By Kollengode S Venkataraman
(written on October 4, 2026, before the Midterm elections)
Not a day passes without some news — some critical, many mocking, and often ridiculing — our President Donald T. Trump in the national print and audiovisual media and social media. Global media all over the world is in its own orbit. These news bites are on our president’s impact on national monuments, our taxes and tariffs, immigration policies and citizenship, wars, saber-rattling bravado, museums, naming and renaming of performing arts venues, arbitrarily renaming a large sea water body and another large freshwater lake, White House repairs, claiming the whole swaths of Canada and Greenland, and Venezuela, … … And then, during his presidency, his publicly discussed “transactional amorous predilections” through Epstein and women of British and European royal pedigree. Some royalty!
And then, the bombing of Iran from off shore Naval ships and planes, against which Iran has not much to retaliate. If there were US boots on Iranian soil… Give him some credit. Trump can add and subtract his losses.
Let us go further. These are the depths to which the Sole Superpower US’s statecraft has plummeted, as we see in Trump’s phrases on Iran: “Scum, sick people, and being led by sick people,” “Scumbags and lunatics,” “Among the most evil people ever on earth,” “Primitive culture,” “A whole civilization will die tonight,” … …
Indeed, a very large canvas one needs to paint his presidency after he leaves office. The curator of his Presidential library has a tough job indeed. These are well recognized within the US and all over the world as well. No need to elaborate on these points. But this sets the stage for what follows.
Personal disclosure: I am on record about how I felt about this president. See here, here, and here. I also have to disclose that I voted for Trump in the 2020 election.
I came to the US as a graduate student. I was 29. Now I am a naturalized citizen. What astonished me the most about the American system – known for its built-in checks and balances and probity in public life – was that the system as a whole is not able to moderate this president’s lack of any restraint. Not his White House staff, not his cabinet officers, not his military officers, not his party leaders and big-time donors, not his GOP congressional leaders, not Wall Street leaders and investment bankers, not even the Christian clergy having direct access to the President.
Trump’s volley of executive orders is a political version of what the military calls “Shock and Awe”: overwhelming an opponent with such force and speed that he is incapacitated by the scale and rapidity of the attack and cannot decide where to hide and how to respond. Trump’s approach is similar against his media critics. He dumped executive orders and presidential decisions one after another in quick succession, giving little time for reporters, commentators, and talking heads to digest one before the next came. Which was the big-ticket item? Which deserved the lead story? By the time they had chosen one, several more had landed.
The first half (two years) of this president’s second term ends in this November midterm election. The president is in his 80s. At this age, Man’s biological drive slows down. But not his anger, greed, and vanity. When such a person leads a nation powerful on many measures, is its constitutional commander-in-chief, and is also vainglorious, he is tempted to rattle his saber. Why? Because he has a global audience. And he is far away from the battlefields; he has not spent even one dark night serving in the army barracks.
He would like to be a Forever President — like the USPS Forever Stamp — if not as a monarch. The US Constitution does not allow that. His octogenarian age is showing up on camera in public functions. Both the chronological clock and his biological clock are running out. Even if he does not see it, GOP’s big donors and its ideological spine see it.
And gas prices are hovering around $4.5 per gallon. It was around $3.10 when he took office. And higher gas prices cascade into all other commercial transactions,, and pinch most Americans’ pocket.
No wonder, in this midterm election season, personally, Mr Trump is facing headwinds even from Republicans on the campaign trail. Many GOP candidates may even feel that the best help Trump can give them is to stay away from their electoral district.
Political bookmakers believe the U.S. Senate majority will be eroded, with GOP having a thin edge; In the House, the GOP majority is likely to erode, with the House majority even changing hands. These two, if they happen, are indictments of the sitting president for the way he conducted the affairs of the nation, within and internationally as well.
Trump, in his campaign rallies before the election in 2024, often said he would start no new war. However, Trump joined the long list of both GOP and Democratic predecessors who started wars, big and small, on their watch. Many couldn’t end the wars they started during their terms. Some dragged on for decades, draining trillions of dollars. So, on this measure, Trump is a just another run-of-the-mill US president.
This President brought his real estate and casino-style CEO approach in his previous incarnation for dealing with at least twenty important nation-states among the 190-plus in the world. Full of bluster, unpredictability, and springing surprises in meetings that baffle even his own staff. Much to his chagrin, he could not easily browbeat them into submission, as he did dealing with competitors, government officials in his real estate and casino operations. Making matters worse for his fragile ego, many of these nation-states are quite weak.
Trump has been his own brand ambassador, as is the norm in the fashion industry and Hollywood. This approach he brought to bear on the presidency. He did not care for the grandeur of the White House and the Oval Office; he only had disdain for his white House staff, cabinet officers, and career diplomats in the State Department. His personality and charisma, he believes, bring the grandeur to the Oval Office.
In this complicated scenario, the midterm elections are more likely to have one of these outcomes, if you go by what the pollsters and bookmakers are saying:
- GOP loses the House majority, but keeps the Senate with an eroded majority.
- The GOP loses control of both chambers in Congress.
The GOP keeping its control in both the U.S. Senate and the House seems unlikely. No matter how the election results pan out, the already unhinged president will be flying off in all directions, post-election. It needs no special insight to say this.
On the midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3, one minute after 8:00 pm Pacific Time, President Trump will be lame duck, de facto. The GOP aspirants for the White House job will start their campaign in right earnestness, and try to distance themselves from Trump and his administration, and from MAGA, using nuanced phrases. It is unlikely this president will have any coattail effect for the new aspirants for the job in the next general elections. Or, for that matter, even in congressional elections.
Even Vice President JD Vance, an aspirant to his boss’s job, will distance himself from his boss. Marco Rubio, too, as the head at the State, will talk about how loyally he tried to execute his boss’s policy and strategy, while candidly telling his interviewers that he shared his differences with his boss privately in Oval Office meetings.
On this point, both Vance and Rubio will be spitting images in deflecting criticisms away from them in debates. Their media mavens, hired at great fees, would have perfected techniques while preparing their candidates for these points. Other GOP aspirants not tied to this administration will be bold. They will talk about how their administration, if they get elected, will undo the damage this administration has done on many fronts, both globally and internally.
As the de facto lame duck president, Trump has two full years, over 26 months. Unlike other presidents, this president is self-absorbed – even narcissistic. He will have no obligation to help other GOP candidates — not that many will seek it in November 2028.
So, most likely, the GOP’s conservative backbone leadership will be wobbly. They are known for closing their ranks — they called it circling the wagons in the era of Bob Dole — when they see their nemesis Democrats smelling blood. Each candidate will see opportunity to get into the White House by differentiating themselves from this administration. And the president will be using his two lame-duck years to accumulate more wealth for himself and his family through his global contacts. This is something he has been doing routinely even before he became a lame duck. And he also has to get money for his grand Presidential Library, running to several billion dollars.
So, in this situation, on foreign affairs, the other nations–states — China, Russia, Germany, France, and other EU countries, Japan, Korea, India, even Pakistan — will be dragging their feet, if not being assertive, in working with the Trump administration in his lame-duck years. They know he is unpopular within his own country, and weak even within his own party. They too will be biding their time.
If frustrated, Trump will be more furious, seeing his grip slipping away right in front of his eyes. He will be a proverbial loose cannon on the deck of the United States’ geopolitical and geostrategic interests — a metaphorical loose cannon having hundreds of nails that can fly in all random directions, once it is ignited.
This slow morphing is taking place as the old-world order, dominated by the US and the Western EU powers, is losing its sheen and is waning. Even well-informed Americans have difficulty in accepting the end of America’s Sole Superpower status, which lasted for nearly 25 years after the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s.
In addition, Americans have difficulty accepting a multipolar world. Now, we are still thinking of the new G-2 (with the USSR gone, now it is China and the US). This president has systematically weakened G -7. Traditional NATO members are bristling at Trump’s public humiliation of them.
The UN has become a good hot air balloon ride in New York City during Fall, when the weather is good, where global leaders gather with their entourage at their governments’ expense. Only as a postscript to their visit, many leaders address the General Assembly jamboree – mostly for their domestic consumption. Often, hardly 15% of UN members are sitting in the grand assembly hall. I have seen this in many video shots of the UN General Assembly when leaders of lesser nations address the “august” gathering.
The idea of American exceptionalism is finally under review among Americans who are serious students of global geopolitics. They realize that increasingly, many global players see in themselves their own version of exceptionalism for good reasons. Many have become prosperous, using private enterprises big and small, with or without being democratic. Note: Ideal democracy exists nowhere. All democracies are manipulated to varying degrees by the Deep States everywhere.
Many of these nation-states pulled out hundreds and hundreds of millions of their citizens out of poverty through their own self-effort. They have improved most human development metrics for their population: life span, literacy rate, health care, caloric intake, infant mortality, women’s education, etc., on their own. This has boosted their confidence in themselves. They are assertive today. They see themselves in terms of their own long civilizational continuity going back to a few thousand years, and not as nation-states with only 100-200 years of life. Their civilizational ethos, they realize, has an enduring value compared to the constitutionality of their nation-states, something the US lacks.
In this overarching environment, even if the US stays powerful in terms of economics, military, and technology, the gap between the US and other nations — particularly in Asia and South America — is reducing. Besides, the US has become dependent on many of these nation-states in Asia and the Americas, addicted to their cheap raw materials and inexpensive consumer products. And these sustain the American working-class people’s lifestyles even with their stagnant wages.
So, with the damage this president has done to the US stature and geopolitical interests by his brashness, it will be quite difficult for the new president in 2029 — irrespective of whether he is GOP or Democratic– to set the clock back the status quo ante of the pre-Trump era. This president’s unique style has forced the rest of the world — including America’s ardent allies in EU and other parts of the world — to recalibrate and triangulate their global interests on their own terms, in their own interests. In this exercise, the US will be one important factors in their recalibration. After a long run for the Post WW-II Bipolar world and the Sole Superpower world after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a multipolar world is perhaps what the world needs.
Something in me tells me that in the 2028 elections, it will be a He and not a She. We certainly are going to live in interesting times. One hopes they do not end up being a curse. END