Election nights are party time in Washington. The bars and restaurants fill up and the city rocks. For diplomats, it’s an opportunity – but it’s also a long night, as you trek across the party scene in search of insight and illumination. Invariably, it has its moments. I recall being at the Washington Post party on the night of the presidential election on 8 November 2016. Washington is an overwhelmingly Democrat city and the atmosphere was raucously optimistic, reflecting Hillary Clinton’s small but consistent lead in the polls. As the first results came in a shocked hush fell across the room. People gathered in small, murmuring groups. Within 30 minutes, half the guests had left.
In contrast, I recall speaking to Nancy Pelosi, the queen of the Democrats, at a watch party on 6 November 2018, for the midterms during Trump’s first presidency. I asked her what I should put in my overnight report to London, given that most results wouldn’t be in. She said, with striking confidence, that I should predict that the Democrats would retake the House of Representatives. She was right: the Democrats flipped 41 Republican seats. It gave Pelosi a second term as speaker of the House and gave the world the enjoyable theatre of her sitting directly behind Trump at his State of the Union speeches, rolling her eyes at the bombast.
So what judgments will the current generation of British diplomats have made about the extraordinary political earthquake of Tuesday night, and its implications for British interests and the handling of our most important bilateral relationship for the next two years?
The starting point has to be the scale of this victory. The blue tsunami has swept the Democrats into ownership of the House, the Senate and the majority of governors’ mansions across the country. To a real estate guy such as Donald Trump, imagine how galling it must be to lose so much property in one night: the Monopoly board almost swept clean. The Democrats ended their lockout from rural states by taking the cornfields of Iowa. After a succession of “close, but no cigar” elections, they finally took a Senate seat in Texas. And they even won in Kansas, which hadn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. In short, it is beyond the Democrats’ wildest dreams and the most comprehensive rejection conceivable of the president’s policies and actions of the last two years.
Now we are left to wonder how this bloodbath will affect Trump’s behaviour over the remaining 26 months and 14 days of his presidency. The Washington insider gossip after his 2018 defeat was that Trump had taken it badly; he felt humiliated and was casting around for people to blame. Well, this is a much worse beating. So expect the Trump woodchipper to be fired up. Pete Hegseth first in the hopper? Or the chief of staff, Susie Wiles?
But never mind Trump’s hurt feelings: what about the stuff that matters to us? As JD Vance has pointed out – at some risk to his personal relationship with the president – the conflict with Iran and its impact on global energy prices was a big part of this election disaster.
The problem for Trump is that he hasn’t got an obvious exit ramp. Negotiations are taking place with Iran via intermediaries. US demands seem to change every day, but they centre on ending the Iranian nuclear programme and the destruction of what Trump calls the “nuclear dust” – Iran’s stock of 440kg of highly enriched uranium. But the Iranians are demanding a huge amount in return – security guarantees, the end of the US naval blockade, an end to sanctions, the release of frozen Iranian assets, a reduction of US forces in the region and even, by some accounts, the strategic prize of sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz. And they think they can outlast the Americans: after all, they live there while the Americans are just visiting.
So perhaps there will be a deal with the midterms out of the way. But equally, given how far apart the parties are, this might drag on, compounding the economic damage for all of us. And the bombing might restart: the Israelis clearly want this, and Trump seems to be keeping his options open, moving more military hardware to the region. No one knows which way he will jump – least of all perhaps Trump himself.
As for Ukraine, for whatever reason (and the conspiracy theories abound), Trump has always appeared to blame Volodymyr Zelenskyy rather than Vladimir Putin for the war. I think he will continue to advocate a peace settlement involving Ukraine giving up all of the Donbas (including the territory Putin has failed to capture) and promising never to join Nato or the EU. Zelenskyy will refuse to sign up to this. So, absent some surprise Putin concessions – of which there have been none to date – this too could drag on and on.
Then we have the continuing possibility of new tariffs. Trump has argued for tariffs for more than 40 years. They will remain his instrument of choice for coercion or punishment. He might use them against Europe if we displease him in any way – for example, by refusing to follow US policy on China, by regulating AI, or by raising new taxes on US tech companies.
So there is no shortage of risks. And there may be more in the pipeline. The loss of Congress will mean Trump is heavily constrained on domestic policy: expect endless fights, vetoes and deadlocks. But he will still have a relatively free hand on foreign policy. And he will want to do things: a deal with Putin, conceivably sacrificing Ukraine, to get US hands on Russia’s energy resources and rare earths; a big trade deal with China; perhaps regime change in Cuba. European and British interests will not figure in his calculations, any more than they did in the conflict with Iran.
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The UK embassy will be advising how best to handle this badly wounded president; how to influence his moves and steer him away from decisions that impact on the wellbeing of the UK. My advice would be to carry on pretty much as before, with one important qualification. We are seeing the beginning of the end of the Trump era. Power is already draining away from him: the vultures are circling. But this is not a man who will settle for just raging at the dying of the light; he will light bonfires to ward it off.
So we have to be careful not to appear to be distancing ourselves or moving on from Trump. His antennae are finely tuned to pick up signals of disrespect. This doesn’t mean turning up the dial on sucking up. But it does mean talking to him intensively, arguably even more so than at present, about the issues that matter to us – Iran, Ukraine, the future of Nato, the global economy. And we should resist the temptation to be seen to be cultivating possible successors from either side of the US political spectrum. Trump needs to believe that we recognise what is actually the case: that he is the president and will call the shots until 20 January 2029.
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Kim Darroch was British ambassador to the US from 2016 to 2019, and is author of Collateral Damage: Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump
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