Republicans will be left holding the bill for Trump’s policies in the midterms | Sidney Blumenthal

The abject obedience of GOP members for the president has not augured well in the 4 November elections

The elections of 4 November were the end of a grandiose illusion. After his 2024 victory Donald Trump claimed he had an unprecedented and powerful mandate", that his mandate" was massive", and that his Maga movement" was irresistible, the wave of the future. It lasted 10 months, in which he had betrayed his chief promise to lower inflation, turned the public against him on every issue and Republicans at last faced a battering by voters.

Trump's image of omnipotence has rested upon a pyramid of dread. His ability to maintain the servility of the Republican Congress, whose members are intimidated by the danger that if they defy him he would support primary opponents to run against them, has been the political foundation for all the other forms of fear he incites throughout American institutions. Trump could not have leveraged himself as dictator on day one" without congressional abdication. The Republicans immediately fell into lockstep. But within two weeks of the 4 November elections, only one Republican in the House voted against the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files which Trump had called a hoax" before he felt compelled to bend in the cyclone to sign the bill - and yet still suppresses the files.

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to the president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist