For instance, a January poll from The Economist and the analytics firm YouGov found that 57% of US citizens disapproved of Trump’s job performance. Only 39% approved.
The President’s State of the Union did not prepare Americans for a potential conflict. Yet 72 hours later, military action was underway.
Earlier this week, I moderated a session on “The US political landscape in the build-up to the midterms”.
Two Washington insiders had been lined up. But what they thought they were going to say at the end of last week was rewritten over the weekend as events unfolded.
Jonathan Mantz and Loren Munroe are principals at BGR Government Affairs in Washington DC.
They are each steeped in party politics.
Mantz served as national finance director for then-Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential campaign. Before this, he was a deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).
Munroe previously served on the finance staff of the National Republican Congressional Committee as well as on President George HW Bush’s re-election campaign. He serves on the Republican Governors Committee.
What came through is that the 2026 midterm elections on November 7 will shape the environment in which New Zealand operates on three fronts that matter deeply to us: Security and war powers; the global trading and tariff regime; and the economic and technological rewiring now underway, particularly on AI and energy.
Up for grabs at the November 3 midterms are all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 33 seats in the Senate, and if the Republicans lose their majorities in either chamber, it will alter the course of Trump’s presidency.
Historically, the party in the White House almost always loses seats in the midterms as campaign promises meet governing realities.
As Munroe put it, the Speaker “doesn’t have a working majority” for anything tough or controversial. The President, in turn, has learned to lean on executive orders and unilateral tools – from energy policy to tariffs to the use of force – rather than on painstakingly negotiated legislation.
For allies like New Zealand, that combination is potentially dangerous: it results in a presidency structurally incentivised to act alone, and a Congress too divided to offer a stable, legislated framework on trade, security or even war powers.
Nothing illustrates this more starkly than the sudden escalation involving Iran.
The strategists say Congress will almost certainly vote on War Powers resolutions to force the President to seek authorisation for further military action.
But for now, few on Capitol Hill want to be seen as undercutting US troops in the middle of a fight. Unless there is a major loss of American life, or a significant economic shock – spiralling oil prices, a closure or credible threat to the Straits of Hormuz, or a serious market downturn – Congress is unlikely to truly clip the President’s wings in the short term.
For New Zealand, this matters: Alliance dynamics are shifting in real time. We are already seeing coalitions around specific operations that do not neatly map on to old templates like Nato.
Our own strategic space tightens when Washington’s bandwidth is consumed by Middle East crises – particularly as we seek to navigate between a more assertive China, a rearmed Indo-Pacific, and renewed emphasis on cyber and AI in defence planning.
New Zealand is not simply a spectator here. We are a beneficiary of an increasingly contested “rules-based order”, even as we trade heavily with those who sometimes challenge it.
When it comes to business, certainty matters. You cannot easily operate in a world where tariff regimes flicker on and off with every presidential tweet or Supreme Court ruling.
Yet that is exactly where we are.
The Supreme Court’s decision striking down the President’s preferred tariff mechanism has not, in practice, ended the tariff story. Instead, the Administration has pivoted to other legal tools, reimposed or tweaked tariffs, and sought to present court defeats as opportunities to “clarify” and “harden” its approach.
From the Washington insiders;
• There is no clear, fast mechanism for refunds of unlawfully collected tariffs – and some firms fear that aggressively seeking refunds could land them on the administration’s “naughty list”.
• Congress is highly unlikely to legislate a stable, bipartisan tariff framework this side of the election. The political incentive is to keep tariffs as a flexible, populist tool, not to tie a president’s hands.
• Tariffs have become structurally embedded. Both major parties have shifted away from the Clinton/Obama era of expansive trade liberalisation. Even with a change of administration, no one expects a wholesale return to pre-tariff orthodoxy.
For New Zealand exporters – especially those operating within complex global supply chains – that means do not expect “normal service” to resume.
The period of relatively predictable, steadily liberalising trade rules led from Washington looks, at least for now, like a historical interlude rather than the new normal.
The bigger threat, of course, is what is happening in the Middle East.
Frankly, whether Christopher Luxon misspoke or not over Iran, and the latest abysmal poll results, hardly matters.
What we need from our Prime Minister and senior ministers now is their concentration on how to mitigate the impact on the NZ economy if the conflict in Iran continues beyond a month disrupting international trade, oil flows and markets.
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