The focus of attention in American politics for the next weeks will naturally be on whether the Republican party can keep control of the Senate or the House. But in one way the election is probably already over: MAGA has lost its magic. What effects this will have on policies that investors care about is a different question.
Donald Trump began using the slogan Make America Great Again at the end of 2011, in the context of rumors that he would run against Barack Obama in the 2012 election. After Obama defeated Mitt Romney, the phrase quickly became central to the Trump political brand. He applied to the Patent and Trademark Office within a week requesting an exclusive right to use the slogan for political purposes. MAGA was born.
Although Ronald Reagan (and even Bill Clinton) had used the phrase, it became inseparable from Trump’s political ambitions, all the more so as the acronym derived from it also became a powerful brand. By the time of Trump’s first successful presidential campaign in 2016 the slogan had proved its value. It focused attention intensely on him rather than on the Republican party that had nominated Mitt Romney — not at all a MAGA figure — just four years before, and John McCain four years before that.
Over the course of one and a half Trump presidencies it became clear that MAGA and the president were like two phases of a single phenomenon. Whatever MAGA might actually mean was clearly up to the president to decide, including to the point of changing his mind. MAGA without Trump was hard to imagine. So was MAGA without executive power. The extraordinary way in which the White House clawed powers from Congress after the 2025 inauguration was about personalizing power in President Trump, whose control over his own branch of government has been very strong in his second term. Budget Director Russell Vought and others certainly do have arguments for strengthening the presidency generically, but their success in strengthening Trump specifically was their real achievement and it depended on having an executive who wanted as much power as he could get. Whether future presidents will want the level and forms of executive power that Trump has acquired is not an easy question to answer.
Whatever the answer to that might be, for now the key fact is that MAGA and Trump have become inseparable. This is the key fact because the president’s favorability rating is extremely low — even as low as 31%. Republican candidates have been quietly distancing themselves from the president for many weeks, and the president’s campaigning stops have often been far from the battleground races.
For both the Republican and Democratic parties the landscape after MAGA is unmapped. SIG’s view, advanced with all due caution, is that Congress will gradually reclaim some of its powers. If nothing else Republican legislators will not want a prospective Democratic president to have the overpowering dominance over Congress that Trump has built for himself and deployed against the Democrats (and disloyal Republicans).
But where will this take policy? In terms of the reach of executive power, which has dramatically affected policy areas like tariffs, foreign policy and Federal Reserve independence, the likely result will be a gradual shift of power back toward Congress and agencies. What is left of the old “permanent government” will slowly revive. But this is not going to lead to bold policy initiatives. Much of the ground that MAGA and Trump have cleared will remain cleared. The US political system was weak enough that it had few defenses against White House initiatives, and if Trump is now weaker himself the broader system has not rebuilt its defenses, much less shown a coherent will for taking new initiatives.
Electorally, at least for the Senate, the battleground races are in mostly Republican states. The results will be determined by independents and Republicans who are no longer willing to stand by Trump. This is the same slice of the population in these states that put Trump and MAGA in office in 2024. So the policy effects will probably not be that great in 2027, because in policy terms that swing vote is as center-right as it was two years ago.
The US after MAGA will then not look as different as might be assumed, at least not at first, even if the president and his family become the targets of investigations. The part of the population that put them in power will be the one that takes them out, and their own policy preferences are not likely to change.