2026 will be a defining year for President Donald Trump’s political standing and for the ultimate substance and legacy of his second term.
The new year will also unfold as a story of resistance to Trump.
Democrats hope to brake his imperial presidency by winning at least one chamber of Congress in November’s midterm elections. The coming months will also test how far the Constitution and centers of power like the courts, business, the media and cultural institutions can bear his strongman’s zeal.
From his first hours back in the White House last year, Trump administered unprecedented shock treatment to US and international systems.
He destroyed agencies such as the US Agency for International Development; fired thousands of federal workers; set government prosecutors on his enemies; and mocked justice with pardons for January 6 rioters and supplicants. He demolished the White House’s East Wing just because he could.
Trump sent masked agents into US cities to grab undocumented migrants (sometimes in error) and transported some to a dictator’s prison in El Salvador. He ordered the National Guard into cities and cut funding for killer diseases like cancer to push Ivy League universities to toe his ideological line. His Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is looking to mess with childhood vaccine schedules, even as the US has seen its highest rate of measles cases in 30 years.
Yet for Trump supporters, this crescendo of disruption represents a winning streak that is shaking up the country. Trump also brandishes new tax cuts as a huge victory, although some analysts argue that Americans will pay more in costs raised by tariffs than they get back from the IRS. And despite White House claims to be lifting up workers, the tax cuts mostly benefit the wealthiest Americans. But Trump was also as good as his word to shut down migrant crossings on the southern border, a key concern of voters in 2024.
Abroad, Trump upended the global trading system with a tariff war. He snubbed allies, lionized tyrants and demanded Canada become the 51st state. He is hankering after Greenland while the US Navy’s gunboat diplomacy off Venezuela also highlights his bid for Western Hemisphere dominance.
There’s no sign normalcy will return in 2026. Last month, in Pennsylvania, Trump promised the storm is far from blowing itself out. “We have three years and two months to go. And you know what that is in Trump time? Three years and two months is called eternity.”
Whether Trump enshrines many of his wins of his torrid first year back in office into American life more permanently will depend on major events in 2026.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are constitutional after justices seemed skeptical during a November hearing. A defeat would throw his trade policy into chaos and could curtail his use of emergency powers in a way that could define the presidency itself.
Trump has also asked the high court to wipe out birthright citizenship — another huge constitutional leap — to reinforce his deportation drive. The case could create doubts over the status of potentially millions of people who were born Americans.
The courts will again be the primary domestic constraint on Trump for most of 2026. The website Just Security is currently tracking 552 cases, of which 153 resulted in permanent or temporary blocks on government action. Another 28 are held up pending appeal. The administration has recorded wins in 113 cases, with 214 awaiting court rulings.
The hallmark of Trump’s second term is the fast and vast use of executive authority power to outrace resistance and to create a sense of his inevitable and overwhelming power.
But he may not have everything his way in 2026.
As the year turned, there were signs that, for all his reality-defying spectacle, the trends that often turn presidencies that begin in a blitz of action into crumbling monuments to arrogance and overreach are setting in.
Trump’s approval rating has plunged to the lowest levels of his second term and is currently just 38% in the CNN Poll of Polls average. Republican lawmakers are rushing to retire, fearing a Democratic rout in the midterms. The public has concluded Trump has flouted his campaign promises to lower prices. And 10 years in, fractures are tearing at Trump’s far-right movement, including over whether an Adolf Hitler enthusiast has a place in it. MAGA dissidents like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene are blasting Trump’s extensive global power plays as a betrayal of “America First.”
Trump might be unmatched as an outside crusader against the “deep state.” But he now represents an increasingly ragged status quo. This year, he’ll need to accomplish a mission at which he failed in his first term — rebuilding his political capital in office. The next year may decide whether a president who has defied every other norm in his office can plug the leaks of power that turn second-term presidents into lame ducks.
People now seem less scared of Trump after a year in which craven tech oligarchs genuflected and top law firms caved to his pressure. An unprecedented Republican revolt led Congress to demand the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, reigniting a damaging intrigue about Trump’s past friendship with the accused sex trafficker. Local GOP lawmakers in Indiana thwarted Trump’s bid to fiddle their state’s congressional map to boost GOP midterm hopes. Voters used their first big chance to judge his presidency by choosing Democratic governors in New Jersey and Virginia. And Trump was forced into a climbdown on one major issue after a Supreme Court rebuke, announcing on New Year’s Eve that he’d withdraw National Guard troops from Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago.
A Democratic triumph in the midterm elections would inflict a devastating regime of investigations on Trump in the last years of his term. But he’s hardly helping beleaguered Republicans on Capitol Hill. His lack of interest is depriving them of new laws to run on. He’d rather rule by decree than legislate after passing his One Big Beautiful Bill Act. “We don’t need anything more from Congress,” the president said in Tokyo in October.
But Trump may already be courting a New Year political disaster. The expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies landed millions of voters with massive price hikes for insurance plans. And his promised better health care at cheaper rates is as much a mirage now as in his first term. And Trump sends his GOP allies deeper into the mire every time he calls the affordability crisis a hoax.
Trump’s political fate will be tied to the economy in 2026. Any spikes in inflation or accelerating job losses could deal the GOP an impossible hand in the midterms. The president’s growing obsession, meanwhile, with vanity projects like his new White House ballroom and a growing habit of slapping his name on everything upon which his eye alights is reinforcing caricatures of an unstable sun king in a gilded palace. So did an unhinged end-of-year prime time address in which he ranted at voters who don’t recognize his “A +++++” economic golden age.
Trump turns 80 in June, so his health will be closely watched, especially since he’s several times appeared to doze in White House events; bruises appeared on the back of his hands; and he struggled to explain why he received an MRI. The president told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Thursday that he’d had a CT scan and not an MRI as he’d previously stated. Trump’s doctor told the Journal that the scan was done to rule out any cardiovascular issue and revealed no abnormalities. Trump and his aides say he’s in excellent physical condition.
Trump, one of the most significant political figures of the modern age, has repeatedly defied predictions of his eclipse. It’s hard to imagine who else could have pulled off the world’s greatest political comeback in 2024, beset by legal baggage that threatened to send him to jail. The president will hope that a late-year surge in GDP growth and an easing of inflation is a harbinger rather than the statistical noise that some analysts attributed to the government shutdown. Prolonged growth and job creation could blunt the affordability crisis and lift Republicans politically. If Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s predictions that tax cuts and deregulation unleash a boom come true, Trump will defy his detractors. And even a Supreme Court knock back on tariffs could be a silver lining if he opts to roll back duties and lower prices revive moribund consumer confidence.
Trump always seeks a foil. And he’s been lucky in his enemies. He may be unpopular, but polls show the public also despairs over Democrats, who often struggle to speak to regular Americans. Republican midterm campaigns will remind voters of unchecked migrant flows and 40-year-high inflation of the Biden administration. Still, the emerging 2028 presidential race could sharpen Democratic messages and show change-hungry voters some younger leaders with new ideas.
A permanent swirl of chaos, vengeance and a scent of corruption surrounds a president who didn’t blink when Qatar gifted him a private jumbo jet and who expects endless tributes and awards from foreign leaders.
But some Trump supporters love that he insults the conventions of his office and offends liberals, media commentators and decorum. Some see the mayhem, threats, social media rage and vulgarity as proof Trump is succeeding. Not everyone judges him by conventional metrics like polls, economic growth and national unity. He’s as much a dominant cultural force as a political one.
A successful year abroad could add genuine weight to his legacy.
He’ll need luck and skill to pull off his big foreign policy bets. But if Trump can move to the second phase of his Gaza peace plan, he would cement the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that was a triumph in 2025. Should he defy his friend President Vladimir Putin’s bloody intransigence and end the war in Ukraine, he might even deserve the Nobel Peace Prize he covets.
But his growing showdown with Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and apparently illegal US strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific could undermine his candidacy. So could his threats of new US attacks on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Trump’s handling of the biggest foreign policy challenge — the confrontation with new superpower China — will be critical in 2026. Trump plans to visit Beijing in April for another summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping after his trade war backfired by revealing Beijing’s leverage over rare earth minerals that power 21st-century life.
Americans who oppose Trump fear fresh erosions of democratic accountability in 2026. But the 250th anniversary of independence from a tyrant king will open a fresh debate on a constitutional system meant to thwart monarchical power.
Trump’s name can be stripped from public buildings, and his golden trinkets can be swept from the White House within an hour of the next president’s inauguration. The new year, however, will help define how far he is able to go in imposing irrevocable, transformational change on the nation and the world.
