Recent US congressional elections a disaster for Donald Trump: Danila Gureev

Danila Gureev, a political scientist, spoke to Alpha News about the recent US elections to the Senate and the House of Representatives. In his view, losing both chambers of the legislature will make it harder for the Trump administration to advance legislative initiatives on both the domestic and foreign policy tracks.

“The recent US elections can be viewed from several angles at once. The first is from Donald Trump’s perspective. For Donald Trump, this is, of course, a disaster. Because if previously Donald Trump could act more freely in domestic politics, pass the legislation he wanted and move in whatever direction he wanted, now that task will become more complicated.

It will be complicated by a number of factors, because the proposals Donald Trump puts forward still have to go through Congress. There are ways around it, but it is still a more difficult task. Donald Trump faced roughly similar problems during his first term. And back then, as we remember, there really were these domestic elite wars, when, again, the executive branch clashed with the legislative branch and they could not reach any agreement with each other. For the American state itself, this is actually quite a serious change of direction.

That is, previously the Democrats were quite strongly disliked, but now the situation is turning around again, and the Democratic Party is winning back its ground. But if we look at the global context, overall we will not see any serious, significant transformations. Why? Because America was and remains a presidential republic. That is, first and foremost, when we talk about a presidential republic, it means that the primary functions of government rest on the shoulders of the President of the United States of America. And the US president has not changed. At least for another two years, he certainly won’t change. And what does that mean? It means that, first of all, the overall direction of US national policy remains as it was,” the expert believes.

Turning to the conflict in Ukraine, Gureev said no significant policy changes are expected in this area.

“With regard to Ukraine, it’s all the same. We should not expect any serious transformations in US–Ukrainian relations. Again, I repeat, because the US is a presidential republic. If the US president changes to a Democrat, then we can talk about a different context. Right now, these changes are not there,” Gureev concluded.