The Make Socialism Great Again President Lost Bigly

The most socialist administration in American history has been resoundingly repudiated by voters. The opposition won the House of Representatives in a landslide and is on track for roughly 255 to 260 seats to about 175 for Trump’s party—its largest House majority since 2008. In the Senate, the opposition holds at least 54 seats to 44 for Trump’s party, with two races in former “Trump country” still uncalled: in Mississippi, its candidate holds a narrow lead, while Alaska’s contest remains too close to call.

Lawlessness, socialist cronyism, corruption, tariffs, and war seem to have sucked the wind out of the MAGA sails. Depending on precise definitions of the extent of government ownership and control, across Donald Trump’s two presidential terms, the federal government acquired ownership or control over about 45 major firms. Those ownership stakes, with one exception (U.S. Steel, where a “golden share” gives the government explicit veto power), do not entail explicit control, but with the added regulatory and subsidizing powers in government hands, effective control over the companies was handed to Donald Trump.

Oddly enough, the Blue Tsunami that has swept Trump’s party from control of Congress includes a small handful of people, identified with “democratic socialism,” whose push for more state ownership of companies would only expand Trump’s control over them.

The vast majority of the Democrats, however, will be on congressional committees examining the self-dealing that has infused many of those “deals,” as Trump describes them. All in all, the election represents an effective repudiation of Trump’s Make America Socialist movement.

This election was even more resoundingly a repudiation of taxes on trade, aka protectionism. The Trump administration’s often blatantly illegal imposition of taxes on people who buy from abroad did what every economically literate person expected. They:

• raised prices paid by businesses for components and ingredients for their products;
• reduced choice for consumers;
• and raised consumer prices on many thousands of goods, from medicines to car parts to furniture to coffee to children’s clothing.

Voters felt the Trump tariffs in their pocketbooks. The most obvious price rise was not the result of an intentional act of blocking trade, as the others were, but was caused by the disastrous war on Iran, which is best described as a mixture of incompetence and sheer reckless stupidity. (After the Iranians attacked Arab Gulf states, the president stated that “they weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East” and that “nobody expected that”; the first claim is laughable and the second is a falsehood, as he had been warned that that was precisely what would happen.)

Lawlessness also played a role in this defeat for out-of-control government, as so many Americans were horrified and angered by the lawless violence perpetrated by ICE and Border Patrol agents on American streets, including well-recorded point-blank shootings that seemed to be essentially extra-judicial executions, but for which there were no legal consequences for the killers. Even many who had supported Trump in the past found those to be steps too far.

Finally, the election represents a return to the separation of powers and the American system of checks and balances, which has been under tremendous strain for years and was then subjected to sustained attack by Donald Trump, who insisted that “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president” and, when asked if there were any limits to his powers, responded, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” The voters understood that whatever counts as “morality” for Trump is not an effective limit on arbitrary power.

Constitutionally, this election represented a last-ditch defense of the separation of powers and of checks and balances in the American constitutional order. Since the election of 2024, Trump has effectively governed without a real Congress, as its members were intimidated into compliance with his erratic demands. On Nov. 3, one of the last of the checks and balances—voters protected by a still largely independent judiciary and local election officials—asserted itself. Had they not, Trump would have proceeded to stack the judiciary with compliant loyalists and intimidated with threats of imprisonment local election officials, which was already underway, but was blocked by the judiciary.

As with Orbán in Hungary and Vučić in Serbia, lawlessness finally met the voters, who voted in such numbers that they could not be intimidated, overruled, or denied. As in Hungary and Serbia, it seems like the last chance to stop authoritarian statism was finally taken by the people.

It was a close call, but a lawless, socialistic, and reckless president was repudiated. Long live the Constitution of the United States.