Is this the end of Donald Trump and Trumpism?

The US midterm elections were “a total referendum” on Donald Trump, said Marjorie Taylor Greene, the US president’s former-ally-turned-major-critic. “He told people to vote like he was on the ballot and they did” – with a mighty rebuke.

Trump has long relied on the support of a vocal, tight-knit fanbase but even the Maga faithful have wobbled as petrol prices soar, the Iran war staggers on and the president seems more interested in remodelling the White House than addressing their concerns. The crushing scale of last night’s defeats at ballot boxes across the country could loosen Trump’s grip on the Republican Party and weaken its contender in the 2028 presidential race.

What did the commentators say?

“The political weather in Washington and beyond changed overnight,” said Katy Balls, The Times’ Washington editor. This was not a Democratic “blue trickle” but a “blue tsunami”. Candidates from all wings of the party won so widely and broadly that any potential Democrat presidential candidate will be able to “find a statistic” to “back up” a claim that their bloc “is destined for the White House”. Trump’s failure to question the results could be “a rare show of magnanimity” but “the results were so bad, it would be hard to claim this was down to a few thousand lost votes”.

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“Donald J. Trump is now officially, thoroughly, a lame duck,” said Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic. For the first time, he may start to see the “fealty of the Republican party erode”. Such an “electoral wipeout” shows his “instincts and influence seem to be waning”, which could make his party “more willing to defy him”. As the US gears up for the next presidential race, Republicans will be trying to map out “what their post-Maga future will look like – and what role, if any, Trump plays in it”.

The Democrats have taken control of both chambers of the US Congress and that will have “two immediate consequences”, said Edward Luce, US editor of the Financial Times. First, the campaigns to replace Trump as the 2028 Republican nominee “will begin straightaway”; second, “Trump’s unpredictability” is likely to figure ever larger in the rest of his term. After all, “Trump is rarely outbid in the drama stakes”.

View Trump as a “spent force” at your peril, said Peter Baker, The New York Times’ chief White House correspondent. His power “may be receding” but he will still be president for two more years, and he will do “everything he can to remain a dominant voice for as long as he can”. There is a “natural tendency” to read too much into a “big midterm wave” but there are “plenty of examples” of when such an apparently “fundamental shift” in the electorate “did not last long”.

What next?

“The next two years will look nothing like the previous two,” said Moira Donegan, The Guardian’s US columnist. Trump will be facing “a hostile Congress”, a “cratering approval rating, and a term limit”. He’ll also have to lead a “fractured coalition”, having “split his inner circle and destroyed his credibility with the Republican rank and file” over the Iran war. Ambitious politicians in the party will “smell blood in the water” and “turn on him to shore up their own prospects”. He will “rage at their betrayal”, like a “stupid King Lear”, but, from now on, “his efforts” to “exact revenge may be severely diminished”.