Trump ended the year with signs of decline, which is a bad sign for the 2026 parliamentary elections

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— Energy and gasoline prices are cheaper, and when those things go down, everything goes down. This word, “access,” this is nothing more than a coup by the Democratic Party — summed up Trump.

It was not a coup, according to the numbers. Republican predecessor Joe Biden left office on January 20 of this year with a gallon of gasoline at an average price of US$3.05 (just over R$16). Yesterday, using the same benchmark, from the American Automobile Association, the price was $3.06. The government’s own forecast for inflation this year in the US ranges from 3% to 3.5%, depending on monthly results delayed due to the federal government shutdown, between 10/1 and 11/12. In any case, above 2.9% last year. In other words, rents, supermarkets and health plans rose in price, voters reported. At the same pace, or slightly higher, which prompted the Americans, in November of last year, to decide that they wanted to see a second season for Trump in the White House.

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The then-Republican repeated, in his campaign rallies, that deciding the vote between him and then-Vice President, Kamala Harris, of the Democratic Party, was a matter of memory: “Put your hand in your pocket and see if you have more money now than when you left government. And vote for whoever left you with the most money.” But the tariffs, which made coffee and orange juice imported from Brazil, among other products, more expensive for Americans, plus the desert of measures to address the famine, gave the opposition “affordability” on a silver platter.

This was the main theme of the nominations that made the Trump administration bleed at the polls in 2025. Every time Americans voted this year, Democrats increased their votes, compared to last year, by double digits. The movement from right to left recorded victories, including victories for the mayor of New York and the governments of New Jersey and Virginia, as well as defeats for the opposition, including Tuesday, in the state of Tennessee, in the struggle for a representative seat in the conservative stronghold.

There, the 22 percentage point lead Republicans had last year fell to 9 points, even with a more experienced candidate, Trump’s involvement in the campaign and $7 billion invested in advertising and mobilization in the past three weeks. With the aggravating factor, on the other side was a young left-wing populist, with a message completely opposite to the majority culture of the southern state, famous for its country music and bourbon.

The unexpected intensification of the dispute has led to bakery bills doubling under Trumpism. One of them states that if the rate of vote migration recorded this year continues until November next year, government leaders will lose 100 seats in the House to Democrats in the midterm elections. It will determine who leads Congress and, in practical terms, the continued rightward shift of American democracy. Despite its lack of precision, and 11 months into the conflict, the desperate calculations show how much political capital has been lost in just under a year of Trump 2.0.

By falling into the trap of claiming that Americans do not see life as it is, Trump has turned on the yellow light in his party once and for all. The statement sent attentive US political chess watchers to a weakened Biden, who contrasted the undeniably positive macroeconomic data from the latter half of his administration with verification, by voters, of the harmful effects of high inflation caused by, among other reasons, the effects of the pandemic. Surveys at the time demonstrated that citizens viewed the Democrat as someone detached from the difficulties of real life. The feeling of the ruling wing is now that of a movie repeat.

This topic will be increasingly explored by Democrats. MSNBC journalist Rachel Maddow, one of Trump’s most vocal opponents in the media, put her finger on the wound when on Tuesday she was interviewed by another prominent GOP critic, host Stephen Colbert: “You can’t tell the supermarket cashier that the most expensive shopping bill won’t get paid because Trump said inflation is a hoax by the Democrats. And when life proves that the reality that politicians see is false, then they are the ones who tend to suffer.” A harsh blow, as was the case with Biden.”

Comparisons with the physical, cognitive and political decline of his predecessor, and the first internal rifts, with Republican members of Congress clashing, unprecedentedly, with the president, on topics ranging from the opening of the files on the Jeffrey Epstein case to the possible war crime committed in the subsequent bombings of a ship, with wounded, in the Caribbean Sea, took Trump seriously. He criticized a New York Times report detailing his ongoing recent lapses, including the moment before the Cabinet meeting in which he allegedly fell asleep in the middle of an audience in the Oval Office.

He stated in his own style that the journalist who signed the text was an “ugly woman.” But this impudence, which once again combined disdain for the professional press with misogyny, was widely interpreted as the reaction of an embattled person, whom the Americans equally accuse of not having enough strength to bring about the promised end to the war in Ukraine and to condemn the repeated deaths in the Gaza Strip, even after the fragile ceasefire reached by their team. A poll conducted by CBS News in cooperation with YouGov shows that only 30% of Americans approve of the use of US military force against Venezuela.