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A FALSE PANACEA The MidtermsMuch focus right now on the upcoming US midterm congressional elections. (For the record, our currently expectation is, barring a significant drop in major financial market indices, for the Republicans to hold the Senate. The key race is Iowa)It seems generally held that their outcome will be historically decisive. As students of US history, and American political culture, we are not so sure. Current circumstance strongly imply that President Trump could win them handily - and still see the ruination of his political legacy. In fact, it might very well make things worse for him. Accomplishment Your Charge' is the oldest person on staff here at the Consulate, and President Trump has been the most effective US President of my long lifetime. I have never seen anywhere near the pace of accomplishments that he delivered. First and foremost among these was the undoing of the political damage wrought under previous Administrations. The repeal of the Obamacare mandate, for example, and his inactment of the Transparent Pricing Rule for hospitals, to name but two. He did this by concentrating on what he Could do, either on his own authority, or with pre-existing alliances. We would hope that these would be remembered by history, and acorded due honors. But history is a fickle bitch. A Flawed Resume President Trump's foreign policy has been iffyer. It took him entirely too long to realize that Putin was playing him. His energetic address of the Iranian issue is certainly welcome, but the precise timing has been troublesome. Worse, his business-background assumption that debt was something that would just be grown out of prompted him to largely ignore the national debt situation - which is starting to look like a political liability. But we hold none of these to be decisive. The Looming Threat When people notice some social trend going on around them, they tend to project them forward into the indefinite future. More often then not, what is imagined as a durable trend is actually just part of a cycle. There are cycles involved in the affairs of men - an ebb and flow of mass mood. They seem to stem from a combination of human herding behavior, and our inability to maintain a given emotional state indefinitely. And they have relevance to matters political. History is not kind to chief executives when the herd changes direction. This is relevant to President Trump's legacy, because major changes in electoral preference tend to occur coincident with drops from major peaks in finnacial markets. Note that this is independent on the quality of the leadership of those executive: The mob does not forgive whoever hand was on the tiller, for the storm. We are just off a record high in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (August 5 of this year), and the industry whose hype has of late maintained the market's evitation is showing serious signs of being all hat and no cattle. The mania is passing; a truely hisotric economic hangover will follow. President Trump's legacy will not weather this well. And it matters little how well his team does in the midterms. In fact, a solid win, maintaining his apparent control (and thus responsibility of the various apparatti of government power), might give him even less excuse for inability to essentially control the weather. ConsequencesThese are not trivial. The last major economic depression was inthe early 1930s. The US President at the time was a Republican - and that party wa not allowed back into the Presidency for 20 Years (and that took a war hero, with no links to the pre-exiting party). So President Trump might well carry the night - and still leave the nation condemned to decades of leftist rule.