What Trump Forgot Before The Wave Crashed Down

Perhaps it’s a bit early yet, just hours past the humiliation of his mid-term rebuke, for President Donald Trump to look on the bright side. But the massive wave of rejection that crashed over him and the Republican Party on Tuesday night is infused with a subcurrent of the validation he craves.

Most presidents simply navigate the existing politics of their times as best they can. Only rare ones manage to be the primary agent of a new historical moment.

Trump, by contrast, has done so twice.

He dominated his age and fashioned a new political movement in success. He’s done so again in defeat. Both movements produced new and surprising coalitions bound together by shared grievance and a singular obsession with Trump — either to vault him to power or belatedly check that power. Once again, it’s all about him.

It is hard to overstate the depth and might of a wave that swept Republicans from office in former strongholds like Texas, Ohio, Kansas and South Carolina. There are local variants and peculiar circumstances in all these cases. But the unifying theme of 2026 is unmistakable: A vastly expanded Democratic electorate as energized in opposition by Trump and the pyrotechnic excesses of his second term as the Make America Great Again movement was energized by Trump when it shocked the establishment of both parties in 2016, and roared back to power in 2024.

The visceral passions that Trump summons and in the past shrewdly exploited now leave him in a knot.

In one light, his new and constrained circumstances — with Democrats handily winning both chambers of Congress — are not novel. Every two-term president since Ronald Reagan has been handed a mid-term rebuke in either their first or second term.

The conventional response to this by presidents is some process of self-critique, self-correction and political recalibration. That’s what Bill Clinton did after a huge Republican sweep in 1994, what Barack Obama was forced to do after his mid-term disaster in 2010 and what George W. Bush did amid a grinding and unpopular Iraq war in 2006. Typically, presidents jettison some controversial appointees and also offer a disgruntled public some version of, “Message received — trust me, I heard you.”

The challenge for Trump is that he would never have reached the presidency in the first place, or won a second term in 2024 after losing in 2020, if self-critique or self-correction were his thing — much less bowing to traditional Washington expectations. That’s not how presidents who build movements around a cult of personality behave.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal he said of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who many in both parties believe is a prime candidate for an unceremonious departure, “I think he’s terrific actually.” In another election-night interview with POLITICO, Trump said he would work with Democrats when he can and use his veto pen when he can’t. Trump’s voice sounded notably subdued as he tried to convey a no-big-deal response to the results.

Those results, to put it mildly, are huge deal for Trump — that’s why he worked so hard to forestall them, including through unusual mid-decade redistricting battles and spending hundreds of millions of dollars under his political control. Also needless to say: It is very hard to imagine Trump, at age 80, submitting at last to the conventional political methods that his predecessors used to revive their standing.

Both Trump movements, as it happens, were principally created by the power of reaction. Starting a dozen years ago, he made himself the most important vessel for people who loathed Obama, who felt their identity, values and livelihood were being threatened by globalism and by economic and cultural elites, who shared Trump’s conviction that American exceptionalism and future prospects were being diluted and squandered.

There’s a question for Trump and his closest aides that historians will spend a long time illuminating. Knowing the breathtaking political power of reaction and grievance — having benefited from it themselves — did they not think these same forces also could be harnessed against them?

Did they think people who are alarmed by the Iran war, who remember that Trump pledged to lower inflation, who think that the Department of Justice should not be assigned to carry out Trump’s personal grievances against foes, who bridle at self-aggrandizing building projects had no political recourse, because the Democratic brand had become so weakened in 2024? Surely at some cognitive level Trump’s team knew the hazards. But the distinctive feature of Trump politics — at least until this week — is that it does not operate primarily at the cognitive level. Tribal psychology — anger, fear, pride, the instinct to demand “which side are you on” — are far more important.

What becomes of that psychology now? Among the things Trump lost on Tuesday was an aura of mysticism. After 2024, which showed irrefutably that Trumpism was a genuine movement rather than a fluke, even Democrats came to regard him as having some kind of imponderable power (perhaps, in their view, a bit like Damien in The Omen films.) Probably the greatest believer in the mystical theory of power was Trump himself. It was on display all through 2026 — Trump’s pleas to voters to pretend he was on the ballot, and that if he did enough two-hour speeches at rallies he would surprise and embarrass the political class and news media once again.

Against mysticism, however, are the prosaic (yet still astonishing) realities of election data: massive swings in nearly every voting bloc. A New York Times data analysis estimated a 15-point swing toward Democrats compared to the 2024 results, which includes a 28-point swing toward Democrats among Hispanic voters.

There is lots more political analysis ahead, but there is no chance that Democrats ran strongly in Texas — including electing Gina Hinojosa as governor over veteran incumbent Greg Abott — without a massive reaction among legal Hispanic voters to Trump’s sweeping deportation policy. There is no way Democrats won a South Carolina Senate seat, and may yet win a too-close-to-call race in Mississippi, without massive turnout among Black voters alarmed by Trump’s redistricting efforts and Supreme Court rulings weakening voting-rights measures that have benefited them.

Trump owns two of the Senate losses in particular. His involvement directly led to the nominations of Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina — both weak candidates in different ways, both election-night losers.

In his interview with the Journal, Trump cast himself as a disappointed but philosophical election-night observer — the result would have been different if he personally was on the ballot. “It’s just the way the ball bounces sometimes,” he said.

Trump gives himself too little credit. He asked the electorate repeatedly to make this election about him — and they agreed.