Why the British Right should be cheering Trump’s midterm defeat

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Ron DeSantis chose his moment with care. The night before the US midterms, the outgoing Governor of Florida appeared on a sports podcast. On election eve, DeSantis admitted that the Iran war had been ‘a big, big drag’ on Republicans, that the party had been ‘gaslighting’ voters by blaming Joe Biden for the price of petrol and that making Kristi Noem Secretary of Homeland Security had been ‘a mistake’. It wasn’t quite Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin, but it may well prove to be just as well-timed a play for political power.

Within a day, the results bore him out: the Republicans were routed, as the Democrats took the House and the Senate, flipping Texas for the first time in decades, and even electing a radical leftist like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

Beyond the personalities, what effect will a Democratic Congress have on the economy? The incoming Speaker Hakeem Jeffries has a list for his ‘first 100 hours’: reverse the Medicaid cuts, restore the Obamacare subsidies, take back Congress’s authority over tariffs and vote to end the Iran war.

The spending is already truly eye-watering. Just as the Tories had spent too much in Britain, only for Labour to say, ‘hold my beer’, Democrat spending plans will be even more disastrous than Donald Trump’s. The United States already borrowed $2 trillion in the fiscal year that ended in September, with the interest bill alone heading past $1 trillion for the first time.

Then there are Trump’s big, beautiful tariffs. The Supreme Court struck down the President’s emergency tariffs in February, and the administration simply rebuilt them under older trade statutes that give the president the power to impose tariffs without Congressional approval. Congress can vote to take that power back. Trump can veto the vote. No change there, yet.

Then there is Iran. Trump himself conceded on election night that Iran was ‘a part of it’, which is the closest the Donald comes to an admission of any kind. It is still too soon to tell what will actually happen there. But given the Democrats spent the Biden term pushing a ‘Green New Deal’ that made energy prices higher and more unstable, it seems unlikely they will want to push for cheaper ‘gas’ at the pumps, as our transatlantic cousins call it.

This brings me back to DeSantis. The Republican Party has two years to decide who will be their next presidential candidate, and DeSantis’s exquisitely timed intervention puts him in pole position. He is untainted by the MAGA circus, clean from Iran or tariffs, and the machine he built in Florida held the line and got a clean sweep for the GOP across the State.

He may not have mentioned tariffs, but he has echoed Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ recently. But this time it was a Liberation Day from borrowing and spending. By criticising congressional stock trading, and highlighting how he never even took a congressional pension, he also puts clear blue water between himself and the Trump family’s dodgy deals.

So, while this all looks like a bad few years for the American Right, odds on DeSantis becoming the next president should now skyrocket. Imagine if the next administration pledged to stop taxing its own consumers and start cutting the deficit. It would find the bond market, the Federal Reserve and every mortgage-holder in the Western world on its side. Treasury yields actually fell on Tuesday night. The market’s verdict on gridlock in Washington is that gridlock would be cheaper than Trumpism, a damning verdict on the American fiscal position.

What does this mean for Britain? It is a reminder that the cost of living remains an enormously important factor for all voters. And CapX readers will know the only way to get that down, while not bankrupting the country, is through free market policies. Robert Jenrick’s 64-point growth plan was superb, but there are lingering fears that Reform UK might flirt with nationalisations and state interference in the economy.

With Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith in the Tory hot seat, and Jenrick’s advisers coming from places like the ASI, however, the British Right has a much better chance of ‘vibing’ with a future DeSantis administration than it ever could with Trump. Let’s hope America’s Right learns its lesson. The bigger question for the British Right remains, who will be our DeSantis?

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