the perennial cudgel for an opposition to bash an incumbent, before becoming the albatross around the neck of the next incumbent. But such is the nature of populism.
And Trump has remade the GOP into much more of a populist party. Even with the Iran war and all the other baggage of the second Trump administration, the candidates he endorsed performed very well in Republican primaries, regularly beating incumbents – such as Texas senator John Cornyn, who lost to Ken Paxton.
‘I’m going to have a lot of power when I leave.’
US President Donald Trump, at a rally in Iowa
How much power Trump retains within his own party will shape the endurance of Trumpism and MAGA. As political strategist Douglas Heye says, Republicans may feel liberated after the midterms to be “a bit more outspoken about what they really think about Trump”, and say publicly what they only admit privately now.
The size of Republican losses will help determine Trump’s ongoing influence: a bloodbath would weaken him, while losses in line with a standard midterm election could be dismissed as inevitable.
At any rate, the immense power Republicans have invested in Trump does not dissipate overnight. And Trump himself is aware of this. In a little-noticed aside during a recent rally in Iowa, he made a prediction. “I’ll always have that little extra power,” he said, while talking about his eventual exit from the White House. “I’m going to have a lot of power when I leave.”
Trump’s assumed successor, Vice President J.D. Vance, has positioned himself to capture those voters who feel betrayed by Trump. He never fully signed on to the Iran war, and does not echo the president’s rhetoric that – current petrol prices notwithstanding – Americans have never had it so good.
At Trump rallies around the country, supporters consistently say Vance is the guy they like for 2028. He represents the MAGA constituency more so than Secretary of State Marco Rubio, another likely contender. If Trumpism is to continue post-Trump, it probably runs through Vance.
But the president has been non-committal so far in terms of an endorsement, and appears to enjoy fostering a competitive rivalry between the two men – or perhaps someone else.
“I can’t see him staying out of this,” says Bob Shapiro, political scientist at Columbia University. “To the extent that he’s in this, that’s going to tell us whether Trumpism has legs or not, and whether there is a candidate he picks or a candidate who steps forward and ascends and basically carries the mantle of Trumpism.”
Beyond policy, perhaps the hallmark of Trumpism is the jettisoning of the normal rules of engagement. It is a skill in which he is uniquely gifted, once boasting – correctly, it seems – that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.
Others may be less adept and less brazen, but they’re happy to try. Vance dishes it out, and saw no problem with the Vivek Ramaswamy ad in Ohio that enlisted a Democratic candidate’s estranged and reportedly mentally ill mother to tar her own daughter. Most Republicans are comfortable attacking Muslim Democrats as jihadist communists. Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, regularly mocks “trannies” and “fatties”.
When it comes to political discourse, we’re through the looking glass – and all else aside, that may be the lasting legacy of Trumpism.
Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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