Midterms: Trump beaten at the ballot box, the American imperial apparatus remains intact

According to Libération, Donald Trump was punished at the ballot box on Tuesday 3 November, in the midterm elections. The paper notes that he nonetheless keeps a free hand beyond America's borders, and that, obsessed with the legacy he will leave, he could be tempted by the worst. Libération's summary stops there: we do not know the detail of the results here, nor the specific files targeted. The rest is our reading.

First observation: the "slap" is real, but it is domestic. It changes the mood in Washington, not the nature of the machine. Army, intelligence, diplomacy, arsenal of sanctions: this apparatus does not switch off because a party loses seats. It keeps running, whoever occupies the White House.

This is exactly what Lenin said about the state: a special public power, placed above society, sustained by taxation and debt, in the service of a class. Voters can punish a man. They do not vote on the structure. And Libération says so in its own way: the president keeps his grip where democratic control is thinnest.

Cui bono? Let us ask the question plainly. Sanctions, tariffs, military deployments, arms contracts: all of this forms, as the Leninist tradition would put it, the political envelope of economic rivalries. Blocs of financial and industrial capital seek outlets, raw materials, markets. States clear the way for them, sometimes with gunboats, often with decrees. Those interests were not on the ballot paper.

Could Congress put on the brakes? In theory, through the budget. In practice, look at who votes the military appropriations: for decades, the two major parties have agreed on the essentials. They quarrel over tone and agree on the Pentagon. Lenin mocked those who dressed up the appetites of "their" bourgeoisie in fine phrases about defending the fatherland or the republic. The vocabulary has changed; the function has not.

We should also be wary of the comforting narrative. Saying "Trump is weakened, the world can breathe" is reassuring. It is mostly convenient for chancelleries that prefer to wait, and for those who see alternation in power as a sufficient safeguard. An opposition party that wins a chamber of Congress does not magically become a party of peace. This is not a prediction about decisions we do not know: it is a reminder of the mechanisms.

What we do not yet know: which foreign initiatives the president might choose, and whether his opponents will genuinely try to obstruct them. Libération raises the risk of the worst without our being able, at this stage, to spell it out. We will keep watching.

The lesson, however, is already here. An electoral defeat dents a man, and possibly a camp. It does not dent a state apparatus built to defend class interests across the globe. For those on the receiving end of American coercion, Washington's electoral calendar remains a footnote.