If ‘a week is a long time in politics,’ as former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is said to have remarked in the 1960s, then two years is an eternity. When Donald Trump completed the mother of all political comebacks in November 2024, winning a sizeable majority in the Electoral College as well as becoming the first Republican since George W Bush in 2004 to win a majority of the popular vote, it seemed as if a new era had dawned in American politics.
As Trump hit the ground running when he re-entered the Oval Office in January 2025 and set about dismantling the legacy of his predecessor and gutting large sections of the federal bureaucracy, it seemed as if nothing could stop or slow him down. How times have changed.
With the stunning victory of Scott Colom as he flipped Mississippi from Republican to Democrat control for the first time in decades and will become the first Black Senator from the state since 1874, the Democrats now control 55 seats in the Senate and could end up with 56 if Mary Peltola retains the narrow lead she currently holds in Alaska. If the Democrats win Alaska it would mean a nine-seat swing which would be the largest in the Senate since 1980, the year of Ronald Reagan’s first election victory.
In the House of Representatives, the defeat of MAGA stalwart Lauren Boebert in Colorado underlined how the Republicans can no longer take seats deep in their midwestern (as well as Deep South) heartlands for granted. Such results would have been inconceivable a year ago, when the Democrats were still reeling from their pummelling in the 2024 election and dealing with the fallout from Joe Biden’s controversial decision to run for re-election, the failure of Kamala Harris to offer any real or meaningful prospect of change, and deep internal divisions over issues such as Gaza.
Simultaneously, the second Trump administration was moving aggressively to exert its power across a wide range of areas that were more traditionally the preserve of Congress, which was reduced to a supine shell of its usual presence in the autumn of 2025, exemplified by the 43-day shutdown which paralysed the government in October and November last year.
Amid a sense of deep Democratic gloom and rampant Republican exuberance, it was easy for many to imagine in 2025 that a new political reality had set in, a reality defined and shaped by the ‘tech bros’ who seemed omnipresent in and around the White House.
While numerous of the administration’s more controversial decisions were eventually curbed by legal rulings of overreach, judicial time moved far more slowly than political time as the adage that ‘you need to break eggs to make an omelette’ proved to be true, time and again.
And yet, the first signs of a shifting of the tide emerged in the ‘off-year’ elections in November 2025, a traditionally lower-key affair than the presidential and midterm elections yet historically a reliable indicator of changes to the public mood.
Mikie Sherrill won the gubernatorial election in New Jersey (a Democrat hold) while Abigail Spanberger won back the governorship of Virginia from the Republicans. In each case, the Democrats chose a woman who was a military veteran and who campaigned on the same issues of affordability and the cost of living that had propelled Trump back into office one year previously. Elsewhere, the Democrats made significant gains down-ballot in both states, and Zohran Mamdani rose to superstardom in the New York mayoralty race, as indications that voter concerns over the economy were beginning to break through, well before the Iran War began.
Despite the growing doubts over the economy, spurred on by the effects (and the unpredictability) of the president’s tariff policies, President Trump began 2026 in a far stronger position than he ends it. The unforced error of initiating military operations against Iran without a clear or coherent plan and endgame, and the shocks of the resultant economic and energy disruption, have inflicted great political damage on the president. The flaws in the president’s character, evident to many from his first administration yet seemingly turbocharged in his second, appear to have contributed to his reluctance to strike a deal with Iran to end the war, despite the unprecedented level of concessions in the memorandum of understanding in June which went further than any previous US offer since 1979.
For Trump, the ‘art of the deal’ seems to have deserted him just when he needs that ability the most. What happens next, in the ‘lame duck’ session of Congress as well as the final two years of the Trump era, is anyone’s guess, and underlines the uncertainty that pervades any analysis of American politics at a time of extraordinary volatility across the globe.
For a decade, the most powerful man in the world has been a man in his 70s and 80s, and in both political parties the pipeline of younger talent had been blocked by the Biden and Trump era. For Republicans as well as Democrats, the campaign to secure the nomination in 2028 is shaping up to be a free-for-all with no clear favourite.
There is also likely to be a battle for the future direction of gravity in each party, between MAGA and more traditional neoconservatives on the right and between progressives and centrists on the left. A flailing and soon to be divided government adds to the challenges facing the United States in the weeks and months ahead.
The spate of cyber incidents in recent weeks, from the PHP code flaw discovered in late October to the outages affecting Microsoft and grounding thousands of flights across the country last week, could not come at a worse time. Whether these incidents are the result of software or update malfunctions or are linked to plots by adversaries to disrupt normal life, as seen in the bomb threats against thousands of schools in Europe, remains to be seen, but they are indicative of tough times ahead.
•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.