Trump’s not just a builder now — he’s the architect of his own demise

Since returning to the White House last year, Donald Trump has never passed up a chance to brag about how he’s done things no other president has done or ever could do.It’s usually baseless or only tenuously grounded in reality, but after Tuesday’s historic thrashing of House and Senate Republicans — plus gubernatorial candidates and Republicans up and down the ballot nationwide — the president has an honest-to-God accomplishment he can hold up for scrutiny. What Trump accomplished in the two years since his stunning victory over then-Vice President Kamala Harris is a stunning reversal of gains he made among multiple demographic groups.Young men, Latino voters, and other traditionally Democratic constituencies that swung hard for MAGA in the 2024 race lurched violently in the opposite direction to support Democratic candidates in places that hadn’t elected Democrats in decades.In the Senate, Democrats needed a net gain of four seats to win a majority come January and had flipped seven as of the wee hours of Wednesday. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas, the first Democrat to win a Senate race there since 1988. Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton unseated Roger Marshall in Kansas, which last sent a Democrat to the Senate in 1932. And in South Carolina, the Senate seat once held by Strom Thurmond and currently occupied by Darline Graham will pass to Annie Andrews, a former pediatrician who will be the first Democrat to represent the Palmetto State since Ernest “Fritz” Hollings retired two decades ago.President Donald Trump appears to have steered his MAGA Republican party right into the Reflecting Pool (Reuters)Democrats also ousted GOP incumbents in Maine, Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina, giving them what could be as much as a four-seat margin in the upper chamber — not enough to bypass a GOP filibuster, but enough to keep control of the floor and put a check on Trump’s nominees. In the House, by pre-dawn Wednesday, Democrats had won 226 seats with roughly a fifth of races still uncalled, past the 218 they needed and climbing. They took districts in the Philadelphia suburbs and Scranton, in New Jersey, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Virginia and Missouri.Democratic House candidates even managed to win convincing victories in Texas and Florida, the GOP strongholds where Trump had browbeat Republican-aligned governors and legislatures into adopting new district maps that were meant to lock in an even larger Republican majority by eliminating majority-Black districts in largely Democratic cities and redrawing other GOP-held House districts based on 2024 voter data. It was a brazen attempt at rigging the game before a single vote was cast — the sort of thing seen in authoritarian states such as Hungary under Viktor Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey or Poland under the right-wing Law and Justice Party.The entire project was based on Trumpworld’s collective belief that the victory Trump had won in 2024 marked a permanent realignment in American politics, in which the young men, Latinos and Black voters who’d pulled the lever for the Republican president that year were going to remain loyal to the MAGA-era GOP as part of a broader anti-woke cultural shift.But the swagger with which Trump entered the White House nearly two years ago and proceeded to push his party to stack the electoral deck in their favor led directly to the 2024 coalition’s undoing this week.The heavy-handed maneuvers backfired spectacularly.President Trump’s MAGA heavy-handedness backfired spectacularly in the 2026 midterms (AFP/Getty)Not only did the blatant efforts to dilute Black voting power energize those voters in places where they’d stayed home during the 2024 race — leading directly to Democratic victories in statewide elections and record Black turnout nationwide — but they combined with Trump’s aggressive push against so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and general anti-discrimination programs to mobilize those voters in ways not seen since Barack Obama last appeared on a ballot.The Latino voters who’d shifted towards Trump over his promise to close the border — the same voters who filled the districts now assumed to be safe Republican — recoiled at the cruel, heavy-handed way Trump’s administration followed up on closing the border by going after their friends and neighbors with masked ICE agents.Instead of protecting the House majority Republicans already had, the new districts traded safe GOP seats for wobbly swing districts that only looked safe if you assumed voters would behave this year as they did two years earlier.It was something no president had ever done before — force through new Congressional maps that assumed a permanent coalition while pushing policies to attack key groups within that very coalition.At the same time, Trump’s obsessive need for loyalty led him to ignore electoral reality and support toxic and unelectable candidates in key Senate races. Scandal-plagued Ken Paxton in Texas, inexperienced Darline Graham in South Carolina, and sycophantic cipher Michael Whatley in North Carolina, each of whom won their primaries with his support and who Trump assumed would command the same loyalty in general elections.He was wrong.The margins were indeed historic — but they were for the other side, this time.The end result was Trump and his party had hoist themselves with their own petard, letting Democrats run up the score in places they hadn’t been even remotely successful since the last century.And, perhaps most resoundingly, the Democratic margin of victory was so huge that it forced Trump to shelve any attempt to challenge election results in the way he had done after he lost the presidency to Joe Biden six years ago.