How will America mark the 250th anniversary of its independence? In addition to hosting the World Cup, Donald Trump has planned a host of celebrations under the banner “Freedom 2026”, including nationwide “Patriot Games” between the states, a UFC-branded event at the White House, a state fair in Washington DC, and a spectacular Independence Day jamboree on July 4.
It will also be a year of political reckoning for the president. On November 3, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 senate seats and 39 governorships will be on the midterm ticket. Every dictate of conventional political logic suggests that Trump and his party are in for a bad night.
A year ago, as he prepared for his second inauguration after the most remarkable comeback in political history, the 45th and soon-to-be-47th president looked close to invincible. Disgraced and exiled after the insurrection of January 6, charged with 91 felony counts and convicted of 34, and found liable by a federal jury for sexual abuse, he nonetheless drove Joe Biden from the race and defeated Kamala Harris in all seven swing states, the electoral college and the popular vote. Like it or not, America wanted him back.
Yet the very context of volatility, unpredictability and public impatience that Trump has so successfully exploited is set to cause him serious problems this year. MAGA is an accelerationist movement; which is to say that it generates and feeds upon ever greater conflict, kineticism and drama. By definition, it is addicted to risk and vulnerable to catastrophe.
At Charlie Kirk’s memorial at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona in September, MAGA looked stronger than ever. But the immaculately choreographed rite of solidarity, cheered on by a crowd of 71,000 true believers, was illusory. Kirk’s assassination has triggered a civil war within the conservative movement, as infantile as it is acrimonious.
There are multiple dividing lines: the alliance between Israel and America; Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files; the supposed superiority of “heritage Americans” to those whose families have more recently arrived; and MAGA’s relationship with the 27-year-old neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and his online army of so-called “Groypers”.
At the annual conference last month of Kirk’s campaign organisation, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), in Phoenix, Arizona these fissures were made embarrassingly public on the main stage, as the big beasts of American conservatism savaged one another. Ben Shapiro, co-founder of The Daily Wire, took aim at Tucker Carlson for his softball interview in October with Fuentes, and at Candace Owens for her increasingly deranged conspiracy theories. “The conservative movement is in serious danger,” Shapiro said, “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”
Carlson dismissed this demand for boundaries as a “Red Guard Cultural Revolution thing”. Megyn Kelly compared Shapiro’s intervention to “when the girl who was the head of our middle school chorus told me she was going to take all my friends away from me. Chorus? Head cheerleader maybe!”
All this playground politics matters for three reasons. First, a movement that turns in on itself so explicitly is, by definition, in trouble. US voters don’t care whether Ben likes Tucker, or Megyn likes Ben: they want the cost of living to come down, the streets to be safe, and their children to have better prospects than they did.
Second, MAGA’s unity in the ferocious culture wars of 2024 was essential to its success; that unity is now shattered. And third, JD Vance, the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2028, made clear in his speech at TPUSA that he sides with those who reject ideological guard-rails.
“When I say that I’m going to fight alongside of you, I mean all of you. Each and every one,” he said. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests.”
This, to say the least, is a risk. The so-called “no enemies to the right” strategy is a conscious echo of the pas d’ennemis à gauche principle in the French Revolution. For Vance to embrace it, even implicitly, sends a signal to the MAGA heartlands that, in 2028, he will be the candidate, first and foremost, of white Christian nationalism. But, in so doing, he jeopardises the very multiracial working-class coalition that he invokes.
All of this ideological tumult, mapped on to personal feuds at MAGA’s cultural apex, coincides with serious economic problems. Biden’s greatest political error – other than running for re-election at all – was to tell the voters, repeatedly, that their experience of high prices was a delusion. In his disastrous debate with Trump in June 2024, he claimed that America was now “a country with no, essentially no inflation”. Such gaslighting was, and always is, electoral madness.
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So it is richly ironic that Trump is now making precisely the same mistake. “They use the word ‘affordability’ – it’s a Democrat hoax,” he insisted on December 3. “I think ‘affordability’ is the greatest con job.” A fortnight later he delivered a televised speech that was clearly intended, in orange-fisted fashion, to address voters’ financial concerns, but, in practice, was just another inventory of boasts.
Chris Whipple’s extraordinary Vanity Fair article last month on Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was full of unexpectedly on-the-nose observations about her boss and colleagues. But the most significant and candid remark in the piece was made by the less famous James Blair, deputy chief of staff for legislative, political and public affairs.
The key to the mid-terms, Blair told Whipple, lies not in the sensationalism of conspiracy theories but the electorate’s sense – or not – that their lives are getting better: “Because even if Epstein were perfect but they don’t feel good about economics, we’re fucked.”
To be absolutely clear: this admission does not mark a straightforward return to the mantra “the economy, stupid” that was the engine of Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992. Politics is now emphatically downstream from culture. But the psychology of work, financial security and family prospects are intimately entangled with questions of identity, community and place.
For all the brutality of ICE agents and extra-judicial deportation, Americans still trust Trump on immigration. But – correctly – they believe his blanket imposition of tariffs is economic madness. Is he on their side, or not?
Yes, US GDP rose at an annual rate of 4.3% in the third quarter of 2025. But that headline figure illustrates – Keir Starmer, take note – how politically meaningless such aggregate statistics truly are. It is much more significant that 0.1% of Americans now hold 14% of the country’s wealth, while only 2.5% is left for the entire lower half of families. The rich are still spending, but the job market remains weak (and will be further weakened by AI).
The GOP has been busy with a vigorous re-districting strategy – redrawing the electoral map to improve its political chances – the success of which is hard to predict, not least because so many of the proposed changes are being challenged in court. But Vance’s remarks to Whipple about what to expect in November suggest that Republicans are braced for what Barack Obama, after his own party suffered serious losses in 2010, called a “shellacking”.
According to Vance: “I think a good midterm election for an incumbent presidency would be to lose a dozen seats in Congress and two or three seats in the Senate.”
It is true that midterms are a notoriously unreliable guide to what will happen in the next presidential race. But – in as much as precedent matters any more – there is one pattern that should encourage the Democrats.
The party of a president in his second term that performs badly in mid-cycle elections almost never holds on to the White House two years later (the only clear exception being 1986, when the Republicans lost control of the Senate, but George HW Bush went on to succeed Ronald Reagan).
The colossal donkey in the room is the matter of the Democrats’ readiness for the challenge. Mid-term elections are usually a referendum on the party that holds the presidency. But the all-important question is this: will the Democrats grasp that hostility to Trump, if it translates into success in November, is not a letter of apology from the American people to the virtuous progressives they let down in 2024? If there is a Democrat breakthrough that lasts beyond 2026, it will reflect something new, not a resumption of some imagined normality (no such thing any more, I’m afraid).
Here are two books that illustrate what to do and what not to do. The first is Harris’s dismal campaign memoir, 107 Days, which is one of the least reflective accounts of an election I have ever read. The defeated Democratic nominee lays most of the blame at the feet of Biden and his team. “One hundred and seven days were, in the end,” she writes, “not long enough to accomplish the task of winning the presidency.”
If anything, in fact, her campaign was too long. After a brief surge in the polls, she fell back in late September and never recovered.
In this context, it is a seriously bad sign that Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic Party, has refused to make public its official report on Harris’s defeat, claiming feebly that it would be a “distraction from the core mission”. How can the core mission possibly proceed if the party doesn’t acknowledge precisely what went wrong last time?
If the Harris campaign proved one thing beyond question, it is that putting an abstraction like “democracy” on the ballot is a losing strategy. Progressives everywhere who are up against autocratic opponents must face the harsh reality that playing by the rules, constitutional rectitude and political respectability are no longer, in and of themselves, significant electoral criteria.
Indeed, the fundamental test now – in the US and elsewhere – is much more alarming: does autocracy give voters what they want more effectively than liberal democracy? Remember, Trump won fair and square in 2024: and he did so with a clear mandate to close the border, deport millions of illegal immigrants, drive gangs out of the inner cities, and purge US institutions of wokery.
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As despicable as his second presidency has already been, it is simply untrue to say that any of this is a surprise. If the voters are experiencing buyer’s remorse it does not follow by any means that they wish they had elected Harris, or crave open borders, a full-blown restoration of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and a federal embrace of gender ideology.
All that counts is whether they continue to buy what Trump and his prospective successors are selling. This is why the second book that Democrats should read is Naftali Bendavid’s account of the 2006 midterm elections, The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution (2007).
Chosen by Nancy Pelosi to head the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emanuel, a representative from Illinois, was tireless, combative and extraordinarily focused in his strategy. A typical phone call would end: “Don’t fuck it up or I’ll kill you. All right, I love you. Bye.” He boasted of being “an equal-opportunity prick to everybody”.
What mattered was that Emanuel’s methods worked – just as, much more recently, those of Zohran Mamdani triumphed in the New York mayoral race. In November 2006, the House flipped to the Democrats, as did the Senate, paving the way for Barack Obama’s first victory. He appointed Emanuel to be his chief of staff.
After three years as US ambassador to Japan, he is now exploring a run at the presidency himself – in a field also likely to include Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro and JB Pritzker (governors, respectively, of California, Pennsylvania and Illinois), New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and perhaps even Harris again. What matters in 2026 is that all Democrats recognise the scale of the task and put the future of the republic ahead of their ideological fetishes, their virtue signalling, and their allegiance to identity groups.
For more than a decade, Trump has dominated US politics and shrugged off every challenge. Are his present travails the beginning of the end, or just another speed bump?
Ask yourself this, too: what plans does he have for all those National Guard personnel still on base, the masked ICE agents patrolling the streets and the 1,500 liberated January 6 convicts who owe him their freedom? Is it not striking that, to mark the 250th anniversary of independence, he has awarded 1.5 million military personnel a celebratory $1,776 “warrior dividend”?
How long before, as he has often threatened, he invokes the 1807 Insurrection Act? How long till the republic, governed by laws not men, becomes a dynastic fiefdom, a Greater America with a ruling oligarchy? How long before what the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call “competitive authoritarianism”, in which elections are performative rather than fair, is installed?
This is the year in which, as a matter of national and global urgency, Trump’s opponents need to get good at democracy again. For, if they don’t, who is to say they will get another chance?
