Extract from ABC News
Analysis
The midterm election results were disastrous for Donald Trump's Republicans. (Reuters: Umit Bektas)
Anyone who thinks Donald Trump is now a lame duck president does so at their own peril.
Certainly, these midterm elections are an emphatic defeat for him. Americans who previously supported Trump have launched a comprehensive protest against the way he has run the country.
The anger and disillusionment felt by many from the president's Republican Party have been echoed in states that have long been GOP strongholds.
The Senate results were seismic. North Carolina, South Carolina both turned blue. Texas sent its first Democratic senator to Washington DC in almost 40 years. In Kansas, the Democrats win rewrote almost a century of history.
For much of his political career Trump has had a Midas touch. You don't get to be president of the United States twice if you cannot read the mood of Americans.
But these midterm results show he has lost that touch.
Nothing exemplified that better than Trump's final speech before voting began. The president stood by the reflecting pool in Washington DC and rambled about the renovations he had done on it.
At a time when millions of working-class Americans are feeling the crushing cost of petrol, which in some states has doubled, Trump declared he had beautified the nation's capital and improved the lawn at the White House.
It was a tone-deaf speech that would have said to many Americans that this is a man whose political judgement has peaked.
Trump has often laughed and mocked what he said were the failing cognitive abilities of his predecessor Joe Biden. Was this reflecting-pool speech Trump's "Joe Biden moment"?
One of the best indicators that Trump has lost his political touch is that many of the candidates who lost were hand-picked by him.
A midterm reckoning for Donald Trump.
In Texas the Republicans had a popular senator, John Cornyn. But Trump was outraged that even though Cornyn supported him frequently, he chose to vote against some of his initiatives.
And so Trump decided to target Cornyn and replace him with Ken Paxton, the state's long-time attorney-general, who was well known but weighed down by multiple scandals.
As a result, the Republicans and Elon Musk (the world's richest man, who has relocated some of his empire to Texas) pumped as much as US$350 million ($500 million) to try to save Paxton.
They made it the most expensive Senate race in US history. And they lost.
It was instructive that for all the money and power of Trump, Musk and the Republican Party, a 37-year-old Presbyterian seminarian and former school teacher James Talarico came out on top.
Money often talks in America, but the Talarico case suggests there is a limit. All the money spent trying to keep Paxton afloat was not able to be spent in other seats where the Republicans had a better chance.
Supporters of James Talarico celebrate a history-making night. (Reuters: Umit Bektas)
The Republican debacle is not to say that Trump has lost power. He still has two years in the White House.
Many Democrats are now openly expressing their claim that the result of these midterms indicates Trump has become a lame-duck president.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
He remains the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in human history. The danger of this result is that Trump will feel wounded and humiliated.
The world saw the consequences of a wounded and humiliated Trump after the 2020 election, when he claimed he had lost because of widespread fraud and cheating.
Many of his supporters decided to take the law into their own hands and storm the US Capitol in what has become an infamous stain on the country's democracy.
With this result, America could enter dangerous days.
Trump may accept defeat gracefully, although he does not often do that.
Even if he does, he can circumvent one or both houses of Congress by simply signing executive orders.
Those orders may be challenged months later in the courts, but in the meantime Trump will be able to circumvent Congress.
The real danger of a wounded and humiliated Donald Trump will be in foreign policy.
He has already intervened in Iran, ordered his military to capture Venezuela's president and and up-ended his country's foreign policy traditions by bringing it closer to Russia.
He may decide that he has nothing to lose when it comes to dealing with Iran, or another country he has often talked about intervening in, Cuba.
American democracy has spoken. The question is will Donald Trump listen?
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