The Trump era is over. The world should take note

The Trump era is over. The world should take note

Submitted by David Hearst on Wed, 11/04/2026 - 21:38 If the Netanyahu camp is trembling at where the US appears to be headed, Gulf leaders should be in no less than a panic An Iranian demonstrator carries a placard depicting US President Donald Trump during a rally in Tehran, on 4 November 2026 (Atta Kenare/AFP) Off

It took nine months, but regime change has finally been achieved. 

Nine months after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad director David Barnea put the idea into US President Donald Trump’s head that regime change was possible, it has been achieved. 

The only variation on the plan that all three men worked on is that regime change has happened in Texas, Michigan, Kansas, Georgia, Florida, and in Congress - not in Tehran. 

The war on Iran is the defining mistake of Trump’s second term as president, and of Netanyahu’s final term of office - but Iran is by no means their sole nemesis. 

For the president who knew nothing about Iran, it was more than a bet that went sour. The fact that it was all Netanyahu’s idea makes failure even worse for the leader of an “America First” movement. Iran is a quintessentially “foreign war” that proved the principle on which Trump himself campaigned. 

Failure in Iran was different for the prime minister who had the Islamic Republic in his sights for most of his adult life.

It was a classic example of military and intelligence overreach. Netanyahu and Mossad thought they could do to a whole country what they thought they had done to two movements: Hamas and Hezbollah. They totally underestimated the power of the Islamic Republic to resist. 

But war on Iran, and the economic disaster it unleashed on both sides of the Gulf and beyond - including record prices at gas stations - are not the real cause of the earthquake that has shaken US politics. 

Common nemesis

The Democrats had to collapse first to let Trump in for a second term. 

They did this by allowing former President Joe Biden to run for a second term, and compounded that error by choosing his vice president, Kamala Harris, to run instead after he dropped out.

Had Harris won that contest in 2024, no Democrat of any stripe would now be talking about ending military aid to Israel.

Biden and Harris had overseen, supported and armed the first and bloodiest days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a policy from which they will never recover.

Sayed is the future, and Pelosi is history. That is the measure of political change that Gaza has produced

Gaza was the Democratic Party’s nemesis, just as it was the British Labour Party’s under Keir Starmer. 

It is Gaza that has turned the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) from a force no aspiring US politician would dare to confront into a toxin. It is Gaza that has now become the nemesis of the Republican Party, and the Trump clan, too.

A genocide that was being documented in real time, with images of war crimes often filmed by the perpetrators of these outrages, became the defining issue of the era. 

These images defied any words invented to cover up what was happening. The images were in total contradiction to the US line that Israel was “defending itself”. They electrified the Democratic base, as they did to the millions of progressives worldwide who took to the streets in protest.

Just consider how one of Tuesday night’s spectacular winners, US senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, started his political journey.

Sayed began as the classic Christmas tree, upon which anyone could pin anything. He was decried by Trump and by his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, as a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Trump said “he is a Muslim Brotherhood guy, 100 percent” - and most of the US media reported that false claim faithfully. 

Policy referendum 

Just last week, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi appeared on a podcast, whose host Donny Deutsch claimed Sayed had made “concerning” comments about the existence of a Jewish state: “That’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

Pelosi replied: “No, it’s more than concerning. It’s wrong. It’s wrong, and it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States. 

“This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress,” she added threateningly.

Americans voted against war. The Democrats must not mistake that for a mandate Read More »

Aipac spent $30m trying to defeat Sayed in the primaries and another $9m supporting the pro-Israel candidate, Rogers, in the midterms. Representative Haley Stevens, defeated by Sayed in the primaries, switched sides spectacularly days before the election, jumping to the Republican camp. 

That alone boosted Sayed’s chances in a tight race, because Stevens was condemned by the very people who had been warned off endorsing Sayed at the start of his campaign.

Well, “this new person” has not only become a reflection of the new Congress. His election in Michigan became the biggest referendum on US policy on Israel that has ever been seen. 

Sayed is the future, and Pelosi is history. That is the measure of political change that Gaza has produced.

The Jerusalem Post was correct to conclude that the election in Michigan alone had grave implications for US support for Israel as a whole.

“One of the clearest takeaways from the election campaign is the political price the war with Iran has exacted on the Republican Party,” its analysis said, referring to the war Israel pushed the US into on 28 February.

“The expansion of the camp critical of Israel, and its growing access to positions of influence, represents a shift that Israel cannot afford to ignore,” it added.

Democratic limits

Of course, we are far from a post-Zionist Democratic Party, still less a Congress that will vote to cut military aid to Israel.

For now, the limits of policy that can be expected from the new crew in Congress have been sketched out by Ro Khanna, the US congressman whose van was surrounded by armed settlers during his last visit to the occupied West Bank.

Khanna has pushed for official US recognition of a Palestinian state, opposed unconditional military aid, and advocated a permanent ceasefire and non-violent resistance - but for all that, he backs Zionism and Israel’s “right to exist”.

“I believe that Zionism is self-determination of the Jewish people, and the right for Israel to exist. And I support that. What I don’t believe is if it means Greater Israel,” Khanna said last year, adding that he believes there must be a “two-state solution”.

In other words, neither Khanna nor anyone else in the “new” Democratic Party is going to do anything about ending apartheid, let alone the occupation. 

In giving credence to the idea that the two-state solution is still possible, Khanna’s position flies in the face of what happened to him during his visit, as well as the unanimous opinion of all Jewish Israeli parties - both pro- and anti-Netanyahu - in last week’s election, all of whom have doomed a Palestinian state.

But here, we should distinguish between the politicians and the movement that propelled them to power. Who would have thought three years ago that US public opinion would have travelled this far? This is a long conflict, and its solution will be long, too. 

The ball is still rolling, and it will not stop.

This global movement supporting Palestinian self-determination will not be assuaged if all that happens is a return to the status quo that reigned on 6 October 2023; if, say, more food and supplies get into Gaza, but the siege itself is maintained, or if settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank calm down, but the settlements themselves remain.

Shaky ground

Across its history, Israel has relied as much on the liberal Zionist support of the centre-left as it has on the neoliberal right. Both those terrains are now shaky ground.

For US Republicans, the lessons of this defeat are even starker. The massive Democratic congressional victory on Tuesday was triggered by soaring living costs, tariffs, and huge instability in US-driven wars.

But behind much of this instability was Trump’s relationship with his two closest allies: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Netanyahu.

However much Trump now tries to claim his name was not on the ballot, the record shows he campaigned in 30 rallies for losers. That is not a good look for a populist

The MAGA faithful who have parted company with Trump, like talk show host Tucker Carlson - and even those who have not declared their hand, like Carlson’s friend, Vice President JD Vance - will feel empowered by this result.

Trump will continue to blag that what the US does at home and abroad is what he, the president, and he alone decides to do. The only voice that matters to him is the one in his head. 

He will cast his veto. He will encourage another government shutdown. 

But history has shown there are forces that Trump fears. He fears the bond market and the opinion of Wall Street. He fears the battle for succession.

The time is long past when he could claim to be a victim of the Democratic establishment. He is now one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s patriarchs whose autumn might have already come.

However much Trump now tries to claim his name was not on the ballot, the record shows he campaigned in 30 rallies for losers. That is not a good look for a populist.

Tighter scrutiny

Beyond Washington, the midterms will clearly be seen as a referendum on Trump’s second term as president, whether or not Trump limps on as a lame duck.

Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said he expected Washington to continue the war, seeking Tehran’s “unconditional surrender”. 

Perhaps, but a resumption of air strikes would be politically even more suicidal after such a result than it was before. Vance called the result a direct consequence of the Iran war.

Trump is a falling object. As such, everyone but his closest coterie will be less than eager to pick up the phone next time it rings.

'Freed up or congressionally constrained': Is Trump more or less likely to resume war on Iran? Read More »

The Trump clan will now come under ever-tighter financial scrutiny from the new Congress. Representative Robert Garcia, who is set to become chair of the House Oversight Committee, was not joking when he warned Trump to “lawyer up”.

Trump clan members have gorged themselves at the trough of every crisis, every impending tariff. In any other environment, it would be called insider trading. In Trump’s White House, it was business as usual.

All the dealings of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, will come under ferocious scrutiny.

Of particular interest to the House Oversight Committee will be the Trump family’s lucrative business relationships with foreign investors and government-linked figures, particularly in the United Arab Emirates.

In January 2025, four days before Trump’s inauguration, UAE-backed investors paid $500m for a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company co-founded by Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump.

The investment was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and brother of the country’s president.

The Wall Street Journal reported that $187m of the initial payment went to companies linked to the Trump family, while $31m went to companies associated with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy and a co-founder of the venture.

Clear warning

Following the money, investigators could move seamlessly to all of the Gulf states’ bribes to Trump and his family. 

That probe should include the Board of Peace, which should now, by rights, be scrapped and replaced by a UN international structure.

If the Netanyahu camp in Israel is trembling at where the US appears to be headed, Gulf leaders should be in no less than a panic. 

Iran’s drones and missiles punctured the bubble of security that gave small but intensely wealthy states the illusion that they were protected from the chaos around them.

The midterm results will have a similar effect. They have surely reinforced the message that the Gulf states have been throwing their money away by investing in Trump. 

The internationally powered movement for Palestine that propelled these changes in the US is not going to go away. If anything, it will gather in intensity

True, we do not know what Trump would have done, had they refused to invest in him. Would he have pulled the plug on the vulnerable Turkish economy if President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had not invested so much political capital in Trump? We may never know.

But that time is past. 

For their own security, Middle Eastern powers must turn to regional alliances and mutual defence guarantees as their template for the future.

UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman both built their country’s strategies around Trump. That surely is the worst investment decision either could have made. 

Everyone kowtowed to Trump. Before the main attack on Iran, the Doha Forum in Qatar last year turned itself into a Trump edition. His sons were the stars of the show, and the halls were filled with American delegates. It showed crudely in which direction Qatar was turning.

Europe was no different. Will it now stand up to Trump and turn itself into a real competitor to US policy, especially over Ukraine?

And finally, the midterms contain a very clear warning to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government. 

The internationally powered movement for Palestine that propelled these changes in the US is not going to go away. If anything, it will gather in intensity. 

If Burnham is perceived to be delivering empty promises to Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general, as former US president Barack Obama did in his Cairo speech, Burnham will suffer the same fate as Starmer.

Talking the talk on Israel’s occupation will not be enough. Burnham will have to walk the walk, too. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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