Finally, the Beginning of Trump’s End
The New Yorker · Susan B. Glasser ·
Susan Glasser on Donald Trump’s final appearances in his final campaign as the let-them-eat-cake President.
The scandal for which the second term of Donald Trump will go down in history may not have even happened yet. (Or maybe it has and we just haven’t found out about it.) But, on the eve of midterm elections whose results will shape the final two years of Trump’s tenure, it’s worth noting that, in reëlecting him in 2024, the United States created a different kind of problem for itself: a President who is himself the crisis.
The new Congress, no matter how blue it is, is highly unlikely to change that. The Constitution’s requirement of a two-thirds super-majority to remove a leader guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors is an all but insurmountable barrier in a country that has become as divided as this one. Trump, America’s only twice-impeached, twice-acquitted President, has already proven that point in his first term. According to most recent polls, Democrats are right now dreaming of, at best, a Senate majority in the low fifties, and they may not even get that.
But elections are another, arguably just as powerful, constitutional constraint on any President, this one included. And with only hours to go until we know the results of the 2026 midterms, I cannot overemphasize the extent to which Political Washington—the Ds, most of the Rs, the polling wonks, the press—believes this time is different for Trump. Forget the hedging and careful ass-covering embedded in so many election forecasts and trust me on this: the campaign obsessives in the capital really think that this may finally be the Big One. Even more remarkable, if Trump’s rejection materializes as they expect, it will come at the hands not of the Democrats who loathe him but as a result of millions of Republicans in large swaths of red America voting to renounce the President, his reckless policies, and, in a number of high-profile cases, such as the Texas Senate race, his handpicked candidates.
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