Donald Trump said it 47 times, and it cost him the midterms

OpinionColumnist and authorNovember 8, 2026 — 5:00amNovember 8, 2026 — 5:00amNick Bryant is a journalist and author of the substack, History Never Ended. He has covered and written extensively on American politics.Fitz: Nick, I reckon you’re about the most heavily qualified journalist I’ve talked to on this subject. You’ve got a degree in history from the University of Cambridge; a doctorate in American politics from the University of Oxford; written three books on US politics, and worked extensively as a BBC correspondent on the ground in Washington and New York. Am I missing anything in terms of your qualifications?Nick Bryant reporting on a US election.NB: Oh! Look, my one great boast is that Joe Biden kept one of my books on the shelf in the Oval Office, which was very different in those days. There was my book, but there wasn’t any gold...Fitz: I’m a world expert at working in gratuitous book plugs to extraneous subjects. What was the book?NB: When America Stopped Being Great.Said ‘gratuitous book plug’.Fitz: Which brings us to those staggering election results, with Republicans even wiped out of such strongholds as Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and maybe even Mississippi. What is the cause of that level of rejection? From a neophyte point of view, I’m tempted to say because Trump’s a disgrace and a danger to shipping, but that is no different to what he has been, in my view, for a decade. Why now?NB: Part of it was: “It’s the economy, stupid”. Every single gas station in America became a billboard for the Democrats, as was every single supermarket checkout. And let’s not forget fertilisers in these rural states that the Republicans lost. At the polls, voters identified two clear decisions from the president: “Liberation Day”, when tariffs even hit penguins on uninhabited Australian islands and second, the decision to go to war with Iran. People got to know about the Strait of Hormuz, a little-known choke point that I dare say most Americans had never heard of, but they know it now and they know the impact that it’s had on their hip pocket.Fitz: And the other part?NB: Another key factor was alleged corruption, concerns that the Trump family and its acolytes have enriched themselves during this presidency – with an Oval Office bedecked with gold, at a time when so many Americans are suffering personal recessions, it was really problematic.Fitz: Those three factors were all driven by Trump himself. Is the real problem that Trump said, “Pretend I’m on the ballot”, and they listened?NB: Yeah, Trump said that 47 times, and this was a repudiation of Trump. It’s being called a “blue wave” and a “blunami”, a “red reckoning”, a “red rout”. But none of those descriptors works for me because they don’t include the name “Trump”. This was a total rejection of Donald Trump, and his hyper-aggressive politics, no question about it. And I don’t think the Democrats should necessarily view these results as a great endorsement of them. The polls showed that they were unpopular too, but they’re less unpopular than Trump.Fitz: Neither you nor I are experts on brain health, and are not qualified to diagnose dementia and all the rest. But certainly social media often has people who are serious neurologists and the like saying he exhibits all the symptoms of rising dementia. From your talk with insiders in Washington, are there any whispers saying the same, like there was with Biden? What else could explain the inanity, nay, insanity of holding up the photo of a sewerage pipe before the Reflecting Pool as his closing message before the midterms, and all the long rambling speeches?NB: That’s a great question. Look, I am indeed wary as a journalist, of undertaking psychiatric portraiture. But look, when I first interviewed Trump in 2014, what struck me about him was how sharp he was, and surprisingly humble. He was very curious. He was intelligent, no question, and very verbally dexterous. I do see flashes of that Trump now, but I think the other Trump is more noticeable – the one who concocts these word salads, and goes off on these odd tangents; the guy that talks about a candidate’s great ass, and the appearance on the Reflecting Pool on the eve of the election. Look, Trump has been a smart politician, and wouldn’t have twice become president without being a smart politician. But that was some of the dumbest politics I’ve seen, and that does point to a kind of narcissistic scrambling of his mind, which I think will become more of a talking point now.Fitz: Okay, Steve Bannon famously said at the beginning of this year, “if we lose the midterm elections, a lot of people in this room, including me, are going to prison.” Do you think that that will happen? Will there be a day of reckoning?NB: Well, with the Democrats now being in the majority in both houses, they have serious subpoena power and can mount investigations. I think that will be their mantra over the next couple of years: investigate, investigate, investigate. I don’t necessarily think they will impeach Donald Trump. They’ve done that twice already and there aren’t the votes in the Senate to actually convict him and remove him from office. So it would be a futile exercise. But I think they will launch investigations into family members like Jared Kushner and Donald J. Trump Jr. I also think figures Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth, for different reasons, will come under scrutiny from Congress. I think that the tone was set immediately after the election when Robert Garcia, the Democrat who’s going to head up the chief investigative body in the house, the Oversight Committee, put out a two-word tweet saying, “Lawyer up.”Fitz: And the chances that Trump himself, when all is said and done, might end up with a zebra sun-tan and go inside?NB: [Laughs.] Fully exchange the pillars of the White House for the iron bars of a federal penitentiary? Well, he believes he’s got presidential immunity. The Supreme Court gave that to presidents during the Biden presidency in response to the legal case against Trump following on from the January 6 insurrection, but that’s only for official acts. So that’s a crucial distinction, and you can’t totally rule that out. But I think the Justice Department would be circumspect about coming after Trump because of the kind of martyrdom effect it would create. A lot of us still think he should face a legal reckoning for his role in January 6. But I get the feeling that for the sake of national unity, not riling up his base and civil peace, I suspect they’ll just let that go.Fitz: Meantime, there’s been a lot of learned pieces, people saying that despite the landslide this is neither the end of Trumpism nor Trump. Your thoughts?NB: Look, the most frequently applied terminology is that he is now a “lame duck”, but I don’t think that fits. That is normal terminology being applied to an abnormal president.Fitz: How ’bout “a wounded vulture”?NB: Yes, but whatever the metaphor, Trump’s going to be there for two more years, and the presidency these days still has so much power. The idea of the founding fathers was that Congress would be number one; it would be the most powerful branch. The presidency number two; the Supreme Court number three. At the moment, the presidency is number one; the Supreme Court is number two, and the Congress is a distant third. We’re now going to see Congress try to reassert itself, and make itself an equal branch of government to the presidency. So that’s going to be really interesting, as we see a constitutional tussle between the power of the presidency and the power of Congress.Nick Bryant, interviewing Donald Trump in 2014. Fitz: Trump says he’ll have the power of veto and is not afraid to use it. But so does Congress over his appointments. Let us say Pete Hegseth resigns over the disaster of the Iran war. Congress obviously won’t let Trump bring in another Fox News host or somebody totally unqualified for the job. Will there now be qualified appointees because Congress won’t allow ludicrous ones?NB: Yeah, I think that’s one of the key things about this, and the Democrats will now use their power to try to stop some of these more unorthodox appointments, sitting behind the desks in powerful departments in Washington.Fitz: While he still sits behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, til 2028, doing what, exactly?NB: Trump still has extraordinary powers to wage war, to make peace. America has been almost in a continuous state of war since the turn of the century, and in times of war, the presidency has more power. So Donald Trump will use all that. Is the political experiment over? Is Trumpism itself over? No, I don’t think it is. You know, Trumpism survives in strong borders, in protectionism, in economic nationalism, in stuff like that, where the Democrats are going to make concessions to him.Fitz: And what of Trump’s successors? You have tweeted that the 600-word statement put out by Vice President JD Vance, blaming the results on the Iran war, was his way of saying: pick me for the Republican nomination in 2028. Is there any point in any Republican candidate putting his or her hand up in 2028? Those results on Tuesday surely say America has comprehensively rejected not just Trump, but JD Vance and all Trump enablers like him, which is pretty much all Republicans.NB: No, I think that’s the wrong way to interpret these results, Peter. The midterms in 1994 saw the “Republican Revolution” and people were talking about a permanent Republican majority. What happened two years later? Bill Clinton comfortably won back the presidency. In 1974, after the Watergate scandal, again the Republicans took a beating in the midterms, and people were talking again about a Democratic permanent majority. Jimmy Carter won the presidential election two years later, but that didn’t last for long. He was a one-termer, and then Ronald Reagan came back and created this period of Republican dominance in the White House that lasted 12 years. American politics is in a really volatile state right now. You know, we’ve had three two-term presidents followed by three one-term presidents. Now we haven’t seen that since the 1880s and the 1890s, right? Congress is changing hands much more frequently in the first quarter of the 21st century than it did in the last 50 years of the 20th century. We’re in a real state of flux at the moment, and what’s really noticeable is nobody can turn an election win into a permanent advantage.Fitz: And yet, the game truly has changed. You mentioned that after the results came in, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “Woke won,” and she’s right. These results are surely also a reflection of Bill Clinton’s line, that “I want a cabinet that looks like America,” in that you’ve now got a ruling class with fewer straight white males and ever more women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics and people with disabilities. Hakeem Jeffries will become the first African-American speaker of the House, after 55 white men preceding him. You’ve got more women than ever, including two Native American women – one as the governor of New Mexico, and the other as senator for Minnesota. You’ve now got a Muslim senator from Michigan; a senator in a wheelchair in Iowa. You’ve got the first-ever female black governor in Georgia. Doesn’t this bespeak an electorate that has fundamentally changed and is activated?NB: Absolutely no question. And the hyper-aggressive politics that Trump has pursued will see its temperature lowered. We’re seeing a new face of American politics and, generationally, we’re seeing a shift. What I challenge is the idea that is actually suggestive of a permanent realignment. What I’m saying is that we’re in this stage in America at the moment where no party can establish lasting dominance. Anti-incumbency is the key thing right now, which is why we’ve seen all these one-term presidents and these Congresses not lasting long. I don’t see this election as changing that mood of anti-incumbency. I repeat: the Democrats are still unpopular – it’s just that they’re less unpopular than the Republicans.Fitz: Thank you for your time.Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.From our partners