Trump Lost Congress. His Most Dangerous Two Months Start Now

Going into the vote, Republicans held the House 218 to 212 and the Senate 53 to 45. Democrats took both. In Texas, James Talarico beat Ken Paxton to become the first Democrat to win a Senate race there since 1988, even though Elon Musk spent more than $150 million trying to stop him. In Kansas, Adam Hamilton became the state’s first Democratic senator in almost 90 years. In North Carolina, Roy Cooper beat Michael Whatley.

In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, won the Senate seat and will become the first Muslim in the US Senate. The pro-Israel lobby fought him at every stage. AIPAC backed his primary rival, Haley Stevens, with more than $30 million in August, and Senator Bernie Sanders said it then put another $9 million behind the Republican, Mike Rogers. El-Sayed won both races. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, two of Trump’s favourite targets, held their House seats.

Trump himself admitted the scale of it. “They’ve been looking for this one for 11 years, and they finally got it,” he said in a phone interview on election night, before adding: “I think a part of it was Iran.” In October he had promised every adult American $5,000 if Republicans kept both chambers. Voters turned down the cheque.

The Iran war hit Americans where they feel it first, at the petrol pump. Fuel and diesel prices rose after Iran choked traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and farmers, normally reliable Republican voters, turned on the party despite Trump’s deal with Moscow to ease sanctions on Russian diesel. By the Pentagon’s own count to Congress, the war had cost American taxpayers more than $47 billion by mid-October, and the United States has not won it. Trump conceded on Wednesday that rising petrol prices hurt Republicans and that voters “didn’t like it.”

Other grievances piled on. Federal workers dismissed in the first year of Trump’s second term voted against him. Immigration raids reached American citizens: in January, federal agents shot dead two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, and Trump later said the killings “should not have happened.”

But the deepest cause was the gap between what Trump promised and what he delivered. He told voters there would be no new wars, and he started several. He said he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine, and it goes on. He promised a calmer Middle East and delivered a regional war. Many of his own voters concluded that “America First” had become “Israel first.” On election day itself Trump announced that US military aid to Israel, about $3.8 billion a year, would end at the close of 2026, saying Israel no longer needs it. It was a decision much of his base had wanted, and it came in injury time. Most Americans had already made up their minds, and millions had already voted.

A lame duck is an officeholder who is still in post but whose power is draining away, either because the term is ending or because opponents now control the legislature. For an American president it usually describes the stretch after a midterm defeat or the final months before a successor takes over. Trump is both: he cannot run again under the 22nd Amendment, and from 3 January 2027 he faces a Democratic House and Senate for his last two years, until January 2029.

There are two lame-duck periods to watch. The first is short: the session between the election and 3 January, when the outgoing Congress still sits and the defeated majority can still pass laws and approve decisions. The second is long: two years in which Democrats control the agenda, the committees and the subpoenas.

History shows how hard those final two years can be. Democrats retook the Senate in November 1986, the same month the Iran-Contra affair broke: Ronald Reagan’s administration had secretly sold weapons to Iran to win the release of American hostages held in Lebanon and diverted the money to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Bill Clinton was impeached by a Republican House in December 1998 over the Monica Lewinsky affair and acquitted by the Senate. George W. Bush lost both chambers in 2006 and spent his last two years fighting Congress over Iraq, where he ordered the 2007 troop surge.

No. The House can impeach a president by a simple majority, but removal requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate, 67 of 100 senators. Democrats will not have anything close to that without a large Republican defection, so talk of Trump being thrown out of office is noise.

What Democrats can do is make every day of his last two years difficult. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, is in line to replace Mike Johnson as Speaker, and Democrats will chair every committee. They can block his bills, hold up his nominees and summon his ministers again and again. They can question his wealth and his business dealings. Trump answered on Wednesday that he would send their bills back “with a nice stamp: ‘veto.’”

No one will be called in more often than Pete Hegseth. The defence secretary ordered a 20 percent cut in the military’s four-star officers, removed a string of senior commanders and has overseen an expensive war. Democrats will want answers on all of it, and they will press hard, because that is what their voters sent them to do. A majority elected to reverse Trump’s course has to oppose him relentlessly to justify the seats it won.

And Trump should not count on his own party. He has already blamed the Iran war for part of the defeat. Republicans who lost, or who fear losing in 2028, may start breaking with him.

Yes. This is the most dangerous consequence of the result, and it runs against the comfortable assumption that a weakened president is a cautious one. Trump has two months in which a Republican Congress will not stand in his way. After 3 January, a Democratic Congress can drag him into hearings and votes under the War Powers Act every time he uses force. If he wants to finish the Iran war on his terms, the time is now, and the purpose is to win it, not to sign a deal.

The signals are already there. US forces struck an Iranian air-defence site on Qeshm Island on 2 and 3 November, which Trump called a “minor attack.” On Wednesday he said “We have to do something large,” warned of a “heavy hit” and said Iran “will never have a nuclear weapon.” Negotiations are stalled, and US officials say strike plans are ready. Silent Dossier set out the competing signals from Washington and Tehran before the vote. The vote has settled which way they point.

Tehran is treating Trump’s defeat as its own victory. In the 48 hours before the polls opened, Iran stepped up attacks on ships trying to cross the Strait of Hormuz to push oil prices up, and Iranian state media warned that the United States could use a nuclear weapon. That message was aimed at American voters as much as at Iranians. On 4 November the Revolutionary Guards said four tankers that had defied them were burning after hitting mines. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker and chief negotiator, wrote that Americans had said “NO TO WAR,” as Silent Dossier reported that morning. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei warned that anyone expecting a change in US policy was “seriously mistaken.” Iran is claiming credit for an American election, and that claim gives Trump one more reason to hit hard before January.

Riyadh loses a reliable Congress at the worst possible moment. The United States was never going to win Saudi Arabia’s war with the Houthis in Yemen: Washington’s answer is air strikes, and air strikes have not settled the war in Iran and will not settle it in Yemen. Now Trump cannot even guarantee the weapons. Democratic committee chairs can hold up arms sales to the kingdom, and they can slow the export of advanced chips to the Gulf. Any new deal Riyadh wants from Washington will run through Democrats.

That explains why Trump rushed the Saudi nuclear deal before the midterms. The civil nuclear agreement signed on 22 July gives the kingdom a path toward enriching uranium on its own soil, the most contested point in the debate, with talk of enrichment up to 20 percent. Trump sent it to Congress on 26 August, starting a 90-day review. Senators Jeff Merkley and Ed Markey have filed a resolution to block it, with a Senate vote possible after 29 November. That vote falls to the outgoing Republican Senate rather than the new Democratic one, which is exactly why Trump moved when he did.

The vote also exposed how weak the pro-Israel lobby has become in American politics. It spent tens of millions in Michigan and lost. Its candidates lost in states it had counted on. A president who boasts of approval ratings in Israel above 90 percent has announced the end of Israel’s military aid. No American president since John F. Kennedy, who pressed Israel hard over its Dimona nuclear reactor, has confronted Israel this openly. A weaker lobby in Washington is a danger to Israel itself.

It is also a danger to Cairo. American military aid to Egypt and Israel grew out of the Camp David Accords and the 1979 peace treaty, and the two have long moved together. Egypt receives about $1.3 billion a year in US military financing. If Israel’s aid is cut, Egypt’s should be expected to follow.