We have talked about the US midterms rather a lot.
There is a reason for that. This isn't simply another foreign election which FX Axe has inexplicably decided to cover because I've become addicted to CNN. What happens in America has enormous implications for markets, and we are living through an extraordinary period in which one individual has an almost unprecedented capacity to move them. Donald Trump can move the dollar with a tariff announcement, oil with a sentence about Iran, defence stocks with a spending pledge and entire sectors with something he writes on social media before his highly nutritious McMuffin based breakfast. We have also covered at length the extraordinary overlap between the presidency and Trump's family business interests, particularly crypto, which makes the relationship between politics, policy and money even more interesting.
Then there is the wider fascination. Whatever your politics, the second Trump presidency has occasionally felt less like conventional Western government and more like somebody handed Emperor Nero a Truth Social account. Wars, tariffs, giant ballrooms, meme coins, gold everywhere, family businesses, pardons, insults, aircraft, flagpoles and an apparently limitless capacity for the completely unexpected. America has always produced wonderful political theatre, but this feels different.
And the 2026 midterm campaign has somehow managed to become even stranger.
So, before we get serious again and analyse the results, here is something slightly different. This is not a political ranking and certainly not a voting recommendation. It is Max's entirely subjective countdown of the ten moments from this midterm campaign that have most frequently caused me to stop what I was doing and ask: hang on, did that actually happen?
Reader, they did.
We begin in Indiana, where Democratic candidate Jaime West was asked the relatively standard political question of what position she held that might be unpopular with voters but nevertheless good for the county.
“Mmm, firing all Republicans,” she replied.
This was not, perhaps, the sort of nuanced bipartisan bridge-building her campaign manager had been hoping for. She continued by saying she didn't talk to Republicans, described MAGA supporters as racist and unintelligent and eventually finished with the reassuring message: “We have guns, too.”
The interview went viral. West subsequently appeared on Piers Morgan, who delicately asked whether she had perhaps enjoyed a beverage beforehand. One Coors Light, she initially said. Then, under the sort of forensic cross-examination usually associated with war-crimes tribunals, the number became three. “What do you want me to say, man? I had three beers.”
At last, a politician willing to answer the question.
Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn's Tennessee gubernatorial campaign decided that what American democracy really needed was artificial intelligence generating a 74-year-old Republican politician performing Kendrick Lamar's “Not Like Us”.
It went viral. Not necessarily in the desired way.
The AI-generated Blackburn appeared alongside other Tennessee Republicans in a video encouraging people to vote early, accumulating millions of views and bipartisan mockery. Even Blackburn's Democratic opponent responded by essentially begging campaigns to stop using AI.
This may actually be one of the great lessons of modern politics. The fact that technology allows you to make absolutely anything does not mean that you should. We discovered nuclear fission in 1938 and Marsha Blackburn performing Kendrick Lamar in 2026. Humanity must learn restraint.
California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton went considerably further.
His “Just Try It!” campaign advert begins with two young women sitting together on a bed in a dimly lit room, a Pride flag behind them. One nervously explains that she has never done this before. The other tells her to close her eyes and give her her hand. She will do all the work.
The camera moves down.
They're voting Republican.
And then, because apparently nobody in the room had yet shouted “Steve, I think we've made the joke”, one woman holds up the postal-vote envelope and says: “Now lick it.”
Even Hilton's conservative allies attacked the advert. The Republican candidate for California attorney general publicly denounced it. I have watched enough Alan Partridge to recognise the moment when an advertising pitch has gone several meetings further than it should have. It’s Monkey Tennis all over again.
This may be my personal favourite.
Fox News was broadcasting live from Trump's rally in South Carolina when reporter Lucas Tomlinson found a huge goatee wearing, baseball capped attendee named Tom and asked the entirely harmless question: why are you here? To all watching, he looked like a textbook MAGA supporter.
Tom explained that he had been too young in the late 1970s to travel to South America for the Jonestown massacre, so this was probably the closest opportunity he would ever get.
The reporter, understandably wondering whether he had heard correctly, repeated: “The Jonestown massacre?”
“That's right,” Tom replied. “There's nothing like seeing a cult right up front, man.”
There followed one of those tiny pieces of live television that deserves to be preserved by the Smithsonian. Tomlinson processed what had just happened before concluding: “Alright, so maybe this is not a Trump supporter.”
Excellent investigative work, and great tv.
Trump's rallies have been repeatedly interrupted by protesters, and the President has developed an extremely specific explanation: they are being paid exactly $250.
Not $200. Not $300. Two hundred and fifty dollars.
He has repeated the figure at multiple rallies, sometimes attributing the protesters to George Soros, but has not produced evidence demonstrating that the individual hecklers are receiving the money. In Iowa he explained that there are normally several per rally and “they get paid $250”. Apparently political disruption in America now operates on a nationally agreed day rate.
The high point came in Ohio, where comedian and activist Robby Roadsteamer infiltrated a rally and began singing about Trump flying on Jeffrey Epstein's plane to the tune of “YMCA”, before being escorted away while shouting “Butterscotch Shitler” and “Pumpkin Spice Paedo”.
I realise this is supposed to be a financial website. I can only report the news I am given.
As campaigning entered its final stretch, Trump announced an extremely simple proposition: if Republicans retain the House and Senate, every adult American will receive a $5,000 “Trump dividend”, supposedly funded from tariff revenue.
That is quite the election pledge.
The obvious economic questions around the scale, financing, congressional approval and inflationary impact of handing thousands of dollars to hundreds of millions of adults can wait for another article. What earns it a place here is the extraordinary directness of the pitch: give my party Congress and I will give you five grand.
At a Nebraska rally Trump said: “If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate, I am going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America $5,000.”
I have seen more subtle loyalty schemes at Tesco.
There are sentences you expect to hear from an American president during the closing stages of a congressional election.
“I will lower your taxes.” “We will protect American jobs.” “Vote Republican.”
“I've never had an interest in dating my sister” is some distance down the traditional list.
While discussing the long-running and disputed allegation that Ilhan Omar married her brother, Trump decided to demonstrate how he himself would respond to questions about incest. At a Kansas rally he explained that he had two beautiful sisters, one of whom had died, but that he had never had any interest in “dating her or marrying her”. He emphasised: “Zero, zero, zero. Never even crossed my mind.”
At another appearance the formulation became even stranger: he had never been “particularly attracted” to either of them.
There is something magnificent about the word “particularly” doing all the work there.
Trump's rallies have also developed a soundtrack.
During a South Carolina appearance, while explaining his decision to appoint Nikki Haley to the United Nations, Trump suddenly produced a loud guttural “EUHHH” noise in the middle of the sentence. The clip was so odd that people online immediately questioned whether it had been manipulated.
It hadn't. The original footage confirms it.
Another peculiar vocalisation accompanied the sister discussion. I am not going to diagnose an 80-year-old man from a video clip because that would be both irresponsible and pointless. Sometimes humans simply make weird noises.
But it remains an extraordinary feature of the 2026 midterms that one of the jobs performed by political fact-checkers has been confirming that, yes, the President of the United States really did make that noise.
We now arrive in Texas.
Trump has developed a peculiar obsession with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico supposedly being vegan. Talarico says he isn't. Trump nevertheless repeatedly told audiences that Talarico secretly hates meat, attends Texas barbecues for political reasons and then disappears behind a tent to vomit.
There is no evidence for the vomiting story. PolitiFact investigated it, which means somebody has now been professionally employed to determine whether a Texas Senate candidate secretly throws up barbecue. It rated Trump's claim Pants on Fire.
But then Trump decided to act it out.
“You ever see him go to a barbecue and he's trying to show, ‘I love the meat. Ahhh! I love it, look!’”
If you haven't seen the accompanying hand and mouth gesture, I cannot adequately describe it while retaining our current website classification. Even American television presenters struggled. Joe Scarborough described Trump's rallies as becoming too X-rated for morning television; Seth Meyers suggested C-SPAN should attach an NC-17 rating.
Taken entirely out of context, the clip looks astonishingly sexual. Taken in context, Donald Trump is pretending to be another man enthusiastically putting meat into his mouth.
I'm not convinced the context rescues it.
There could only be one winner.
The defining policy issue of the closing weeks of the 2026 midterms has apparently been the male posterior.
Trump discovered that Ohio Republican Senator Jon Husted had been an accomplished college football player and decided to investigate. At rallies he has described “examining his body”, looking at his hands, shoulders, legs and feet and, inevitably, his backside.
“I've been living with this whole thing about the ass,” Trump subsequently explained.
He insisted this was unusual behaviour for him because studying men's bodies was “not my thing”. In Michigan he clarified that he had looked at Husted's backside and had “never done that with a man before”, adding: “Women yes, men no.” He then spotted Nicki Minaj in the audience and announced that he had also looked at hers, describing it as “one hell of a beautiful ass” and “hard to miss”.
JD Vance eventually joined the joke, reassuring an audience: “Don't worry, I'm not gonna talk about Jon Husted's ass.”
Trump even suggested that his remarks might be improving Husted's polling and offered to compliment other Republican candidates' backsides if it would deliver them Senate seats.
And that, for me, takes the title.
Not because it is the most offensive thing said during this election, nor the most consequential. It is simply the moment that best encapsulates the magnificent weirdness of the whole campaign. America is deciding who controls the legislature of the most powerful country on Earth while fighting a war with Iran, running enormous deficits, wrestling with inflation, confronting China, dealing with oil above $100 and sitting at the centre of the global financial system.
And the President has spent ten minutes explaining why he was looking at a senator's arse.
It has been funny. Frequently astonishing. Occasionally extremely dark. But there is a serious reason the world has been watching.
The midterms matter because Trump matters to markets in a way few presidents have. Tariffs, Iran, Russia, oil, defence, the Federal Reserve, fiscal policy, regulation and the dollar have all become unusually sensitive to what the President says and does. At the same time, the boundary between Trump the president, Trump the political movement and Trump family commercial interests has become increasingly difficult to ignore. We have covered the crypto ventures, the foreign deals and the conflicts that arise when political power and private wealth occupy the same room.
Tomorrow's result determines how much congressional freedom the White House has for the remaining two years of Trump's presidency. A Democratic House means investigations and obstruction of parts of the legislative programme. A Democratic Senate changes appointments and the balance of power considerably further. Both chambers changing hands creates an entirely different Washington. Republican retention of both would amount to voters giving Trump another two years with his congressional majority intact.
Markets will therefore care. The dollar will care. Treasuries will care. Oil will care. And given how rapidly Trump's rhetoric and policy announcements can move prices, traders certainly ought to care.
But that is tomorrow.
Today we can simply marvel at an election in which a Democrat admitted drinking three beers before threatening Republicans with guns, a Republican used AI to become Kendrick Lamar, another Republican produced a lesbian-themed postal-voting advert ending with “lick it”, Fox News accidentally interviewed a man who thought he was visiting Jonestown, protesters sang about Jeffrey Epstein, the President offered everybody five grand, assured America he didn't fancy his sisters, made noises requiring independent authentication, simulated enthusiastically consuming meat and spent several weeks conducting an apparently nationwide audit of Republican buttocks.
The Romans had Nero.
We have C-SPAN.
Keep your Axe sharp. Tomorrow, things get serious.
Join the FX Axe newsletter and stay one chop ahead.
