Midterm Rout Weakens Trump, but His Executive Powers Remain Formidable for Now

Before the dust had settled on the Democratic wave that swept the country on Tuesday, the official White House account on X posted a photograph of Donald Trump standing behind his desk in the Oval Office, looking stern. The caption read: "Trump is still your president."

It is the image he would want to project, a president in command and unbowed after a dramatic electoral setback. The post left two things unsaid. Even without Congress, an American president keeps broad powers, and Trump has already shown he will push the limits of his. But the clock is also running on his presidency, and using those powers will get harder.

Many of his most consequential moves came through presidential orders rather than laws passed by the Republican-controlled Congress. That includes the tariffs on allies and adversaries alike, and the military operations in Venezuela and Iran. At home, he unilaterally cut federal spending that Congress had approved across government. With Democrats now holding majorities in the House and Senate, he can keep doing such things for the last two years of his term. If Democrats try to rein him in with legislation, he has the veto, which can be overridden only by congressional majorities larger than the ones Democrats will have.

Having the powers is not the same as having the political will to use them. A large class of new Democrats is heading to Washington promising to oppose him at every turn. The bigger obstacle may be inside his own party. For two years Trump has held Republicans in line with a mix of rewards and bare-knuckle threats. There are now signs the grip is loosening. Some Republicans are criticising his decisions in ways few would have risked a few months ago.

Vice-President JD Vance wrote a long social media post blaming the war in Iran, which Trump launched with Israel, for the sweeping defeat. "If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so," he wrote. "But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there."

Rumours are also circulating about the president's team. BBC's US media partner CBS News reports that Trump has asked close advisers whether he should replace Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, one of the architects of the war. The president denied it. A change would echo George W Bush's decision to replace Donald Rumsfeld, a driving force behind the Iraq war, after the 2006 "thumping", the last time Democrats won congressional majorities on this scale in a midterm.

David Miller, an assistant professor of government at American University, expects Republicans who want distance from Trumpism and the Make America Great Again movement to either stress different policy issues or frame themselves to show some daylight between themselves and Trump.

Trump's own signals have been mixed. On Tuesday night he posted online and spoke to several media outlets, pledging cooperation with Democrats one moment and threatening vetoes of liberal legislation the next. On Wednesday, as construction workers raised the final beam of the White House ballroom he is building despite a lawsuit seeking to halt it, he answered a few questions. "I'll get along probably with the Democrats, unless they want to be destructive," he said. "But I have the power of the veto."

There is precedent for a weakened president insisting he still matters. In 1995, months after a Republican wave gave the party control of Congress, a defensive Bill Clinton said, plaintively, "The president is still relevant here." Clinton was in his first term, had time to recover, and won re-election the following year. Trump does not have that time. What to watch now is whether Republicans keep breaking with him, whether Hegseth or others are pushed out, and whether his authority to use his powers erodes with each passing day.