Trump: 'The United States will be finished if the Democrats win the elections'

Donald Trump has warned that the United States will be 'finished' if the Democrats win the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Presidency in 2028, and has pledged to veto any opposition bill if he loses control of Congress. Polls show the Democrats as favorites in the lower chamber for the November 3 midterms.

The warning is nothing new from him, but this time he framed it with a specific date and scenario. Donald Trump said the November 3 midterm elections open a decisive cycle for the Republican Party: if the Democratic opposition wins both chambers now and then the Presidency in 2028, the country will be 'finished'. He said it in an interview on the show of Australian conservative columnist **Miranda Devine**, and backed it up with a comparison to **Elon Musk**: 'If we lose the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Presidency, this country is finished.'

It is worth separating the pieces. Trump is not running in 2028: he is serving the maximum number of terms allowed by the Constitution and, for now, there is no clear successor in sight. His remark, therefore, does not describe a future personal defeat but a chain of defeats for his party. And the first stop on that chain is November 3. The latest polls give the Democrats victory in the House of Representatives and do not rule out their also taking the Senate, though there the challenge is greater because several key states are still in play.

## What a president can do without Congress

If the Democrats take the House of Representatives, Trump has already announced what he intends to do: veto. 'I'm going to become Mr. Veto,' he warned. His reasoning is that the opposition will have to negotiate with him 'as has always been the case.' The tool is real and is in the Constitution: the presidential veto requires two-thirds of each chamber to pass a bill over the White House's objection. With a simple Democratic majority in the lower chamber, that threshold is out of reach.

The practical result of that standoff would be a two-year legislative wasteland. The opposition can pass bills, but without the ability to override a presidential veto they remain gestures. In return, Congress retains another lever that needs no presidential signature: investigating. A hostile chamber can summon witnesses, request documents and open committees that wear down the executive. That is political pressure, not legislation.

The third scenario, losing the Senate as well, changes the nature of the blockage. The upper chamber confirms cabinet members and federal judges, including Supreme Court nominees. With a Democratic majority, Trump could not place his nominees. And there is a pending matter: speculation about a vacancy centers on **Samuel Alito**, 76, and **Clarence Thomas**, 77. An open seat with Trump in the White House would allow him to nominate a young judge aligned with his ideology for decades. With the Senate in Democratic hands, that possibility collapses.

## The economic agenda the opposition wants to undo

The Democratic plan for the first 100 days, according to what its leaders have previewed, involves reversing parts of the Republican's economic agenda. The three fronts cited are restoring assistance to cope with health insurance costs, eliminating the cuts to Medicaid and fighting the tariffs. In other words, health care and prices: the two areas where the opposition believes it can win votes.

The Democratic minority leader in the House of Representatives, **Hakeem Jeffries**, has left the door open to an impeachment process, which would be the third of Trump's tenure after the attempt to pressure Ukrainian president **Volodimir Zelenski** into investigating Joe Biden's son in 2019 and the January 6, 2021 Capitol assault. But his declared priority is different: 'To begin efforts to make life more affordable for Americans.' His campaign diagnosis is that 'the cost of living is too high and far too many people who work hard and play by the rules cannot get ahead.'

There are more goals on the table. Addressing the wars in Iran and Ukraine, limiting Trump's executive power and regulating artificial intelligence. On defense, control of both chambers would allow forcing a cut in military spending to pressure the president and compel him to seek authorization to continue his military campaign in the Middle East. In Ukraine, a country Trump has turned his back on after lifting sanctions on Russian diesel, a Democratic majority could translate into new aid, even if it required two-thirds of the chamber to override a presidential veto. Several Republican congressmen have come out in favor of sending funds to end a war that will turn five years old in February.

## The Republican antiestéticar of a tax hike

On the other side, the senator who leads the Republican majority in the upper chamber, **John Thune**, antiestéticars a Democratic wave would translate into a tax increase and scenarios he has called 'horrible.' Among them, expanding the number of Supreme Court justices or granting **Puerto Rico** and **Washington DC** statehood, which would make them the 51st and 52nd states of the Union. That means two more Senate seats and, in the Supreme Court's case, the possibility of changing its internal balance.

**Chuck Schumer**, the Senate minority leader, has emphasized judges: 'One of the reasons we must make sure we do everything possible to take back the Senate is to stop Trump from putting such terrible judges on the Supreme Court and the lower courts.' The remark sums up what is at stake: not just laws, but who interprets them for decades to come.

Analyst **William Galston**, of the Brookings Institution in Washington, describes the scenario more precisely than any slogan: a Congress under Democratic control 'could challenge the president's actions at every step, slowing — and perhaps stopping — the steady expansion of executive power observed since the start of President Trump's second term, and making it harder for a future president, of either party, to trinc in Trump's footsteps.' Neither the end of the country nor a walk in the park: a brake.

## The doubt about the vote count Trump sowed again

Trump also cast doubt on the integrity of the elections. The courts have rejected several of his attempts to block recounts, as peine in **Alaska**, where it was argued that Republican candidate **Dan Sullivan** and independent **Daniel J. Sullivan** have nearly identical names and voters could be confused. Asked whether he expected an honest election, he replied with a 'No.' He added that the two candidates 'even have the same face' and speculated that the Democrats 'must have found a lookalike.' There is no evidence to support that suspicion.

That kind of claim has a measurable economic cost in other contexts: uncertainty about the validity of a result raises the cost of debt and punishes markets that depend on institutional stability. In the United States, the dispute over the 2020 count ended in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, an episode that cost lives and damaged the country's image before international investors. The comparison is not gratuitous: the candidate who today promises to veto everything the opposition passes is the same one who then disputed the result.

What is at stake on November 3 is not an apocalyptic prediction. It is the control of two chambers, the power to confirm judges, the key to public spending and the ability to investigate the executive. With the House of Representatives in Democratic hands, legislation stalls and governing happens by decree and by veto. With the Senate too, the blockage extends to appointments. And with the Presidency in 2028, the scenario Trump describes as the end is, in reality, the scenario any democracy contemplates every four years: a change of power. That the country would be 'finished' by that is a political hypothesis, not an economic fact. The markets, for now, are pricing in uncertainty, not the end of the world.