All current indications are that Donald Trump and the Republicans are set to take a beating in the 2026 midterms. The cratering economy, tariff woes, disquiet over ICE raids, Trump’s mental competency, his Epstein connections, and well, basically everything, have voters feeling mutinous.
We’re still a long way away from voting day, and a lot can change in a year, but Trump is currently staring down the barrel of spending the last two years of his presidency as a lame-duck, struggling to get legislation through a rebellious Democrat-controlled House and Senate.
But former Republican strategist Rick Wilson is certain that Trump just isn’t going to take voters turning against him and spend two years doing nothing. He counters that “Trump is not planning a quiet sunset. He is planning a siege.”
In an essay on his Substack, Wilson points out that Trump is currently appointing as many people as he can who still believe the 2020 election was stolen from him to key positions across the federal government. For example, Heather Honey, a major 2020 ‘truther’ is now Trump’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity at the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump doesn’t “care who he burns”
If and when the votes don’t go Trump’s way, Wilson believes he’ll simply rule that they’re illegitimate:
“Trump is already aiming the federal machine at the midterms. If you think a lame duck can’t cause chaos, you didn’t learn the lesson of 2020. The lame-duck period then gave Trump and his allies space to organize a coup attempt…Now imagine that same playbook with four years of institutional capture, a more radical staff, and a president who knows he can’t be reelected and doesn’t care who he burns.”
It’s a fair point. Trump is already acting more like a king than a president, with the threat of huge midterms losses one of the few things holding him back from straight-up despotism. By this point, Trump knows he’s effectively immune to prosecution for his political dealings, so why not do everything in his power to tell the American voter that, actually, they meant to vote for Republicans, not Democrats?
Or, as Wilson put it:
“Watch what happens in red state legislatures and courts when Trump calls on them to throw out the election results, or when Mike Johnson declines to seat newly elected members.”
But, once again, a year is an eternity in politics. With the Epstein files release looming and the AI bubble due to pop any day now, who’s to say what the political landscape will look like by the holiday season, let alone in November 2026.
