In the fall of 2026, Washington is putting the finishing touches on the White House’s golden ballroom, while the approval rating of the president who commissioned it is sinking toward historic lows. Two months after the midterm elections, Donald Trump will become a lame duck — a leader barred from seeking another term and therefore traditionally regarded as politically neutralized. In his case, however, the old rule may work in precisely the opposite way: the less chance a president has of remaining in power, the fewer reasons he has to restrain himself.
In the fall of 2026, a new White House ballroom clad in gold and spanning more than 2,000 square meters is nearing completion in Washington. Construction is underway directly beside the East Wing of the presidential residence; the old wing was demolished without prolonged consultations with the commission responsible for preserving the city’s historic character. The symbolism turned out to be more precise than anyone intended. While the president’s approval rating falls to record lows and Republicans brace for their worst midterm elections in a decade, Donald Trump himself is busy building a monument to himself — literally, in architectural form. Two months after the November vote, he will officially become a lame duck, a president serving out his term with no possibility of reelection. For most of his predecessors, lame-duck status marked the beginning of waning influence. The logic of Trump’s second term suggests that in his case, the opposite may happen: the less political future he has, the greater his room for maneuver in the here and now.
The Two Trumps: Before and After Butler
Four years separate Trump’s first and second presidencies, but something far more profound lies within that gap: a complete transformation of his model of power. During his first term, he was surrounded by people such as Rex Tillerson, John Kelly, and James Mattis — figures who saw their mission as restraining an impulsive president from taking drastic steps. They delayed controversial orders for months, leaked details of internal disputes to journalists, and at times resigned in dramatic fashion, as Mattis did after Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria in late 2018. Trump himself later complained repeatedly and publicly that he had been surrounded by people who sabotaged his directives under the pretext of protecting the country. Four years of internecine warfare produced two impeachments and a toxic atmosphere of mutual distrust in which Trump ultimately faced defeat in the 2020 election.
On July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania, a gunman opened fire at a Trump campaign rally. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear, and one spectator was killed at the scene. Trump emerged before the cameras with blood on his face and his fist raised — an image he would later describe as a turning point in his destiny. Publicly, he repeatedly linked his survival to providence, as though he had been spared for a special mission to complete the transformation he had envisioned. That conviction in his own exceptional destiny became the foundation of his personnel policy during his second term, in which personal loyalty — rather than government experience or professional reputation — became the only truly decisive qualification.
The consequences were visible in the first appointments. Pam Bondi became attorney general, former Fox News television host Kash Patel took over the FBI, former host of the same network Pete Hegseth became secretary of defense, and Trump’s longtime personal adviser Susie Wiles built the White House operation around him. All four owe their positions not to institutional standing within the Republican Party but to personal loyalty to the president, demonstrated long before the inauguration. The traditional autonomy of federal law-enforcement and intelligence institutions from the Oval Office has eroded to a degree almost unimaginable in postwar American politics. Trump openly demands that the Justice Department bring cases against political opponents, while the prospect of another investigation into Trump himself is treated within his inner circle as something bordering on science fiction.
Domestic policy follows the same logic of personal will rather than coordinated procedure. The National Guard has been deployed to cities by direct presidential decision, bypassing the customary practice of coordination with governors, while raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have expanded sharply in both scale and severity. According to polls conducted by NBC News and The Washington Post in late fall last year, more than half of Americans considered the deployment of the Guard to cities unjustified, while nearly two-thirds believed the president’s expansion of executive power had gone too far. For tens of thousands of detained people and families facing deportation, this is not an abstract debate about the scope of executive authority. It is a question of whether a parent or child will still be with them by the end of the week.
A Palace Without Congress
During the first year of Trump’s second term, the Republican majority in Congress effectively removed itself from the task of overseeing the executive branch. The primary beneficiary was the president himself. What suffered was the legislature’s ability to influence almost anything beyond political rhetoric. Lawmakers made the 2017 tax cuts permanent, accepting trillions of dollars in additional federal debt over the coming decade. They also failed to stop the strikes on Iran that Trump authorized on February 28, 2026, without a single congressional vote declaring war, even though the U.S. Constitution assigns that prerogative exclusively to Congress.
The budget offers an especially revealing example because the dispute concerns not rhetoric but actual money. On July 24, 2025, Trump pushed a rescissions measure through Congress under the Impoundment Control Act for the first time since 1992, eliminating $9 billion in spending that lawmakers had already approved. A month later, the administration went further, with little regard for the statute itself. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought used a so-called pocket rescission, freezing $4.9 billion in USAID assistance in a way that left Congress physically unable to hold a vote before the fiscal year expired. Republican Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the move a direct violation of Article I of the Constitution, which reserves the power of the purse for lawmakers. According to calculations by Democratic staff on the budget committees of both chambers, by the fall the administration had frozen, canceled, or challenged in court more than $400 billion in spending approved by Congress. Different snapshots using the same methodology put the figure at either $410 billion or nearly $437 billion, depending on the date of calculation. The general scale of the figure, however, is no longer seriously disputed even by Republicans serving on the committees.
A similar dynamic has emerged in relations with major corporations, where the president increasingly acts not as a regulator but as a direct negotiator. On August 7, 2025, Trump demanded the immediate resignation of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, citing his previous investments in Chinese technology companies. Two weeks later, after a personal meeting in the Oval Office, the demand turned into a deal. On August 22, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that the United States would acquire nearly 10 percent of Intel, worth about $10 billion, formally in exchange for converting grants provided under the CHIPS Act. In practice, it demonstrated a new norm in which the fate of one of America’s largest corporations can be determined by a personal call from the White House rather than through a regulatory process.
Then there is the separate story of the gift from Qatar’s royal family. In May 2025, the Pentagon accepted from Doha a luxurious Boeing 747-8 valued at roughly $400 million, intended to serve temporarily as Air Force One before eventually being transferred to Trump’s presidential library foundation. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it the largest bribe from a foreign government in U.S. history, quipping that nothing says “America First” quite like a plane donated by Qatar. The converted aircraft made its first official flight on July 1, 2026, and has carried the president ever since in an interior and exterior scheme repainted in his personal colors — blue, red, and gold — replacing the traditional pale-blue livery that had passed from president to president since the Kennedy era.
The New York Times editorial board brought these and dozens of other episodes together in an index of 12 warning signs of democratic erosion toward autocracy, launched in October 2025. Its criteria include declarations of emergency based on dubious pretexts, the domestic use of the military, persecution of political opponents, and the suppression of the independent press. On all 12 measures, the assessment has shifted from the baseline established in January 2025, when the newspaper regarded the United States as one of the world’s healthiest democracies. The Times includes an important qualification: the country remains far from genuine autocracy on the model of China, Russia, or Iran. But in its assessment, the direction of travel has been consistently the same.
The Judges Who Still Say No
Yet complete submission has not occurred, and this is where the real drama of Trump’s second term begins. The Supreme Court, where appointees of Republican presidents hold a solid majority, has twice over the past year inflicted painful and costly defeats on the administration. On February 20, 2026, the Court ruled 6–3 in the consolidated case Learning Resources v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give the president authority to impose tariffs in the first place. The ruling wiped out nearly all of the “Liberation Day” tariffs introduced a year earlier. According to the Tax Foundation, more than $160 billion had already been unlawfully collected under them by the time they were struck down, while collections over a decade could have reached $1.4 trillion. Trump responded that same day by replacing the invalidated duties with a 10 percent tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a mechanism that, by law, cannot remain in effect for more than 150 days without separate congressional approval, meaning that by early 2027 the administration will need another round of legal acrobatics.
The day before, on June 29, 2026, the Court taught the administration a different kind of lesson, demonstrating that it was prepared to protect not every institution equally, but certain ones in particular. By a 5–4 vote, the justices barred Trump from firing Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook. The president had attempted to remove her in August 2025 over alleged mortgage fraud said to have occurred before her appointment. Cook became the first governor in the Federal Reserve’s 111-year history whom a president had ever attempted to dismiss, and Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized in his opinion the central bank’s uniquely independent status. The motive was not difficult to discern. For months, Trump had publicly demanded that the Fed slash interest rates, and removing an uncooperative governor appeared to be the shortest route to securing the necessary majority on the board. Yet over the previous year, the same Court had allowed Trump broad authority to dismiss leaders of the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and other independent agencies. In other words, the justices expanded presidential power almost everywhere while carving out an exception for the inner sanctum of monetary policy.
On June 30, 2026, the Court delivered another blow by ruling Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship unconstitutional. The decision in Trump v. Barbara reaffirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to virtually everyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of the legal status of their parents. Trump did not concede defeat. On August 6, just over a month after losing the case, he signed a new executive order seeking to narrow eligibility through a different approach, excluding children of foreign embassy employees and members of prohibited organizations. A coalition of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Defense Fund, and the Asian Law Caucus immediately filed a new lawsuit — hardly the first round of the same battle for any of these organizations.
Congress, too, eventually found the courage to object, albeit largely symbolically. The war with Iran, launched with strikes on Tehran on February 28, 2026, prompted nine unsuccessful attempts to pass a War Powers Resolution through the Senate, beginning in March, when Republicans joined by one Democrat blocked the first such effort. The tenth attempt, on June 23, 2026, passed by a vote of 50–48. Four Republicans voted against the president, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the war a historic mistake that had imposed the highest possible cost on the country for the smallest possible benefit. The House of Representatives backed a similar measure twice, first in early June by a vote of 215–208 and then again in late July by 214–208. These resolutions have no binding legal force: as concurrent resolutions adopted by both chambers, they do not require the president’s signature and therefore cannot be vetoed, but neither do they directly compel Trump to act. He dismissed the votes as a meaningless gesture that offered comfort to America’s enemies and did not stop the war.
The Autumn of a Presidency in Free Fall
While the courts and Congress push back in isolated cases, voters are turning away in large numbers. That mismatch between enduring formal power and collapsing public support defines the central drama of the two years that remain. A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on August 17, 2026, put approval of Trump’s job performance at 33 percent, with 64 percent disapproving — the lowest rating of either of his presidential terms. A week later, the same pollsters found almost identical numbers: 33 percent approval and 65 percent disapproval, while support for the military operation against Iran had fallen to 31 percent from 37 percent in March. An August survey by the University of Massachusetts Amherst confirmed the trend. It recorded overall approval at 32 percent, with nearly two-thirds dissatisfied specifically with the Iran campaign, while four out of five respondents said the war had driven up gasoline and food prices.
The economy, traditionally one of the Republican Party’s strongest assets, has for the first time in nearly a decade stopped working in favor of the party in power. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released August 3 found that Americans trusted Democrats more than Republicans on the economy, 38 percent to 35 percent — the first Democratic advantage of this kind since the mid-2000s. On the cost of living, the Democratic advantage had widened to eight percentage points by August 25, the largest gap since October 2025, when pollsters began asking the question in its current form.
To be fair, the rest of Washington is extraordinarily unpopular as well. The November 2025 shutdown, the longest in the history of the U.S. federal government, drove Congress’s already weak approval rating down to 14–15 percent, according to Gallup, while disapproval exceeded 80 percent. For Trump, this provides a peculiar form of political cover: voters are angry at almost everyone at once rather than exclusively at the White House, which is precisely why the decline in the president’s approval rating does not automatically translate into greater trust in congressional Republicans. Trump’s ability to transfer his own popularity to fellow Republicans is weakening as well, undermining what has long been his most important political asset — his capacity to determine the outcome of a Republican primary with a single social-media post. Of the 312 primary endorsements he has issued during this election cycle, 12 of his candidates have lost. Despite a nominal success rate of 96 percent, the number of defeats is already approaching Trump’s record from 2022. They include the Wyoming gubernatorial primary, where Trump-backed candidate Megan Degenfelder lost to fellow Republican Eric Barlow, who focused on local issues and state land rights rather than seeking a presidential blessing. Trump-endorsed candidates suffered similar defeats in Georgia, South Carolina, and Iowa, while in Tennessee, Rep. Andy Ogles — whom the president himself had called a fighter on the conservative front — lost his primary to incumbent state agriculture official Charlie Hatcher. The White House insists on an official success rate of 98 percent, but the independent Ballotpedia methodology relied upon by most major outlets, including CNN, does not support that figure.
Trump’s Final Two Years Could Be His Most Dangerous: November May Set the President Free
The November Crossroads
Prediction markets are describing the November elections with few illusions for Republicans, although the picture remains considerably more fluid than headlines often suggest. By the end of the summer, the forecasting platform Kalshi was consistently putting Democrats’ chances of retaking the House of Representatives above 80 percent. In some readings, the figure climbed as high as 86 percent. The Senate is far less certain. In the spring, traders saw the two parties’ chances as virtually even, at roughly fifty-fifty. By May, Republicans held a modest advantage of around 56 percent, but by late summer the market had swung back toward near parity. The fact that the same market produced such different assessments over just a few months illustrates how unstable the outlook for the upper chamber remains, in sharp contrast to the House, where a broad consensus has been in place for some time.
The difference between these scenarios is fundamental to the future direction of White House policy. This is where November will determine who gains and who loses. If Republicans retain both chambers, Trump will have another two years to push legislation through Congress and confirm judges with a friendly majority behind him. Speaker Mike Johnson has long ceased challenging the president on any major issue, while Trump himself has effectively become the real architect of the House agenda. A Democratic victory in the House would give the party the power to subpoena officials for sworn testimony, demand documents, and turn the budget process into a permanent bargaining contest. But if Republicans retain the Senate, Trump would still preserve the ability to confirm judges and senior officials without seriously accommodating the opposition.
The most explosive scenario is the third one, which prediction markets currently regard as the least likely but by no means impossible. Losing both chambers would leave the president primarily with executive orders, veto power, and direct control over the executive apparatus, while a Democratic Congress would simultaneously acquire the tools for investigations and budgetary pressure. Specialists in the separation of powers describe precisely this scenario as the most likely source of an open constitutional confrontation during the final two years of Trump’s presidency.
For the rest of the world, this crossroads is not merely an exercise in American electoral arithmetic. The composition of the next Congress will help determine whether the White House retains a free hand for new unilateral military decisions modeled on the Iran campaign, whether major arms packages to allies continue moving forward without substantive congressional scrutiny, and how predictable Washington’s trade policy will remain for partners that have already watched tariffs disappear overnight after being struck down by the courts. Democratic control of even one chamber would not stop the president’s foreign policy. The war with Iran continued despite repeated unsuccessful attempts to end it. But it would make any new Trump venture substantially more expensive politically by forcing the administration to justify itself publicly before congressional committees.
The Unrestrained President
Common sense suggests that weakening political power should make a president more cautious. Political science points to the opposite effect, supported by decades of evidence rather than journalistic speculation. Economists Timothy Besley and Anne Case demonstrated as far back as 1995, using data on U.S. governors spanning three and a half decades, that officeholders barred from seeking reelection systematically exercise less restraint in fiscal and tax policy. The reason is simple: voters can no longer punish them at the next election.
Political scientist Philip Potter extended similar logic to American presidential foreign policy in a December 2016 article in Presidential Studies Quarterly and concluded that outgoing leaders do not necessarily become more cautious. On the contrary, a growing desire to leave a mark on history can push them toward riskier foreign-policy decisions precisely because Congress increasingly constrains them at home while presidential autonomy in international affairs remains largely intact.
I have watched American politics from Baku for many years, and this mechanism feels familiar from a very different historical setting. In the final years of the Soviet Union, officials at both the republican and central levels, knowing that their era was coming to an end, often acted more boldly than they had at the height of their careers. They had less left to lose, while their inner circles were increasingly selected for personal loyalty rather than professional competence.
Washington in 2026 is built on entirely different democratic foundations and remains constrained by independent courts, a free press, and federalism, none of which existed in the late Soviet system. Yet the psychological mechanism is recognizable. Weakening external restraint combined with a continuing concentration of power inside the executive can produce similar behavior regardless of the political system in which it appears.
Trump himself appears to be confirming the theory even before the November vote takes place. The book by journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “Regime Change: Inside Donald Trump’s Imperial Presidency,” published on June 23, 2026, after roughly 1,000 interviews conducted over two years, portrays a leader who is becoming progressively less responsive to negative headlines and increasingly focused on his historical legacy rather than current approval ratings.
Writing in The New York Review of Books, Mark Danner observed that the authors portray a president willing to take enormous risks for power but consistently prepared to retreat once the personal cost becomes too high. In an interview with PBS, Swan said directly that he does not expect Trump to quietly leave the stage after the midterms. In Swan’s assessment, Trump will remain intensely active until the final day of his second term rather than withdrawing to write memoirs.
A Reuters source inside the White House made a similar point in June on condition of anonymity, acknowledging that the president would inevitably begin losing leverage after November. Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, quoted in the same report, described Trump’s governing style as inherently chaotic and warned that this style would not disappear regardless of which party controls Congress after the elections.
The unresolved question, debated by political scientists for months, is whether this chaos can be converted into durable institutional power after 2027, surviving Trump himself and passing to his successor, or whether it will remain an individual characteristic of one president and leave the White House with him. Neither Democrats, who are preparing dozens of potential hearings in the event of victory, nor Republicans themselves have an answer. Some Republicans are already beginning to distance themselves cautiously from a president whom, only a year ago, many were afraid to criticize aloud even in private conversations.
Whatever happens in November, Trump will enter 2027 at the peak of his formal presidential authority. Executive orders are signed without hesitation, his appointees inside the intelligence agencies and Justice Department remain loyal, and the gold-covered ballroom is being completed exactly on schedule.
He has almost no remaining incentive to compromise with either allies or adversaries because there is no longer an electoral reason to do so. There will never be another election for Donald Trump.
The history of his first term repeatedly created the impression that the outer limit of political irresponsibility had already been reached: after January 6, 2021, after two impeachments, after an endless succession of scandals involving hotel bills and criminal prosecutions. Each time, it turned out that the boundary lay a little farther away.
Judging by the architecture of his second term, built around loyalty instead of expertise, personal enrichment instead of restraint, and a conviction in his own divine purpose instead of fear of the voter, Donald Trump has every opportunity during his remaining two years to push that boundary farther still.
And probably not for the last time.