Latika M Bourke: Why Donald Trump lost and the scorched earth legacy he leaves Republicans

So now we know. It wasn’t a realignment, a permanent rejection of the things that truly made America great.

The American vote for Donald Trump in 2024 was a dalliance with populism. It was an experiment borne out of frustration at a declining Octogenarian president in Joe Biden.

And in the end, the same Americans emphatically spurned Mr Trump for many of the same reasons they originally turned to him.

Populism’s poster child has shown the movement is a dead end. Every political party and their supporters need to take notice of the electoral implications of MAGA’s demise.

Americans in places that had not rejected Republicans for decades said no thank you and then some to a President who hijacked the Grand Old Party and turned it and the White House into a grotesque freak show where allies were treated like bowling skittles, dictators like chums, and national politics became a gilded altar for ego, vanity, graft and schoolboy bullying.

It was fitting that Trump’s final messages in the lead-up to the midterms were incessant appraisals of male bodies, mostly in relation to derrières belonging to men but also to the rapper Nicki Minaj, and a rambling babble about algae in Washington DC’s Reflecting Pool.

It was nonsense and quite frankly disturbing that the leader of the United States had so little restraint around him that these displays were ever allowed, let alone on repeat.

But where Republicans cowered and failed to step in and restrain their mad king and his destructionism, the American people stepped up, ousting Republicans from their heartlands in Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, handing both Houses of Congress to the Democrats.

“The American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption and incompetence of the failed lame duck president, Donald J. Trump,” said the Democratic Senator from Georgia, Jon Ossoff.

For supposed “Dumbocrats”, it was a whole lot of winning.

The American people delivered Mr Trump their verdict in a fashion only he could understand — “too big to rig.”

Unlike January 6, he accepted the vote. But he did not accept responsibility.

“If I were on the ballot, we would have won . . . we weren’t able to translate the love to candidates,” the President insisted, despite having told voters to cast their midterm judgments as though he were on the ballot.

In an interview with Fox, he said he would use his Presidential veto over the remaining two years of his term to override Congress. This will only solidify the Democrats’ quest for the White House in 2028.

And validating the very reason so many voters turned down the Republicans’ offer, Trump’s first public engagement post his shellacking was to the construction site of his White House ballroom.

“I’m looking at that beautiful facade, how it’s gleaming; we recorked it, repainted it, and it’s good for another 200 years now,” he remarked.

He will not be able to say the same of the condition he bequeaths to the party that motored him to the White House.

“This is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country,” Ron DeSantis, who ran for the Presidential nomination against Mr Trump, told reporters in Florida, the state where he is Governor.

“It’s the political equivalent of a meteor strike that went all around the United States, blue states, red states, everything in between.

“We almost lost Louisiana; that was a one per cent victory. This is going to last far beyond just two years. You look ahead to ‘28 election, a Presidential election; you are not, as Republicans, going to be able to retake the Senate under this current math just two years from now.”

Mr DeSantis said it could be six years or more before the Republicans could hope to gain back both Houses.

Perhaps. Having lost to Mr Trump, who ridiculed him as “Ron Desanctimonious”, he has a greater hand to play in vying to be the person to rehabilitate the party post-Trump.

But much will depend on how judiciously the Democrats wield their mandate, which was more anti-Trump than pro-Democrat.

“This was a vote against Trump more than a vote for the Democratic Party. Our brand is still quite weak,” David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and advised Kamala Harris’ failed run, told Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics.

The US electorate could also be showing the same tendency for wildly swinging between parties observed in the UK, which delivered huge landslides to the Tories and Labour in successive elections.

For now, Mr Trump’s staggering losses appear to uphold that several fundamental truths of politics hold fast.

The first is that the number one job of every leader and government is to provide voters with economic security. It’s always the economy, stupid!

Cost of living was the number one issue cited by voters, and Mr Trump’s war with Iran sent gas and diesel prices to record highs.

The second is that voters do care about broken promises, and you cannot confuse your voters about what you stand for, especially if the latter involves the former.

Mr Trump pledged to bring down the cost of living and end wars forever, but turned around and started an unprovoked war with Iran that sent energy prices rocketing.

The third is that even in a polarised United States, the middle is still ultimately the electoral sweet spot. And the universal issue for winning the hearts and minds is to offer them solutions that provide for a life of dignity that they can afford. This is a lesson for both sides.

“Democrats should be clear-eyed about who the majority makers were in these midterms. The majority makers of 2026 were mainstream and moderate Democrats who overperformed and flipped red and purple places blue — especially in seats that have been moving further away from Democrats over the last decade,” said Third Way, the mainstream centre-left think tank in its post-election memo.

The fourth is that standards and corruption do anguish voters.

In Ohio, where the Republican Vivek Ramaswamy aired an ad featuring the estranged mother of Amy Acton accusing his Democratic rival and her daughter of being a liar despite the fact that Ms Acton was a victim of alleged child rape perpetrated by her stepfather, the state elected Ms Acton to be its first woman governor, ending 16 years of Republicans holding that office.

Both Mr Trump and Vice President JD Vance enthusiastically used their positions of office to endorse such an attack.

“Obviously prices, gas, heating oil, groceries, that drove the election, but this was much bigger than that; this was about the cruelty, the corruption, the attacks on the rule of law,” Mr Plouffe said.

And the final electoral truth underlined by Mr Trump’s loss is that oppositions don’t win elections; bad governments lose them.

Fifty-three per cent of voters Tuesday said they have unfavourable views of the Democratic Party, according to NBC’s exit poll.

The Republicans embraced populism and have paid a staggering price. Donald Trump is a deteriorated President, and his MAGA movement is scorched earth. Wise victors are humble winners. And the best losers are smart learners. That is tomorrow’s contest.