Hold on tight, 2026 may get rocky
President Trump and Republicans are in a world of hurt politically. If the times were normal, the congressional elections this November would warrant an easy call: the House is going to flip, from a slim Republican majority to the Democrats being comfortably in charge.
There are a number of factors in play, including a wobbly economy and Trump’s worrisome habit of threatening other countries, even allies. Not the least of these factors is that midterm elections historically favor the party out of power. Fed-up voters vote the “ins” out and the “outs” in, sometimes by lopsided margins. In 2006, for instance, Democrats barged their way to a House majority by changing 31 seats from red to blue. In 2010, 61 Democratic seats changed hands to give control to the Republicans.
But these are not normal times. Political polarization has reached a zenith; besides, the president is Donald Trump – the same Donald Trump who tried to steal the 2020 election.
Who’s to say he won’t try to swipe the 2026 midterms? He has plenty of reasons to feel apprehensive about a Democratic majority in the House, the least of which is impeachment. Donald Trump is not going to be tossed from office. For one thing, the math in the Senate just doesn’t add up.
Far more consequential for the president are the investigations Democrats could launch; the possible monetization of the presidency by Trump and his family is only one example of congressional probes that might be coming his way.
The president recently told the New York Times that he should have seized voting machines following the 2020 election, in an attempt to prove his point that the election was stolen from him by the Democrats and Joe Biden.
He blamed not doing so on dimwitted National Guardsmen. “They’re good warriors (but) I’m not sure they’re sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats….”
This time around National Guard and immigration enforcement officers need not be wizards (and by ICE’s recent behavior they certainly are not). Now the president has a fully staffed administration to do his bidding. Aside from Trump himself, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel may be the chief 2020 election deniers in the administration, but there are plenty of others.
During the vetting process to fill administration jobs, candidates were quizzed on who they thought won the 2020 election. Even an equivocal answer was proof of being insufficiently MAGA, and therefore unqualified for high office.
According to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, the president has “amassed an army of people loyal to him.” They were speaking specifically of ICE, but it might have been other agencies and departments.
As for ICE, not a few people have expressed the fear that Trump intends to use the agency as a kind of personal political battering ram.
“Everything Trump is doing now is a dry run for the fall.” This includes, the Lincoln Project says, ICE storming American streets.
Responding to an article about the possible federal confiscation of local voting machines, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics wrote on X, “Expect Trump and his agents to try [this] in 2026 and 2028.”
In another X post, Sabato, a man not usually given to wild exaggerations, likened ICE officers to the Gestapo.
There are those who contend that Donald Trump says things for effect – to get a rise out of liberals. Then there are those who say that the president is a man of action, and thus attention should be paid to his words, to his “weave” as a foretaste of what’s coming down the pike.
President Trump told Reuters on Wednesday, “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms…. When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
Lisa Goitein of the Brennan Center recently told historian/podcaster Anne Applebaum that there is a risk that the president will attempt to deploy troops “around the time of the election on theory that people are less likely to come and vote.” Armed personnel in the neighborhood are not exactly conducive to civic engagement.
Having created a government in his own image, an unconstrained Donald Trump seems capable of just about anything. The concluding months of 2026 could get very ugly.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.