Plainly, Trump doesn’t really care about the midterms

With a month still to go before America’s mid-term congressional and gubernatorial elections, the prospect of a “blue wave” of Democratic success in the House of Representatives, the Senate and in many governorships is looking increasingly likely. But whether that forecast holds true or not, one important aspect has already become clear. It is that President Trump does not really care much about what happens in the elections. This could be because he thinks, rightly, that he can no longer do much about it, beyond feeble gestures such as allowing truckers to use tax-exempt red diesel. The unusual “mid-term convention” he organized for the Republican Party in early September, which was little more than an extended Trump rally, seems to have done more harm than good for his and his party’s cause. Alternatively, it could be because he thinks he will be able to use misinformation, intimidation and anti-constitutional measures to disrupt the outcome, delegitimising the Democrat-run House and Senate as much as he can. On that we can only speculate and wait and see, while cheering on the courts, public officials and civil society groups who are gearing up to oppose it. The third explanation, however, is something we already know a lot about. It is that he thinks that thanks to him Congress no longer matters and intends to carry on governing much the way he has for the past two years. This is the explanation worth focusing on as it also helps clarify what Trump really thinks about the presidency and what it means to “govern” America from the White House. During his first two years back in office, Trump has really had only two ideas which qualify as a domestic legislative agenda. One was his “big beautiful bill” surrounding his 2025 budget, which represented an effort to reward his supporters, punish his enemies, fund his obsessions and disregard any semblance of fiscal rectitude. This succeeded but despite America’s “hot” economy is leading the country towards some sort of a debt crisis. The other has been his effort to gain federal control over the country’s voting systems and rules, chiefly in order to suppress the votes of his opponents. This has largely failed. Beyond those initiatives, Trump has mainly governed by writing executive orders and waiting for courts or Congress to block them, if they can. The courts have often done so, but both the Republican-majority houses of Congress have been too supine to stand in his way to any serious extent. The virtue of the big beautiful bill, from his point of view, is that it appropriated sufficient funds to allow him to do what he likes, often by transferring funds from one pot to another, without bothering to ask Congress for permission. Notably, this provided a huge pot of money for his anti-immigration militia, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which, apart from Elon Musk and Russell Vought’s project to destroy or disable large parts of the federal government, counts as his main governing initiative, if arresting, deporting and sometimes shooting people largely without due process can qualify as “governing.” It also gave him access to enough money for his pet legacy-creation projects in Washington, DC, mainly by taking money away from the National Parks Service and using it for his ballroom, his reflecting pool debacle, his “arc de Trump” and other efforts to leave a permanent, vainglorious mark on America’s capital city. That has been his agenda, but his most common focus has been not on an agenda, per se, but on the accumulation and exercise of power. This has made him and his family hugely richer, for a start, in complete disregard of legal and constitutional constraints on the financial exploitation of office. He has also used his power to pursue and punish his enemies, through Department of Justice indictments and FBI investigations. And in foreign policy he has used his power to extort investments and other monies from other countries, including allies in Europe and Asia, to try to intimidate and gain concessions from neighbors such as Canada and Mexico, and to exert military force where it pleases him to do so, whether by killing alleged drug-traffickers in international waters, by kidnapping the president of Venezuela or, most fatefully, by seeking to force a change of regime in Iran. If, as it seems, he does not care very much about what happens to Republican control over the House of Representatives or the Senate in the mid-terms, the implication is that he thinks he will be able to carry on in his final two years acting pretty much in the same way as since January 2025. Presidents always have wide latitude over foreign policy, which he will continue to exploit. But he will also continue to seek to enrich himself and his family, through corruption, insider trading and deals with foreign powers, and to seek to pursue his enemies inside America. And he will be planning to end his term of office by exercising his presidential power of pardon to try to protect his family and associates. For a president with such a limited, highly personal conception of his role and opportunities, the prospect of spending his next two years in this way may well be quite attractive. Certainly, he understands that a Democrat-controlled Congress will pursue him with investigations and laws targeting his corruption and his abuse of power, and that he will very likely be impeached for a third time. But he will know that he can veto laws, can brazen out investigations, can enjoy painting himself as a victim and can be confident again of avoiding being found guilty in a trial in the Senate, which requires a two-thirds majority. The best conclusion to draw is that even if American voters deliver a well-deserved rebuke on November 3, the next two years are not going to be pretty. A Democratic Congress may decide to use its budgetary power to block the administration’s actions, including in defense, but this will have to be modulated carefully to avoid queering the pitch for the presidential race in 2028. Only if a large number of Republicans turn against the president, as they did against Richard Nixon in 1974, will there be any real prospect of punishing Trump, given that the Supreme Court in 2024 granted presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts, without defining any limits for what constitute official acts. The final conclusion can, however, be modestly optimistic. Trump’s disregard for the midterms shows that the Trump presidency is a highly personal and power-obsessed affair rather than being ideological or pursuing any coherent agenda. This, in turn, makes thinking about dealing with the post-Trump America a little less daunting. There are long-term changes in American attitudes to the world, to be sure, and there are some ideologues trying to pursue their own agendas through Trump who will still be around when he has gone. But the shameful, shameless, bullying, incompetent, corrupt, law-breaking America is defined by Trump, is dominated by Trump and, in that form at least, will end with Trump. This article first appeared on Bill Emmott’s Global View Substack and is republished with kind permission. Read the original here and become a paid subscriber here.