There's a well-established pattern in American politics: the party that wins the presidential election almost always loses support two years later in the congressional midterm elections.
But this is the first time in half a century that the opposing party's victory has been so decisive. In last week's midterms, the Democrats secured majorities in both chambers of Congress – the Senate and the House of Representatives.
According to George Kent, a former US diplomat with more than 30 years of experience, the election result is a direct consequence of Donald Trump's policies and his attempts to "Make America Great Again", including by starting a war with Iran.
Kent has an in-depth understanding of US politics, having served under five presidents. His previous roles include special assistant to the under secretary of state for political affairs and senior anti-corruption coordinator in the State Department's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.
He also has considerable expertise on Ukraine. He first served as deputy political counsellor in Kyiv following the Orange Revolution and later as deputy chief of mission in Kyiv from 2015 to 2018, following the Revolution of Dignity, Russia's annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the war in Donbas.
Kent's most recent position was US Ambassador to Estonia under President Joe Biden. He was dismissed by Donald Trump in January 2025 and is now retired.
In this interview with Ukrainska Pravda, George Kent discusses the reasons behind the "blue tsunami", the MAGA movement, future cooperation between the newly elected Congress and the Trump administration, US-Ukraine relations, and the prospects for the upcoming negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in Abu Dhabi.
You can watch the full interview (dubbed into Ukrainian) on the Kliati Pytannia YouTube channel.
"The Republicans associated themselves with the policies of Donald Trump, which were incredibly unpopular"
When preparing for this interview, I came across a quote from Nate Cohn, a journalist at The New York Times. He says it was the largest victory in the national popular vote since at least 1976, probably since Watergate. Do you agree?
I do. When he's talking about the biggest swing vote since 1976, this is essentially how much the Democrats or a single party overperformed the other party. US politics generally, we have 50 states, we have a lot of voters. Yes, this week over 124 million Americans voted. With so many different communities, even a small difference between the two parties can lead to a very clear victory. This wasn't a small difference. This was over 13 percentage points nationally.
What we saw was the Democrats didn't just win certain swing locations that can go either Democrat or Republican. They won places that had not voted Democrat in decades, and, in the case of Kansas, not since 1932.
I understand why they changed their mind. The incumbent senator was not a strong person. He was seen as corrupt, and farmers were angry. They were losing their farms.
Trump's tariffs shut down the Chinese markets for soybean and sorghum, and then the war in Iran led to higher diesel prices, which also hit the farmers this harvest season. So last year they weren't ready, but after another year of bad policies from Trump, even the farmers in Kansas and Iowa voted against Republicans.
The Republicans had a lot of money and financial support. There was also gerrymandering. The Democrats were somewhat demoralised after losing the presidential election, but they won in the end.
What did the Democrats do right, and what did the Republicans do wrong? How did Trump's policies affect the Republican Party?
The polls showed they were more unhappy about President Trump than any president since the Second World War. So before the voting started, people knew Americans were unhappy.
What did the Democrats do right? They actually ran competitive candidates in nearly all of the possible places to have elections. And I think that's critical because these weren't national elections. People were voting for candidates representing their communities and their states.
What did the Republicans do wrong? Associated themselves with the policies of Donald Trump, which were incredibly unpopular.
And I think the quality of their candidates was not as good. The other factors are neither related to party, but to the conditions in the country.
Besides President Trump being very unpopular, the number one issue in polling was corruption. There is the impression that Donald Trump personally, and the people in his party and around his circle, are benefiting from office.
Corruption is illegal in the United States, like it is in other countries. And I think you're going to see a lot of investigations going forward.
Number two: inflation, the cost of living.
While the Republicans tried to blame it on Joe Biden, who has not been president for several years, the reality is that the inflation that Americans are paying higher prices for is the result of two things: Donald Trump's tariffs, which were bad policy and then created problems with our friends and allies, and the war of choice in Iran.
So people who expected better economics after Trump came into office were very disappointed. The war also had another impact. On the one hand it raised prices, particularly for diesel and gasoline.
But if you look at the MAGA base, the core people who are very dedicated to Trump, they actually believed him that he would put America first, stop wars and focus on domestic problems. Instead, he was busy building a ballroom, wanting to do other vanity projects, and he started a war, and many of them didn't want the US to have so much military presence in action overseas.
Some of his supporters stayed home and did not vote. So that's why I would say it was less what the parties did and more the conditions that were created by poor choices by President Trump. And then decisions by people to be angry and send a signal.
If I can add another factor: Trump was able to bring new voters to support him and the Republican Party in the last election. Three of the groups that he really shifted in the direction of the Republican Party were young people, who previously had voted primarily for Democrat candidates, Hispanics, and then also white working class.
In the last election – not this week, but two years ago – more union members voted for Donald Trump in the Republican Party than voted for the Democrat Party, which traditionally had a close association with trade unions. That 2024 Trump coalition shattered in less than two years.
The number of young people, even young white males, who voted Democrat as opposed to supporting Trump was about 65%. Hispanics, which were roughly 50-50 in the last election, were in the 70% for Democrat range.
That was primarily because of the use of our ICE, federal law enforcement, to really brutally treat people of colour and Hispanics. Whether they were deported or just beaten up, the perception was that people who had committed no crime were the victims of brutality.
For Black Americans, particularly in the South, there were efforts to take away some of the voting rights progress that had been done over the last 50 years. You saw higher African American turnout.
So, youth, Hispanics, Blacks – these were all key constituencies that Trump and the Republicans had been making some progress in and pulling them away from the Democrat Party.
But this week, every single demographic, regardless of gender, race, location, age, education, every single cohort moved towards the Democrats.
I'm thinking of Donald Trump's remark that if his name had been on the ballot, then people would probably have…
Yeah, he doesn't have a lot of self-awareness, and the reality was that his approval ratings were the lowest since Harry Truman in 1946 for a midterm election – so, depending on the poll, in the mid 30 percents – and you don't win elections with 30%.
Overall, is this a major blow to the MAGA movement?
MAGA was never a majority. If you look at the numbers in 2024, President Trump won 49.8%, which is less than 50%, on 64% turnout. So one out of every three eligible voters in the US supported Trump, and not all of those were so-called MAGA voters.
Again, the people who consider themselves MAGA is not a unified profile, but among other things, they are more isolationist. They don't want the US spending money outside the United States, and they oftentimes have faced economic difficulties in their own lives.
So the idea that the US or policies would focus only on Americans and make their lives better was what part of "Make America Great" meant to them. It wasn't what it meant to Donald Trump.
Donald Trump sold them something like one of his failed business ventures and then looked to get rich while in public office. He did not deliver on his side of the bargain. I think there never was enough people in the MAGA movement to be sustainable if you didn't have the policies.
Even if JD Vance or others are going to try to claim that base in the future, it will not be enough to win another election.
Will anything change within the MAGA wing of the Republican Party after this defeat?
Many of them were in politics before Donald Trump emerged. They embraced MAGA, tried to repaint themselves. But they have affiliated so closely with Donald Trump during his time in office that I predict it will be hard for them to claim that they weren't full supporters of a failed set of policies under Trump. And there will be space for people outside of Washington in the Republican Party to try to reframe what it should be to be Republican.
That's what we'll see from Republican candidates for president over the next two years. I think the chances of a Republican winning in 2028 for president are very, very low, because the reality is that Donald Trump will still be president for two years. It will be his policies that rule our government for two years, and his personality isn't going to change.
I doubt he learns from his mistakes. So I think he will continue to make mistakes. And it will be very difficult to run and win the presidency in 2028 as a Republican.
"Trump didn't even work with Congress when a majority was Republican"
Will Trump cooperate with the Democrats in Congress? He recently called himself "Mr Veto".
He has the right under our Constitution to veto legislation that Congress sends to him. I don't think there's any indication that he is going to cooperate in a positive, constructive manner for the next two years.
He spent the last two years breaking every law practically imaginable, even laws that were passed with Republican support. In 2022, after Russia's wider invasion, Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, passed a law banning the import of Russian oil into the United States. And then two months ago, Trump announced this deal, the diesel deal, to import Russian diesel into the US. It is illegal to do so.
That is just one of many laws that Trump takes action to break. If Trump won't even obey the law or work with Congress when a majority was Republican, why would he work with a majority that's Democrat?
So I think you're hearing Democrat voices in the last 24 hours suggesting the Democrats need to take this opportunity seriously and pass laws that matter to the US people, including ethics laws to cut down the opportunity for corruption and laws on policies that would help the average American.
If Trump wants to veto them, he can veto them. He probably will veto them. But then the Republican Party can run on a record of preventing legislation that the American people want.
I do agree with the prediction that Trump isn't going to cooperate, because he sees himself as the alpha male, the top dog, and he expects everybody to come and give him stuff like a Mafia don or a Turkish sultan.
He does not have a sophisticated or even appropriate understanding of the role of an elected president of a country of 340 million people.
Can the Democrats change US foreign policy after the election? If so, how?
Foreign policy is conducted by the executive branch – in our system we call it the administration, so the president and the people who work for him. So regardless of who was elected in Congress to represent the 50 states and who won the governorships, foreign policy is run by the administration.
Marco Rubio is still the secretary of state. If he wants to run for president, he probably has to resign sometime to focus on being a candidate. Pete Hegseth for now still is the secretary of defense.
So the role of Congress in foreign policy is focused around two areas, really. One: they pass the budget, and that includes the budget not just for the functioning of the State Department, but for any programmes overseas. And then they have oversight responsibilities, so oftentimes you'll see congressmen travelling – many of them come here to Ukraine – and that's because they need to understand what is going on so they can ask the right questions of the president, the secretary of state, and others.
But the sad reality for Ukraine is that our foreign policy is going to be the policy of the Trump administration until January of 2029, and that has implications for US-Ukrainian relations. The Trump administration has chosen not to nominate an ambassador, so our policy really is run out of Washington. And it's really run, it seems, from two people who aren't even elected as US government officials: Steve Witkoff, his [Trump's] business partner, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. So you have a real estate developer from New York and a real estate developer from New Jersey, they're not US government employees, and they're apparently in charge of Israel-Gaza, Iran, and Russia and Ukraine.
Two people – even if they're the president and the secretary of state – couldn't do all of that on their own. And yet you rarely see professional diplomats accompanying them on all of these meetings.
So it really raises the question of capacity, and very clearly there's a question of competence. Our foreign policy, national security policy, under Trump is profoundly incompetent. It doesn't mean that someone like Marco Rubio is incompetent by nature, but he's incompetent by choice.
Trump and Rubio have overseen the diminution, the destruction of the US role in the world, trust in the world, US leadership, in a way that no other president or secretary of state have done, and the reality is that they're going to be in charge for another two years.
I think the positive message coming out of the election for Ukraine is that Americans as citizens have found their voice.
The American people themselves want the US government to do more for Ukraine. I spent the last two summers cycling across the US – in 2025 from Oregon to Washington, DC, this summer from Canada to Key West.
We had conversations with hundreds of Americans, mainly in places that actually voted for Trump at least in 2024, and even MAGA supporters want the US government to do more to help Ukraine. That's what Americans want to see. Right now we have a government policy that doesn't match what the American people want.
"Trump is hostile towards Ukraine and equally inexplicably friendly towards Russia"
How would you assess US-Ukraine relations at the moment?
I spent many years working promoting good US-Ukrainian relationships. I'm a retired diplomat, a civil activist who raises funds for Ukrainian frontline units through the NAFO network.
I think at this point for the last year and a half of the Trump administration, there has to be this division between what Americans think and do and what the Trump administration does.
Americans overall are pro-Ukrainian and want Ukraine to win. It's amazing how many Ukrainian flags are flying all across America still, four and a half years later. There aren't flags in those numbers of any other country.
The challenge for Ukraine is that so much relies not on Americans individually, but on the government.
And ever since February 2025, when the US started voting in the UN with Russia against Ukraine and the terrible meeting in the Oval Office with JD Vance and President Trump with President Zelenskyy, it's very clear that President Trump is hostile towards Ukraine and equally inexplicably friendly towards Russia.
This is not a position that is supported by the American people – a recent poll showed that even with MAGA Republicans, only 5-6% of them support good relations with Russia. A majority support good relations with Ukraine.
And yet this is the position that the Trump administration, voting in the UN and in diplomacy, seem to continually take. Waiving the Graham-Blumenthal bill on sanctions and tariffs, so not imposing them on Russia; signing and announcing the diesel deal; inviting Russians to the G20 meetings; the cutting down of Starshield; not providing weapons at the same level as was done in the Biden administration; cutting off most economic and other assistance. It's just decision after decision after decision.
And after almost two years, it's hard to interpret that as anything more than a pro-Russian position. That's not in US interests, which then leads to the question: whose interests is it in?
I think with Trump, you always have to say "Follow the money." They have developed, over the last two terms, close relations with Gulf countries, and it's pretty clear that the Witkoff family, which runs the crypto business that is making money for the Witkoffs, Kushners and Trumps, got their initial money from Gulf countries.
And now they're pursuing economic deals with Russia. Vladimir Putin is an ex-KGB case officer. He understands how to entice people. So all these possible deals keep on getting mentioned: Lukoil assets, Nord Stream 2, developments in the Russian Arctic, possible Russian involvement, investment in US Alaskan gas fields.
The people who benefit from that almost certainly are family members or close associates of the Trump team. None of that is in US interests. So unfortunately I think that is what's driving US diplomacy within negotiations with the Russians and Ukrainians.
But on the other side, Ukraine has to continue to try to engage the US that is, and try, to the best extent possible, to show the Trump team why good US-Ukrainian relations are in their interests. So that is a tall diplomatic task that is ahead and has been the challenge for President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian officials talking to American officials.
Do you believe in this new round of negotiations?
Ukraine's showing its willingness to be responsive to proposals, coming up with proposals on its own, and it's the Russians who just say "nyet, nyet, nyet" and want to grab more and more territory. So that's, I think, the challenge of representing Ukraine diplomatically in these negotiations. They're a "pokazukha" ["window-dressing" in Russian – ed.].
They're not designed to achieve peace – they're designed to give the outside world the appearance of a process. Meanwhile, the Russian military machine relentlessly tries to take more territory and terror-bomb Ukrainian citizens in what very clearly are war crimes.
Their goal is the destruction of the Ukrainian state, and any Ukrainian official has to defend the integrity of the state.
And that's why my prediction is there will be lots of talks, but no peace agreement.
Fedir Popadiuk, Ukrainska Pravda
Edited by Teresa Pearce