Donald Trump has defined himself for decades as a genius, a dealmaker and – above all – a winner. But against all sensible advice he tried to turn the midterms into a referendum on his presidency, and after a devastating loss, he now appears to be working through all five stages of grief at once.
“FoxNews Ratings are way down (27%!) because they’re spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats!” he posted on Truth Social. “They’re way down, not because of me, but because they are AGAINST me!”
What to know as Republicans suffer brutal election losses
The Democrats have made sweeping gains in a bruising night for Donald Trump and the Republicans.
Sweeping victories
The US midterms have seen the Democrats flip key Republican Senate seats in places such as and .
The stunning results have been widely regarded as a consequence of the cost of living crisis which has been driven by the US-Israeli war with Iran. Losing both houses will now make it hard for Trump to drive his legislative agenda.
Key Republican losses in the Senate
Democrat James Talarico defeated Trump-backed Ken Paxton in Texas.
Democrat Sherrod Brown won in Ohio, defeating Republican Jon Husted.
Democrat Annie Andrews beat Trump’s hand-picked candidate Darline Graham to take the seat.
The losses keep coming
Democrat Troy Jackson won, taking the state’s Senate seat for the first time in 29 years.
Abdul El-Sayed is projected to win, becoming the first Muslim senator in US history.
Paralympian Josh Turek won a Senate seat in the state for the first time in 18 years.
Democrats needed a net gain of four seats in the 100-member Senate to win a majority, while in the 435-member House, they needed three. Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff, who won re-election in Georgia, told supporters “the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J Trump”.
Trump’s response:
I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!
Posting on his social media platform Truth Social, the President sought to defend the bruising results.
While offering to work with opponents, he also posted a picture of a red baseball cap emblazoned with the word “Veto”, suggesting he would block legislation they sought to take through Congress.
Watch more from The i Paper
Why you feel completely broke
A decent salary and watching what you spend is increasingly not enough for people to feel well off– here’s why.
Cost of living
The UK is suffering the worst decade in terms of the growth in household incomes since records began.
Due to cost of living pressures and a lack of substantial wage growth, leading think-tanks like the Resolution Foundation predict that a typical working-age household will see their disposable income fall by £1,050 or 3 per cent between now and 2029.
Disposable income growing slower
Slow growth, inflation and stubbornly high housing costs are the main culprits. While disposable incomes fluctuated throughout the 1970s and 80s, they generally rose again after a fall. Not so since the 2008 global financial crisis, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic.
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House prices rising faster
The average house price in the UK is currently around 6.5 times the average income, compared to around 3.5 times in 1996 and 2.5 times in 1966.
- One could argue that it is why Andy Burnham thinks Britain should rejoin the European Union and why we’ve heard so much about growth – now rebranded as “good growth” – in order to improve incomes.
More people paying higher rate income tax
One of the major reasons behind stagnated income growth is the constant freezing of tax thresholds – levels that won’t change until 2030.
You are now dragged into paying the higher tax rate of 40 per cent if you earn £50,271 or more. You stay in that bracket until you earn £125,000, but at £100,000 a year you lose your personal tax-free allowance and your entitlement to state-funded free childcare.
The NHS blood test which could find several cancers
Blood tests capable of detecting signs of several cancers from a single sample will be offered to NHS patients in a world-first trial.
New blood tests
Thousands of patients will be invited to take part in the Stride-RCT study, which aims to catch cancers at a time when treatment is more likely to succeed.
The tests – which use AI and other cutting-edge technology – could also help GPs identify patients with cancers that are difficult to diagnose.
How will the tests be rolled out?
Who is eligible?
More than 20,000 patients aged 45 or older will be invited to take part.
The tests will be offered to patients who present with symptoms such as persistent bloating or abdominal discomfort.
Where will they be available?
The £8.5m government-funded trial will be offered in more than 200 GPs across England.
How do the tests work?
The tests are designed to detect signs of cancers including bowel, pancreatic, ovarian, stomach, liver, kidney, bladder and prostate cancer.
Some work by identifying tiny fragments of DNA that are shed into the bloodstream by tumours. Others measure proteins in the blood, or use AI to analyse results.
The tests aim not only to identify possible cancer cells but also to indicate where in the body it may be developing.
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How autism diagnoses are ‘increasingly linked to ADHD’
Experts found a rapid rise in autism diagnoses among 16-to 20-year-olds since 2010 in the UK, as well as a rise in women and white people, compared to other ethnicities.
What were the findings?
Researchers from the Medical Research Council looked at data from the UK and Sweden.
They found that new diagnoses have increased from six people per 100,000 in 2010, to 64 per 100,000 in 2023.
Analysis also showed there has been a change in the make-up of people diagnosed with autism, with a decrease in those with a prior diagnosis of epilepsy.
Instead, they found an increase in the proportion of people who had a prior diagnosis of ADHD, stress-related disorders, eating disorders, headaches and chronic fatigue.
The story in numbers
58%
The proportion of autism diagnoses in people with anxiety more than doubled form 29 per cent to 58 per cent between 2010 and 2023.
- In the UK, 24.5 million adults contributed to the study, including 141,119 with an autism diagnosis.
- Writing in , the team said this could be the result of “greater appreciation of nuanced forms of autism that may have previously been labelled as other conditions due to overlapping features, particularly in females”.
How menopause is affecting women’s careers and pensions
Half of women in the perimenopause or menopause say their career has suffered as a result, with workers cutting their hours or feeling forced to turn down opportunities for career progression, according to a new survey.
Lack of support for symptoms
Nearly one in three said their life stage had influenced their retirement savings, according to the research for Scottish Widows. A similar number also said their regular finances had been affected.
And 50 per cent of women surveyed said they would like more support at work. 17 per cent said they had been forced to take time away to manage symptoms.
Breaking down the numbers
- One in eight (13 per cent) women had reduced their working hours and 10 per cent had turned down a promotion or career progression opportunity, for menopause-related reasons.
Scottish Widows found that a 50-year-old woman in full-time work taking a six-month unpaid break could potentially cost £1,300 in pension contributions.
Gaps in pension contributions will have a bigger impact over time, as savers will also miss out on the interest that could have been earned on them.
Two-thirds of women surveyed believe employers should be required to provide better support to women experiencing menopause symptoms, including financial support.
A blow to pension pots
Perimenopause or often coincides with what should be the peak earnings potential of a woman’s career. When symptoms force women to reduce their hours, step back from promotion opportunities or leave work entirely, the ripple effect on their pension pots is huge
Susan Hope, a retirement expert at Scottish Widows
The lessons Britain can learn from France’s pensions crisis
The i Paper takes a look at why the bill for pensions keeps rising on both sides of the Channel – and what can be done about it.
What’s the situation in France?
France will be unable to resolve its debt crisis without tackling sky-high pension bills, economists have warned.
It spends a massive 14 per cent of its GDP on pensions and the costs are rising every day.
Falling birth rates and rising life expectancy in France and the UK means pensions are mounting pressure on public finances.
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Why pension burdens are becoming unsustainable
- Economists have warned that unless France takes action to overhaul the pension system, it is unlikely to end its debt crisis.
- In the UK, public spending will be further strained next year, as state pensions are set to get a 3.5 per cent boost.
- Fraser Thorne, CEO of Edison, told The i Paper: “The UK’s… trajectory is more manageable. But more manageable isn’t the same as sustainable.”
UK advantages over France
Heidi Karjalainen, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says bigger private pension pots in the UK are making it easier to increase the state pension age, whereas “in France, it’s been really difficult to do that”.
It’s this cushion that will help the UK better navigate the trials and tribulations that come with an ageing population and falling birth rates, she says.
Giving people time to adjust
The French proposals were announced “without much notice”, Karjalainen noted, while the UK made the decision more than a decade ago.
Thorne says France offers a “pointed lesson in what can happen when governments try to reset the terms of the pension contract: five prime ministers in two years; mass street protests; and a reform ultimately diluted by political reality even when the economics were clear”.
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As the extent of the Democrats’ triumph became increasingly clear, surpassing even the most optimistic of predictions in their favour, petulant Trump insisted: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
He then turned on Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican and close Trump ally who the President had just hours earlier described as an “exceptional Governor and man”. Trump claimed Abbott had only lost to Democrat Gina Hinojosa because he had “become a RINO [Republican In Name Only] in the last six months”.
It was not immediately clear why Trump had attacked Abbott, although in recent months the two have disagreed on data centres.
Shortly before 5am, a bruised Trump returned to berating Fox News for its coverage, accusing the network of making a poor choice in having Bill de Blasio “the Worst Mayor in the History of New York City, on air, ranting and raving like a Lunatic”.
“FoxNews bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse,” the President raged.
Yet as the hours went on, Trump seemed unusually sanguine and philosophical about the results, at least for a time. Speaking to Fox News (a few hours after publicly savaging the channel), Trump said: “The Democrats did a good job, they fought hard.”
Uncharacteristically, he acknowledged his greatest failure – the unpopular war with Iran – noting that people “didn’t like it” when they had to pay more for fuel as a result of the conflict.
Trump even hinted at potential deals with the Democrats – something that seems deeply unlikely amid a mood of widespread public anger. “After a couple of months of vetoes, they’ll call and they’ll say, ‘how do we get this stuff done?’ and we’ll work together,” he predicted.
But those who expect a new, bipartisan and collegiate Trump to emerge from the midterm humbling are likely to be disappointed. Soon after, he had bounced back to posting memes of a “VETO” cap and distancing himself from Republicans’ failure.
The election, he reminded CBS News, was not about him after all. “We would have won easily if I was on the ballot. But I wasn’t,” he said, despite spending weeks telling voters the exact opposite.
Few look to Trump for consistency – and what we have heard so far is unlikely to be the President’s final word on election results that will shape the rest of his presidency, or his legacy beyond it.
And he has nodded to an additional role. “I’m going to become a Political Pundit, both good and bad, on the reasons these Candidates won and lost!” he posted. If we take Trump at his word, it sounds like he intends to spend the next few weeks weighing in on exactly why various Republican candidates lost. His verdicts might well be bracing.
Democrats have taken governorships across the country and will now control both the House of Representatives and Senate. This means Democrat lawmakers should be able to ensure that the second half of Trump 2.0 looks very different to its first two years.
In exit polls taken across the country, voters gave their reasons. Top of the list was that they were unhappy with the economy and the cost of living, and blamed Trump for creating the circumstances causing the harm. Next on the list was concerns about the health of US democracy itself, after a relentless barrage of corruption scandals, ICE invasions and other legally questionable developments.
The Democrats will soon be mounting numerous investigations into Trump, his family and his cabinet, as well as attempting to block his policy at every turn. The President is already spinning.
One option that seems to be off the table is Trump trying to challenge or overturn the results, at least on any kind of large scale. He had suggested a willingness to try, but when voters opt for the Democrats by double-digit margins in state after state, including many administered by Republican authorities, it simply doesn’t work. Trump seems to have realised this, telling the that he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results.
But Trump’s behaviour may now grow more erratic as he tries to fend off accusations, push his agenda and cement his legacy – and finally sees the extent of the mess he is in.