Damian Paletta

Excellent question.

We're less than 10 months away from the midterm elections.

And these are really consequential elections that will determine who controls Congress in the final two years of Trump's presidency.

Now, President Trump is a lame duck president.

He's not going to run for reelection.

So his ambitions and goals might not completely overlap with the goals of the Republican Party or even the goals of voters.

For voters, affordability and the economy, those are huge issues, and those are always big issues.

Those are the sorts of things that can decide elections, potentially much more so than whether the United States controls Greenland.

But President Trump is in legacy mode.

He's trying to think of the sorts of things that'll outlive him, the sorts of things that'll define him and his legacy going into the future.

Now, ironically, this midterm election idea is kind of forcing Trump to move faster because he knows he only has 10 or 11 more months of Republican control of Congress.

If Democrats take control of the House, it makes it much harder for him to operate unilaterally like this.

So that might make him even more adversarial, even more aggressive with the European allies.

And that could, ironically, pull him even further away from voters.

And that's exactly what we're going to be watching for today and in the days to come.

My pleasure.

Well, it was an incredibly consequential year for President Trump.

He accomplished a tremendous amount.

Whether voters supported it or didn't, no one could argue that he didn't have a huge impact, whether it was on tax cuts and tariffs he imposed and immigration changes that he was able to get through without much from Congress.

So what we'll be watching for in 2026 is whether he is going to be able to sell this to voters in the midterms.