More than 11 years since he descended a golden escalator in Trump Tower to declare his run for president, the laws of political gravity have finally caught up with Donald Trump. The significant gains which saw the Democrats take back control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives will mean that the final two years of the second Trump presidency will be mired in political feuding and likely investigations into administration decisions.

In addition, the jockeying for position ahead of the 2028 presidential election will increasingly take centre-stage, as the long-awaited transition to a post-Trump area at last takes shape.

With two Senate and about 25 House seats still to declare a result, the Democrats have matched their 41-seat gain in the House in the 2018 midterms, during Trump’s first term, and may yet record their biggest majority in the lower chamber since 1992.

Back then, the Democrats had held the House majority for 40 years, a remarkable run which has since given way to an era of alternating control and, in recent years, often wafer-thin margins. Not since 2010, when Republicans gained 63 seats during Barack Obama’s first midterm contest, has a party in opposition done so much political damage to the incumbent in the White House.

Whereas successive rounds of electoral redistricting (or gerrymandering) have steadily reduced the potential for parties to make significant gains in the House, the pattern of results in the Senate provide a fuller picture of the defeat suffered by Republicans on November 3. Democrats not only held onto all the seats they were defending, including those in Michigan and Georgia that were considered marginal contests earlier in the year, and won the seat in North Carolina that most observers had expected, but they also flipped six other races, including in Kansas, which elected a Democratic Senator for the first time since 1932, and Texas, which did so for the first time since 1988 amid Democrat wins in other state contests.

Similar results up and down the ballot compounded the scale of the setback for the White House, as Democrats won five governorships from Republicans, including in Texas, to give them a majority of governors the first time since 2010.

Further down the ballot, the Democrats also gained control of hundreds of statewide positions and flipped at least 12 legislative chambers across the 50 states. In five of the seven swing states which decided the presidential election in 2024, the Democrats now control a ‘trifecta’ of governor’s office and upper and lower chambers, in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These gains may become consequential in shaping electoral decisions in the 2028 election.

By and large, the midterm results amount to a repudiation of Trump’s second-term agenda rather than an overwhelming endorsement of the Democrats’ message. Too many people felt directly affected by policy decisions which worsened the cost of living pressures that had made affordability the central plank of Trump’s successful campaign two years ago.

Having promised to bring down prices on day one, voters across the country felt the pinch from sharply rising petrol and diesel prices as a result of Trump’s war of choice against Iran,

which also went against another promise to keep out of ‘stupid foreign wars that never end’. Heavy-handed actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents also horrified many Americans, including Hispanic voters who abandoned the Republicans in droves.

Historians of the future may look back at the ‘MAGA Age’ in American politics as a bounded era which started in 2015 and ended in 2026, at least in its current version.

After all, the Make America Great Again movement grew out of the Tea Party which erupted onto the political scene in the late-2000s, and, before that, from Pat Buchanan’s fiery advocacy of right-wing populism in his 1992 challenge to George H W Bush for the Republican nomination. This is to say that the populist forces which Trump was able to mobilise so powerfully for a decade are unlikely to subside but rather will evolve into an as-yet unknown new political form.

From the start of its current inception in 2015, MAGA has been intertwined with Trump to the extent that it is difficult to imagine the one without the other. This inseparability has enabled Trump to withstand setbacks that would have definitively derailed the careers of most other politicians, not least in the wake of the January 6 riots at the Capitol in 2021.

The feeling that Trump could do (almost) anything and get away with it was also foreshadowed in the then candidate Trump’s infamous comment, in January 2016, that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any votes.” It is this perception of impunity, at least in the eyes of the voters, that has been shattered by the midterm results.

Signs of fracturing within MAGA were already becoming evident in 2025, especially in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September. Kirk, the youthful founder of the Turning Point USA movement, had emerged as a critical unifying figure in the movement and his sudden death created a void which others rushed to try and fill.

It was noticeable that intra-MAGA rivalries and splits intensified in the months after Kirk’s death as notable figures turned on each other, whether on issues related to Israel, the Iran war, or the Epstein files. In addition, Kirk had been a key supporter of Vice-President J D Vance and had been expected to play a central role in securing MAGA support for Vance as the appointed heir to Trump.

Going forward, Trump’s control of a disillusioned MAGA base will likely ebb further just as his political authority slips away as Republicans position themselves for the campaign to secure the party’s nomination in 2028. Ron DeSantis’s failed campaign in 2024 showed how hard it was to inherit Trump’s mantle, and others, such as Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, may similarly find it an insurmountable challenge.

• The writer is a leading scholar specialising in Gulf politics and international political economy, and a fellow at the Baker Institute and co-director of the Middle East Energy Roundtable.