The American midterms have reopened an argument older than the United States itself: how does a democracy protect its liberties from the personal ambitions of those elected to govern it? The question belongs to every democracy, even if the consequences of America’s experience travel unusually far and wide.
Trump has not lost the presidency; his party has lost Congress. The distinction is considerable and hardly promises a sea change in America’s conduct abroad. Still, the scale of the Republican defeat is stunning. Democrats have won both chambers, with gains extending into territory long considered unshakeably Republican. Texas and Kansas stand out. Since much has already been written about how those electoral tables turned, you, dear reader, will gain little from me recounting them again.
More interesting is the return of an older constitutional argument. The American presidency, perhaps the most powerful elected executive office in the modern world, was never designed to exercise authority without institutional restraint. During the first two years of Trump’s second term, Congress had been forced to accommodate brute presidential power. However, the midterms have restored the genuine possibility of a Congress willing to act independently of the president.
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Old suspicion of sovereign power
More than eight centuries ago, Magna Carta of 1215 placed an enduring proposition into writing: the English king too, it said, was subject to law. It was the outcome of a confrontation between King John and his barons, and not a declaration of universal political rights per se. But the political ideas that arose from Magna Carta have been far more expansive than the immediate quarrel that produced it.
A few centuries later, the struggles between Crown and Parliament, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and the political philosophy of John Locke gradually developed the case for limited government. The French philosopher Montesquieu gave that argument an institutional form. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), he warned against placing the powers to legislate, execute and judge in the same hands. That principle travelled into revolutionary France: Article 16 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen treated the separation of powers as indispensable to a democratic constitution.
The American founders carried this same suspicion of concentrated authority into their own constitutional deliberations. Among them was James Madison, a young Virginian who arrived at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 exceptionally well prepared. He had studied ancient and European confederations for clues to the weaknesses of political unions. He went on to become one of the American Constitution’s principal architects, a chronicler of the convention’s debates and, eventually, America’s fourth president.
Madison had little faith in the proposition that good government could be secured simply by choosing good men. In Federalist No. 51, he offered the more durable prescription that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The American president would possess formidable authority, but Congress would legislate and control expenditure; courts would decide constitutional disputes; and federalism would distribute power between Washington and the states. The institutions were expected to compete, disagree and occasionally frustrate one another. That was how the republic was meant to function, frustrating as it may be. That was the plan from the get-go.
For all these arrangements, the early American republic was far from perfect. Its constitutional settlement accommodated slavery, excluded women from political participation and left large sections of the population without an effective vote. The Nineteenth Amendment secured women’s voting rights only in 1920. Even a century after the emancipation of enslaved African Americans during the Civil War, discriminatory laws and intimidation still kept many Black citizens from the ballot, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to dismantle those barriers.
The republic’s distinction, therefore, rested not on an immaculate beginning but in a constitutional framework that allowed the struggle for citizenship, representation and equality to continue. Its institutions were conceived to outlast the ambitions and shortcomings of individuals, including presidents.
Peculiar illiberalism of contemporary populism
Over the past decade, constitutional democracy has encountered a peculiar challenge to its institutions, simultaneously internal and external. Political movements gain legitimacy through elections and then question the legitimacy of the restraints that make elected government constitutional. An institution is then not criticised for a particular failing; it is denounced as part of an elite arrangement supposedly hostile to the people. If that has not rung a bell yet, I am referring to the rise of populist politics across the world.
The language of the populist, ‘anti-woke’ revolt has made this accusation especially convenient. Judicial independence, minority protections, procedural safeguards, the autonomy of public institutions and even independent journalism can be easily dismissed as components of a liberal-left agenda. In the process, liberal constitutionalism is reduced to a partisan label, as though limits on arbitrary authority had been invented by contemporary progressives for their personal benefit.
That is a remarkable historical inversion. The principle that public power must be limited has a distinguished conservative inheritance, from the English constitutional tradition to American republicanism. A disagreement with a court’s ruling or a newspaper’s editorial line is perfectly legitimate. The claim that either institution is inherently an enemy of the people because it refuses political obedience is something else altogether.
MAGA turned this distinction into a central political battleground. The movement’s rhetoric of the “deep state” supplies an all-weather, all-purpose explanation for delegitimising opposition, while Trump’s electoral mandate has been treated as authority to override institutional checks. The violent breach of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 supplied an extreme demonstration of what happens when electoral defeat itself is interpreted as evidence that democratic institutions have betrayed the people.
Trump has exploited this notion with remarkable élan and consistency. His attempts to extend executive discretion, challenge limits on congressionally authorised spending and demand loyalty from institutions expected to exercise independent judgement have encouraged a personalised understanding of his presidency. Freedom of courts is recast as adversarial; administrative restraint becomes disobedience and congressional oversight is framed as sabotage. The distance between MAGA’s conception of political authority and Madison’s constitutional republic could scarcely be starker.
Trump did not create the powerful American presidency, nor has he made it all-powerful. But he has tested how much of the constitutional system depends upon the willingness of institutions, and the people within them, to defend their prerogatives. The midterms have exposed a serious political limit to that experiment. Whether or not they also restore an institutional limit remains to be seen.
Congress, the inconvenient institution
The Democrats’ victory will alter this relationship, though not necessarily in the ways those celebrating it expect. Their substantial majority gives congressional leaders more room to organise investigations, control committees, examine expenditure and resist presidential nominations.
Yet a majority is not omnipotence. Trump retains his veto, which requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override. Most of the contested legislation in the Senate must also clear the 60-vote threshold for ending debate. Congress, on its part, can constrain presidential initiatives more readily than it can impose a comprehensive alternative programme. Congress retains substantial oversight of war and foreign affairs, but the president remains commander-in-chief and holds considerable diplomatic and operational discretion.
There is another question for the Republicans. Congress was not constitutionally helpless during the first part of Trump’s second term, but Republican legislators frequently chose accommodation over scrutiny. The electorate has now changed that political calculation. The defeat of Trump-endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio, alongside Republican losses elsewhere, weakens the assumption that fidelity to MAGA guarantees electoral success. JD Vance’s unusually explicit criticism of the Iran war right after the Republican defeat has already raised questions about the movement’s future.
The next Congress will be in a much better position to demand accountability from Trump. Whether Democrats can exercise that authority without allowing legislative conflict to harden into permanent paralysis is a separate challenge. A republic needs checks on executive power, but it also needs a government capable of making decisions and functioning.
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Morning after
America’s domestic politics have an unusually large international audience. The country’s economic and financial dominance, the dollar’s status as the world’s principal reserve currency, and its military, technological and diplomatic reach connect Washington’s choices to the fortunes of countries far beyond its borders. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas. What happens in Washington seldom does.
For Vladimir Putin, a Democratic Congress could mean stronger scrutiny of American policy toward Russia and greater pressure to assist Ukraine. European allies may find more receptive interlocutors on Capitol Hill. International far-right movements (like Germany’s AfD), encouraged by MAGA and even by the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, may have to reconsider the political value of association with Trump. However, the domestic grievances sustaining right-wing populism have not disappeared with an American midterm election.
The immediate test is Iran. The war played a role in costing Republicans their congressional majorities, and it is tempting to assume that defeat might compel a retreat. However, what seems more plausible is that Trump may delay renewed escalation or find an added incentive to negotiate longer. He has defended the original intervention, and there is little evidence yet that the larger course of his policy has changed. A weakened president may seek a way out, but Trump may also double down in pursuit of an outcome he can present as his legacy. Congress can complicate his choices, but not force him to retreat. And that will carry implications for everyone caught in the crossfire of energy disruptions, including India.
Nor does a Democratic sweep necessarily promise functional government. The coming two years could bring rigorous oversight and useful compromise, but they could equally bring vetoes, budgetary deadlock and greater reliance on unilateral executive action. That possibility is not an indictment of the separation of powers but a reminder that constitutional machinery still requires political judgement.
Americans have repudiated the administration’s performance, but it would be premature to declare that they have repudiated every idea associated with Trumpism. An election cannot, by itself, repair institutions or reverse years of political mistrust.
Trump promised to make America great again. He has, for the moment, made it blue again. The harder question is whether America’s political stakeholders can now make it functional again.
Swasti Rao is a Consulting Editor (International and Strategic Affairs) at ThePrint. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)