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By Shane Croucher
Senior Editor
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Next week, if the polls are right, Americans will hand Donald Trump’s presidency a near-mortal blow in the November 3 midterm elections.
Trump’s approval rating, near the lowest of either of his terms, averages about 37 percent after his still unresolved war with Iran spiked gasoline prices and compounded voters’ anger over the cost of living.
Forecasters make Democrats heavy favorites to win the House and narrower ones to take the Senate. Polls have erred before, and may again. But a blue wave is likely coming in some form, be it a baby swell, a tsunami, or somewhere in between.
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This is a signal of changes beyond America, however. The political moment Trump embodied when he won in 2016—nationalist, populist, scornful of institutions and allies alike—is ebbing across much of the democratic world.
Its grievances over immigration, stagnant living standards, and remote elites have not gone away. Trump leaves a permanent legacy on all those. What is fading is Trump’s model.
His allies are losing power, and the populists still rising increasingly keep him at arm’s length.
Brejoin?
Britain was the harbinger 10 years ago. In June 2016, four-and-a-half months before Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the mother country voted for Brexit. That August, a victorious Nigel Farage, Brexit’s loudest champion, shared the stage at a Trump rally in Mississippi.
This spring, as the referendum’s 10th anniversary approached, Farage’s Reform U.K. party led Labour by seven points, on course perhaps for Downing Street with a MAGA-esque project for nationalist revolution in Britain. It has since slumped to third, behind even the Conservatives.
(In a symbolic mix-up over a "prayer card" to reserve a seat in the House of Commons, Farage had to watch Wednesday's Budget statement by the Labour chancellor—and the response by Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative opposition—from outside the chamber.)
Labour’s Andy Burnham, who replaced Keir Starmer as prime minister in July, now says Brexit has done "more harm than good" and has opened the door to rejoining the European Union (EU).
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Public opinion shifted before Burnham’s position. Britons now tell YouGov, by two to one, that leaving was a mistake, and almost a third of Leave voters have recanted or harbor doubts.
Death has thinned the older cohorts that carried Leave to victory, while the new generations of young voters are emphatically pro-European. Ipsos finds 68 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds would vote to rejoin.
"Bregret" is not yet a full reversal. Support sags when voters are told re-entry could cost Britain its old opt-outs, such as keeping the pound as its currency, or remaining outside of the passport-free Schengen zone. But the ground has clearly shifted towards "Brejoin."
Trumpism's Global Retreat
Britain is not alone in this pullback from the kind of politics that has defined the Trump era.
In April, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the prototype illiberal nationalist and a fixture at MAGA gatherings, lost power after 16 years. Five days before the vote, Vice President JD Vance was in Budapest, holding his phone to a rally mic so Trump could endorse Orbán live.
Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, conservative but pro-European Union, won a two-thirds majority. Orbán, who Trump saw as a model leader for the future of sovereign states that could shatter the EU, called the result "painful for us, but clear."
Sweden followed in September, ousting a right-wing government that had promised the nationalist Sweden Democrats seats in cabinet. In Italy, the public fallout between Trump and the right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni, over Iran and Greenland, is well known.
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Over in Trump’s hemisphere, Brazil delivered another rebuke on Sunday. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became the first candidate in decades to win a runoff after losing in the first round. He beat Trump’s favored candidate, the rightist Flávio Bolsonaro, 52 percent to 48.
Trump had helped him. Last year’s 50 percent tariffs, explicitly tied to a "witch hunt" against Flávio’s father Jair Bolsonaro, let Lula wrap himself in the flag.
Flávio Bolsonaro has since landed in Florida—a quite literal retreat of Global Trumpism—as he defied a court order to surrender his passports. His father is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup, confined to his home in Brasília. Bolsonaro, in true Trump style, is alleging election fraud.
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Canada set that kind of pattern last year, when Trump’s tariffs and annexation talk revived the Liberals and cost the Conservative leader his own seat. The Trump clash has bolstered Carney’s popularity.
Alberta also rejected an independence referendum. Separatists in Quebec did win a provincial election, but fell short of a governing majority.
Trump’s other friends are faltering. In Tuesday’s Israeli election, the right-wing bloc led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump’s partner in this year’s war on Iran, fell well short of the 61 seats needed for a majority on partial results.
Netanyahu has survived worse, and deadlock may keep him on as caretaker. But the corruption trial under way since 2020 still shadows him. Both he and Trump are on course to end 2026 far weaker than they entered it. Netanyahu, too, is claiming election fraud.
In Argentina, the mad-haired libertarian Javier Milei’s chainsaw strategy has worked on inflation. Monthly price rises have fallen from 25 percent when he took office to under 2 percent. Yet about six in 10 Argentines view him unfavorably amid economic discontent.
With a difficult re-election fight looming next year, he gave a familiar sign of desperation for struggling Argentinian leaders. Milei has vowed to "recover" the Falklands, seizing on Trump’s suggestion that America might not stand by Britain and reopening old wounds.
Down But Not Out
To be fair to Trump, in Latin America, candidates he endorsed have won in Honduras and Colombia, albeit by very tight margins. His uncompromising ally in El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, remains the region’s most popular president.
In Europe, the populist right is far from finished. Marine Le Pen, cleared to run by an appeals court in July, launched her presidential campaign last weekend. She is polling about a third of the first-round vote, nearly double her nearest rival. It’s hers to lose.
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The Alternative for Germany (AfD), headed by Alice Weidel, won almost 44 percent in Saxony-Anhalt’s state election in September and leads national polls. She, like Le Pen, may soon lead her country.
But Europe’s modern insurgents do not, and indeed have not ever, governed nationally, in the U.K, France, or Germany. They have also learned to keep Trump at arm’s length when it suits.
Over Greenland, Weidel accused Trump of violating "a fundamental campaign promise" not to meddle abroad. The National Rally’s Jordan Bardella denounced his "commercial blackmail."
Le Pen, if she wins, would inherit rubble: public debt of 119 percent of GDP and a febrile society where streets burned only this month. National populism makes a fine insurgency and a poor incumbency.
The Trump era is ending because many of its champions now have records to defend—the American president chief among them. Those still only on the cusp of power are likely to face a similar fate.
Premature Evaluation
It ain’t over till it’s over. Trump still has two years left, and has shown he will stretch executive power to push his agenda through over the heads of Congress and the judiciary, as much as possible.
Nor are his voters’ causes dead. A Reuters/Ipsos poll this year found 61 percent of Americans backed deporting immigrants living in the country illegally, even as most rejected his methods.
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But the 22nd Amendment obliges him to hand the movement on, and there is only one Trump. A successor can pick up the same causes and discard the style. Whether that can win in 2028, without Trump leading the charge, is another matter.
Overseas, perhaps Trump’s greatest legacy for his political allies like Le Pen and Farage is to help soften the ground on issues like immigration and rejecting the authority of multilateral bureaucracies over nation-states. He moved the debate much further right.
Moreover, Trump has pushed American allies, especially those in Europe, to think about standing on their own two feet for a change and face up to economic and security realities. That may come at the expense of American influence. But it’s a good thing overall.
And he may have finally lifted the socialist curse on Venezuela with the stunning operation to remove Nicolás Maduro from power. Communist Cuba is perhaps next—if he can tidy his Iranian mess soon enough.
Of course, if Republicans outperform their dire expectations next week, and Farage’s Reform surges back to the top of the polls now Brexit is back on the agenda, the obituary for Global Trumpism is a little premature.
But for now, voters elsewhere are moving on from the MAGA moment. America may be next.
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