Post election

Alternet  - When President Donald Trump's Republican Party lost the 2026 midterms in a landslide, the immediate GOP reactions varied, from Trump's surprising decision not to fight the results to conservative interest groups insisting their party would have won if Trump had listened to them. Now a new report indicates that Trump is literally in a state of dazed denial about the historic defeat he suffered on Tuesday.

"In the days since his defeat, he has sounded like a man in denial," reported The New York Times' Peter Baker on Sunday. "With his party still picking through the wreckage of a political earthquake, a seemingly oblivious President Trump signed a steel beam for his new White House ballroom and flew to Florida to give a speech on the space program. He seems flat these days, maybe a little dazed."

After describing how Trump dominated American politics from his surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election until last week, Baker points out that Trump has yet to openly accept that his heyday is behind him, something his predecessors did not struggle to do when faced with similar setbacks.

"Unlike other presidents who suffered midterm defeats, Mr. Trump has largely not acknowledged the setback," Baker wrote. "After Mr. Bush’s Republicans lost both houses in 2006, he admitted it was a “thumping.” After President Barack Obama’s Democrats lost the House in 2010, he admitted it was a “shellacking.” Mr. Trump, by contrast, has offered no expression of humility or much recognition of public discontent with him."

The Hill - After Democrats clinched majorities in both chambers of Congress, party leaders have already vowed to try and stop them through legislation.

“We need to stop the Trump tariffs that have increased costs on everyday Americans by thousands of dollars,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) told reporters on Wednesday. 

How Democrats can do this once they assume the majority in both chambers could take different forms, Erica York, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, told The Hill.

“It could be really narrow and just say, ‘These particular tariffs that the president has imposed, we want to … overrule those or … remove those from the books,’” she said of potential legislation.

She added, “It could be more expansive and say, ‘This authority in general shouldn’t sit with the president, and so we want to bring that back to Congress and not let any president do any tariff under this type of authority.’”

Arun Venkataraman, an international trade lawyer with Covington & Burling LLP who previously served in senior roles at the Commerce Department, said he sees Democrats getting more support “for specific tariff actions than they are to do a broadside against underlying” authorities.

“I don’t think we’re going to see them out of the gate on day one completely try to revise all of the U.S. trade laws,” he said. “I think that perhaps the more focused and strategic approach is to address particular tariffs, and then be able to get Republican support for some of that.” Trump, however, still holds the veto power, a fact that he has repeated since Tuesday’s blue wave.

NBC News  -  Sen.-elect Adam Hamilton, who flipped deep-red Kansas for Democrats, said that he hopes to prioritize lowering costs for his constituents and that he would be “deeply disappointed” to spend two years investigating members of the Trump administration.

“The bigger priority for me, and I think for most people in America, especially people living paycheck to paycheck, is ‘please help us with the cost of living,’” Hamilton told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”