Trump’s Whole Theory Of Power Is In Ruins

That whooshing, gurgling sound you hear this morning is the power draining out of President Donald Trump’s White House.

The 2026 election results are an electoral humiliation unseen this century. They would be calamitous for any president.

They are even worse for Trump.

Trump is a singular figure in American history, a quasi-strongman leader whose particular brand of presidential power simply cannot coexist with the kind of rout his party faced last night.

His fundamental theory of power is in ruins. The survival of his presidency now depends on him adapting to diminished circumstances in a way he has never done before.

The essential problem for Trump is that his favorite instrument of governing is fear. His second term has been a 22-month exercise in projecting invulnerability and ruthlessness, then presenting powerful people and institutions – even foreign countries – with a choice. Either live peacefully with Trump on his terms or prepare to suffer the consequences.

This proposition, imposed on the world’s largest companies and America’s wealthiest universities and oldest allies, has worked in Trump’s favor more often than not. Faced with a president returned to power from political exile, promising vengeance and brandishing the support of more Americans than had ever voted for him before, so many executives and diplomats and generals and prime ministers chose to submit.

This has been the defining dynamic of elite politics in this chapter of the Age of Trump. That is how Trump has wrangled lavish investment pledges out of foreign nations and tech giants, deterred corporate criticism of his agenda and raised money to fund a new White House ballroom, inspired the NATO secretary-general to call him “daddy” and assembled a gallery of rictus-faced billionaires at his inauguration.

And that’s over now.

The breadth and depth of Republican defeats have shredded the aura of invincibility that any strongman needs: the sense that no matter what his adversaries do and no matter what the courts say, at the end of the day he will still be there, with the apparatus of the state in his grasp, and he will remember the names of his friends and his enemies.

With his political coalition in tatters and Democrats on the march even in Texas and Kansas and South Carolina, Trump doesn’t look so permanent anymore.

Compared to that shift, losing the House and Senate is almost incidental.

Trump still possesses expansive authority over foreign policy, national security and federal law enforcement. Clashing with the American president, even a very unpopular one, is no small thing. His executive decrees can still upend businesses and agencies, even if courts ultimately strike them down. The new Congress cannot do much to constrain Trump from making war, in Iran or Greenland or anywhere else.

Yet for leaders in Washington and far beyond, the risk calculus involved in dealing with Trump is different now. The expiration date on all of Trump’s inducements and threats looms larger than ever, and the down side of playing by Trump’s rules has come sharply into focus.

A CEO or college president sweating pressure from the White House must ask anew whether it is riskier to cross the president or invite the scrutiny of the Democratic Congress – and perhaps the next president’s Justice Department in 2029.

A foreign leader pushed by Trump to make concessions in a trade deal must now ponder whether it is more important to stay friendly with Trump or to stay on the right side of Americans who have rejected his protectionist policies.

Even before the midterm elections, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada told my colleagues Nick Taylor-Vaisey and Zoya Sheftalovich that he’d rather wait for a new president than strike an unfavorable trade deal with Trump. Last Friday, he shrugged off Trump’s threats to punish Canada and the European Union for forging a tighter partnership.

“That way lies madness,” Carney told POLITICO.

Carney’s peers can only find that logic more convincing today.

And who looks wiser today, the parade of CEOs who beamed at Trump’s swearing-in and helped fund his ballroom, or JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, who told CNN a full year ago he was steering clear of donations that could look like “buying favors”?

His company, Dimon said then, had to consider “how the next DOJ is going to deal with it.”

Trump has endured defeats before. In 2018 he lost control of the House and two years later lost the presidency and the Senate. Yet in no election before this one has Trump’s hold on the MAGA base and rural America been in question. No election so far has forced him to change his basic approach to politics.

It is up to Trump to decide if he’ll try something else, at age 80 and midway through his final term.

He is now the one confronting a fearful choice: reckon with Wednesday morning’s political reality or lose what remains of his presidency.