Democrats’ 16% House swing tops the Watergate-era benchmark of 1974
Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland argues that this week’s Democratic sweep in the US midterm elections has left the global nationalist right reeling — while cautioning that the danger of Trumpism will never be gone. Writing in a column published Friday, Freedland called the result no ordinary midterm setback but “a thorough repudiation” of Donald Trump’s second presidency and of Trumpism, one whose lessons, he argued, extend well beyond Washington. The outcome, he wrote, is cause for genuine international jubilation that should nonetheless be tempered, if only a tad.
Freedland cited a 16% swing to Democrats in the popular vote for the House of Representatives — larger, he noted, than the 11.2% swing recorded in the Watergate midterms of November 1974, following Richard Nixon’s resignation. The vote swept Republicans out of even their deepest heartlands, he wrote. Trump had worked hard for many months to undermine the elections, either by gerrymandering districts in his favor or by preparing the ground for a later claim that the vote was rigged, Freedland argued, but to no avail: “The democratic system proved too resilient, and the American public too determined to have their say” — and they had it, in his account, “in a voice loud and clear.”
The repudiation still leaves Trump in the Oval Office for a further two years and 10 weeks, until 20 January 2029 — a reality the White House itself acknowledged, per Freedland, in a social media post he described as plaintive and “brimming with neediness”: “PSA [Public Service Announcement]: Trump is still your president.” He has lost what the column calls the “doormat House” and the “rubber-stamp Senate,” the institutions that enabled him to act without restraint. Still, Freedland argued, it is too soon to speak of Trump in the past tense.
Beyond the United States, Freedland described a strong temptation to see Tuesday’s result as the moment the wheels came off the authoritarian, nationalist populist bandwagon that has rolled through so much of the world’s politics over the past decade. Viktor Orbán’s fall in April was “pivotal,” he wrote, but the humiliation of Trump was always going to matter more: thanks to the sheer might of the United States, Trump has for a decade been “the engine of the illiberal international” — and now it is sputtering. The defeats of Trump allies in Serbia and Brazil registered as “delicious appetisers,” he argued, but this was the feast.
The risk, Freedland argued, is that those who have fought nationalist populism — inside the US or outside it — take Tuesday’s success as their cue to relax, reading the midterms as the end of the Trump threat and proof that normal service will shortly resume. That, he wrote, would repeat the mistake Trump himself — and too many others — made in November 2024, when the president interpreted his win over Kamala Harris not as the cry of a public fed up with rising grocery bills and petrol prices, but as a permanent “vibe shift” and a mandate to turn the United States into an autocracy, take a chainsaw to government agencies, have masked men abduct and shoot American citizens on the streets, launch a doomed and disastrous war, fill the capital with monuments to his own vanity, and enrich himself and his inner circle. “Because if something can happen once, it can happen again,” Freedland wrote. “Trump was possible – which means another Trump is possible.”
That is the lesson the United States’ traditional allies in Britain, the EU and elsewhere must internalize, Freedland argued: even if Capitol Hill will soon be in saner hands, as he put it, and even if Trump’s eventual successor proves a committed internationalist who believes in a rules-based order, the reliability of the US as an ally “can never again be taken for granted.” After Trump, he wrote, the country’s status as guarantor of western security is anything but guaranteed — contingent, instead, on this or that election result — which means the rest of the west must still plan for its own protection and defence.
Freedland allowed that nationalist populism is now “badly damaged, marked as the cause of losers,” and suggested Trump may well have demonstrated that nationalist movements whose sole currency is grievance ultimately always fail — a lesson, he wrote, that could deter voters in France and Germany tempted by Marine Le Pen or the AfD. But he questioned whether Trump’s failure was generic or particular: did he lose because politicians of his kind always will, or because of “stupid and, crucially, avoidable decisions” — above all the attack on Iran, which broke the pledge, cherished by Maga voters, to “end wars rather than start them” while driving up the very inflation he was elected to curb? Either way, Freedland argued, it is hard to speak of inevitable failure for a man who, despite the havoc of his first term — including what the column calls the violent insurrection of 6 January 2021 — was elected to a fresh term less than four years later. “He disgraced himself, but was rewarded with victory,” Freedland noted.
“A weakened Trump is not necessarily a tamed Trump,” Freedland wrote, citing a seasoned Washington hand who told him that a defeated Trump could become “a cornered animal.” Foreign policy remains largely the president’s preserve, and Freedland argued Trump now has a double motive to use it: a legacy to offset what the column calls this week’s “historic drubbing,” and a craving for attention so elemental that ceding the spotlight to Democrats or anyone else, he wrote, would appal him.
Freedland pointed to demands lodged by Vice-President JD Vance in a statement on X — one that, in the column’s telling, saw the vice-president “all but break from his boss” — urging Trump to move to end the war with Iran, even if that means capitulation. The alternative, Freedland suggested, is that Trump doubles down and pushes for the toppling of the Tehran regime, which he likely believes would give him the place in history he deserves.
Until 20 January 2029, Freedland wrote, those decisions remain Trump’s, and he still has the power to shape world events even if that power has diminished. One example is the US relationship with Israel. Israeli elections last week, though far from delivering the repudiation of Benjamin Netanyahu many Israelis sought, wiped out the prime minister’s parliamentary majority, the column reported, and coalition bargaining is under way with the US results already in play. Israeli opposition leaders argue that Netanyahu’s closeness to Trump — long claimed as an asset — is now a liability that renders him “toxic” among the Democrats about to wield power on Capitol Hill. If that argument prevails, Freedland wrote, the “blue tsunami” will have claimed not only Kansas and Texas but also the man once dubbed “the Republican senator from Jerusalem.”
On the morning of election day, Freedland wrote, Trump announced the termination of military aid to Israel — perhaps, the column suggested, a last-ditch attempt to win over “Tucker Carlson Republicans” hostile to the country. Trump could continue on that path, especially if he seeks to punish Netanyahu for his role in the joint US-Israeli war on Tehran that, in Freedland’s telling, broke his presidency — or, alternatively, he could defy Vance and “hug the Israeli PM close.”
The fateful choices ahead remain Trump’s, Freedland concluded. Congressional Democrats will soon hold the power to investigate allegations of corruption and hold him to account, and America’s allies in Europe and elsewhere will find in Washington people who talk like partners rather than enemies — both prospects, he wrote, a great relief. “But that does not alter two key facts,” the column ended: “Trump happened – and he’s still there.”