Trump Lost Congress: 3 Historical Paths and What They Mean for Crypto

Congratulations to the Democrats. They did a good job. They've been looking for this one for 11 years, and they finally got it. But I don't view it as a hit on me. I think what

That was Donald Trump reacting to the midterm results in November 2026. And honestly, guys, the charts did around that result was mental. By about 10 to 9 on election night, the 3rd of November, the betting on Polymarket gave the Democrats a 98% chance of taking the Senate. Bitcoin dipped below $76,000 at night. And by the next day, it was back above 80,000, while oil dropped more than 80% in a single session.

And the Dow shot up more than 1,500 points, its best day in over a year. Then the very next day, the whole lot went into reverse. The Dow lost more than 1,800 points. The Nasdaq dropped 5 and 1/2%. Bitcoin slid back towards 76,000, and more than a billion dollars of crypto trades got wiped out in 24 hours.

So what on earth happens now? Well, history doesn't give you a date, but it does give you a pattern. Nearly every president who loses Congress ends up going down one of three roads. And each of those roads did something completely different to the markets. And here's the bit I didn't expect.

Trump has already been down all three of them once. And the last time he did, Bitcoin had one of the worst months in history. I'll show you exactly what happened and which of the three roads matters more for anyone holding crypto. [music] Hey bull runners, welcome back. First, let's be clear on what Donald Trump has actually lost because it's not the presidency. He's still in the White House until January 2029.

What he's lost is the other half of the government. Think of Congress as holding three sets of that every president needs. The first set is laws and money. Nothing becomes law and not a penny gets spent unless Congress says yes. The second set is the power to investigate, meaning hearings, subpoenas, and if it goes that far, impeachment.

And the third set is war because Congress is the only one that can declare a war and the only one that can pay for one. On the 3rd of November, voters handed those keys to the Democrats. They took the house and they took the Senate with at least 54 seats. Now, the president's party nearly always loses seats in a midterm. That's normal, but losing both chambers at once is much rarer and it's happened to Trump now.

The new Congress sits on the 3rd of January 2027 and from that day, every one of those keys changes hands. So, let's walk the three roads one at a time and I'll show you what each one did to people's money. Road number one is the veto war and it's the simplest one. Congress sends the president bills he hates and he blocks them with his veto. And Trump told everyone this was his plan before a single vote was counted.

Look, if we didn't win, I think we're going to do great, but if we didn't win, I'll veto everything. I'll be vetoing, vetoing.

Still be able to do what you do, work with the Democrats even if they do?

Well, if that happens, I guess Mr. I'll become Mr. Veto. I'm not going to let them run and then at some point we'll probably make deals. That's what's happened.

I mean, this is this wouldn't be the first time. You'll have a president and he won't have the house or the Senate. They'll be sending stuff up, you veto it and eventually after a month or two of getting all vetoed, you know, it's waste, they're just waste. They come over and you make a deal.

And on election night, he doubled down and posted a picture of a red cap like the famous one, except it says veto. Now, to knock down a veto, Congress needs two-thirds of both chambers and the Democrats are nowhere near that. So, the veto road usually ends up in a standoff and the best example of how that plays out is a president from almost 80 years ago. In November 1946, Harry Truman's party got hammered and lost both chambers. It was so bad that Senator from his own party, William Fulbright, suggested Truman should step aside and let the other side run everything.

Truman did no such thing. Instead, he went to war with Congress. When they passed a big law cutting back the power of the trade unions in 1947, he vetoed it, and they overrode him within days. Over his time in office, he vetoed around 250 bills. But here's the clever part.

In the summer of 1948, he dragged Congress back for a special session, gave them a list of things to pass, and when they didn't, he called them the do-nothing Congress and toured the country by train shouting about it. And when the votes came in, one Chicago paper had already printed the famous headline, Dewey defeats Truman before the count was even finished.

In fact, it's a pretty sloppy edition. In the story about Dewey's victory, part of a sentence is printed upside down. But there's also [music] some comeuppance in this story, and that might explain at least partly Truman's [music] grin. The Chicago Tribune had called Truman a nincompoop. But still, going with that headline wasn't just wishful thinking.

The odds seemed pretty good. The pundits, the pollsters, they all expected a Dewey victory. The Washington Post later called Truman the only accurate election forecaster and jokingly invited the president to a dinner where he would be fed turkey while reporters, editors, pollsters, radio commentators, and columnists would all be served breast of tough old crow.

Truman won, and on top of that, his party took back both chambers. Then you get 1994. The Republicans take the House for the first time in 40 years, and the Senate too. Then Bill Clinton and the new Speaker, Newt Gingrich, go to war over the budget, and the government shuts down twice the following winter. The second time for three weeks.

Sounds like a disaster for markets, right? But but stick with me here because the S&P 500 went up by about a third in 1995. Gridlock, it turns out, doesn't scare the stock market half as much as people think. It doesn't always end that nicely, though. In 2011, Barack Obama and a Republican House fought over the debt limit right up to the last minute.

A deal got done, but days later America lost its top credit rating from S&P for the first time ever. And on the next trading day, the Dow fell 635 points. So what does the veto road mean for crypto? Well, this is where I get a bit wound up, guys. The biggest crypto bill America has ever had, the Clarity Act, which sets the rules for how coins like XRP get treated, passed the House back in July 2025 by 294 votes to 134.

Then on the 15th of September 2026, the Senate couldn't even agree to start debating it, 49 votes to 50, when it needed 60. And according to Abhishek, the chief legal officer at the NEAR Foundation, if it's still sitting there when the new Congress is seated on the 3rd of January, it lapses and the work starts again under a Democratic Congress. I remember the SEC ruling day when I fully expected the charts to fly and they just didn't and I was gutted. And I think a lot of us felt that same thing again in September, but here's the side of it that doesn't get said enough. Crypto rules in America would never only be a Republican thing.

78 House Democrats voted for that market structure bill. The stable coin law, the Genius Act sailed through with support from both parties and it has to take effect by the 18th of January 2027 at the latest, whoever runs Congress. And the regulators haven't stopped either. One analyst, Paul Howard of Winset, reckons the crypto rules already in place will largely stay put until the next election. So, the veto road might freeze new laws in Washington, but it doesn't rip up the rules that already exist.

Road number two is the hearings. And this is the road where Congress stops trying to pass laws and starts asking questions, witnesses under oath, documents handed over, and if it goes all the way, impeachment. Now, a lot of people get impeachment wrong, so let's clear it up. The House can impeach a president with a simple majority, which is basically a formal charge. But to actually remove him, two-thirds of the Senate has to vote guilty.

That's 67 senators. The first president who went down this road was Andrew Johnson after the Civil War. Congress overrode his vetoes 15 times, more than any other president in history. And then in 1868, they impeached him. The Senate voted 35 to 19 to remove him, which was one vote short of two-thirds.

So, he survived by a single vote. More than a century later came a quieter version. In 1986, Ronald Reagan's party lost the Senate. And that same month, the Iran-Contra affair broke, secret arms sales to Iran with some of the money sent on to rebels in Nicaragua. In 1987, Congress held weeks of televised hearings and Reagan's approval took a real knock.

But he was never impeached and he left office in 1989 as one of the most popular presidents in modern time. Then in 1998, things went the other way. Clinton's party actually gained seats in the House that year, which almost never happens. And the Republican Speaker ended up stepping down. And yet, weeks later, the House impeached Clinton anyway.

There was, of course, other news today, including the surprising resignation of Republican Speaker-elect Bob Livingston. But that will be just a footnote in history. Instead, December 19th, 1998 will be remembered as the day William Jefferson Clinton was impeached in Washington. Roskottati, News Channel 6.

The Senate cleared him in February 1999 and here's the thing that blows my mind. While Washington was tearing itself apart over impeachment, the NASDAQ nearly doubled in 1999, up about 85% in one year. The politicians were busy in the hearing room and the money was busy somewhere else completely. Now this time the Hearings Road has a crypto sign on it. The man in line to run the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia, sent a two-word message on election night, lawyer up.

And according to fortune and crypto.news, the Trump family's crypto business are high on that list from World Liberty Financial to the Trump meme coin. On the 4th of November, the Trump coin and World Liberty's own token both hit record lows. A White House spokeswoman has called the Democrats' plan a decade-long witch hunt. Honestly, that story deserves its own video, so I'll leave it there for now. What matters for this one is the mass.

Even if the House impeached Trump, the Democrats are miles away from 67 senators. No president in American history has ever been removed by the Senate. And there's one more president who walked this road, and I'll come back to him in a minute because he's the one this whole video is really about. Road number three is the war, and it's the most serious road, and it's the one I'd be watching the hardest. It's when Congress uses its money and its votes to fight the president over a war.

Back in 1999, Woodrow Wilson wanted America in his new League of Nations after the First World War. The Senate, now run by the other party, needed two-thirds to approve the peace treaty, and it said no, not once, but twice. In 1973, Congress went further and cut off the money for American bombing in Cambodia. On the 15th of August that year, the bombing stopped. Months later, Congress overrode Richard Nixon's veto to pass the War Powers Resolution.

And in 2007, with American troops in Iraq, a Democratic Congress tried to set a date for bringing them home. George W. Bush vetoed it, and in the end, the money went through without the day. Now, look at where we are because America has been at war with Iran since late February 2026. Trump said it would last four to five weeks, and it's now into its eighth month.

According to the Defense Department, 23 American service members have been killed. And on the day after the election, the vice president said something nobody saw coming.

Response from the vice president today, as you say, a very long post on social media where he says that Republicans lost the midterm elections in part because of the war with Iran. The vice president writes, the reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay, agree or disagree, that at least is honest.

That's a man who's next in line for the presidency, saying it out loud the day after the vote. And this is why Road Three matters so much for your money, guys. Remember that oil drop I mentioned at the start? On the 4th of November, Brent crude fell more than 8% to under $95 a barrel, partly on hopes of less American fighting in Iran. And oil feeds straight into prices at the pump, prices in the shops, and the decisions the Federal Reserve make about the interest rates.

When the analyst at Wintermute explained why Bitcoin fell back on the 5th of November, they pointed to the Middle East, high inflation, and an economy running hot. So if Congress pushes the war towards an end and oil keeps falling, plenty of analysts would say that takes some pressure off rates, and cheaper money tends to change how people feel about risk. That's not a prediction. It's just how the pipes are connected. So those are the three words.

Now, I promised you the twist. Trump has already been down all three, and it all happened in one spell, not long after he lost the house in November 2018. First, Road One. In December 2018, the government shut down over money for his border war. It lasted 35 days, the longest ever at the time, and around 800,000 government workers went without pay. in March 2019, Congress voted to end his border emergency, and he used the first veto of his presidency.

A month later, he vetoed a second bill, one that pulled American help out of the war in Yemen. That's Road Three. And in December 2019, the House impeached him. That's Road Two. The Senate cleared him February 2020.

All three roads inside about 14 months. And what did crypto do? Well, here's the bit that stinks. The midterm was on the 6th of November 2018, and Bitcoin was sitting at roughly $6,400. By the midterm of December, it was around 3,200, so half of it gone in about six weeks.

Here's how one market expert at CNBC put it.

That's where we are. The other thing that I have in mind is um 2018, every time somebody has been talking about, you know, following midterm elections, the market is almost always up over the the months to come, and it's a fourth quarter rally in the making. Yes, the patterns are pretty clear on that front, but in 2018, the day after election day, the S&P was up 2%, and then we went straight down. And then you had this complex correction, the Fed was tightening, and all the rest of it.

So the stock market popped and then dropped in 2018, and that's exactly what's got traders twitchy now because we've just watched the same thing happen again in the space of two days. But here's what I want you to take from it. And I'm saying this as someone who's been liquidated on a Bitcoin trade. I laughed, shut the laptop, and went for a walk because the crash in 2018 wasn't really about the election. Like he said, the Fed was putting rates up, and crypto was still coming down off the 2017 mania.

A year after that midterm, Bitcoin was back around $9,000. And 2022 was even stranger. The midterm was on the 8th of November, and that same week, the giant exchange FTX fell apart. Bitcoin dropped to about 15 and 1/2 by late November. A year later it was back around 37,000.

All through 2022 so many of us checked our portfolios every single day and just watched them bleed. And the week after that midterm told you absolutely nothing about the year that came next. And the stock market has a similar habit because it's going back to 1874. The S&P 500 has gone up in the 12 months after 32 of the last 38 midterms. That's not a promise and the years it didn't were pretty ugly ones, but it's a pattern worth knowing before you make a big decision off the back of one wild week.

So here's how I'd keep score over the next two years. Watch the vetoes because that tells you where the crypto gets a new laws or just lives with the rules it's got. Watch the hearings because that's where Democrats have said they'll question the Trump's family crypto business. And watch the votes on Iran because that's the one that runs through oil, through interest rates and straight into the price of everything you hold. And remember 2019 when all three happened at the same time.

Which road do you think Trump goes down first guys? And which one do you reckon matters most for your crypto? Tell me in the comments. I read them. Truman lost Congress, picked a fight and two years later he was the one grinning.

So whatever the headlines say the next two years are going to be a proper scrap and the markets will swing with every round of it. So here's a question. When the charts go mental like that do you have a plan or are you just reacting? That's exactly what our research team helps with. They're the best in the game.

They watch this every single day. So members here at first and they'll help you know when to move instead of chasing every headline at midnight with 15 tabs open. Grab a free 15 minute call with the team. It's the first link under this video. It's built for people holding $50,000 or more in crypto and if that's not you yet no stress at all.

Keep watching. These go up every day. None of this is financial advice guys. It's just me, a coffee and a lot of research. Crypto carries risk and what's happened before is no guarantee of what happens next.

Your keys stay with you and the team never needs them. Thanks for watching, guys. Keep your head, stack with purpose, and I'll keep you posted.

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