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Don’t Bet On The Fever Breaking
Democrats have to be ready to box Trump in, even if Republicans in Congress close ranks around him, the way they always have.
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Let me inject you with a dash of hopium before we spend the next month huffing into a paper bag.
There is a scenario, real but remote, in which the midterm election really does bleed MAGA to death.
The country will still be in terrible danger. That’s just in the nature of making a person with no civic virtue the leader of a superpower. For the danger to actually end, Congress would have to remove Donald Trump from office, and allow JD Vance enough running room to serve as a caretaker president, but no more.
Something like this is technically possible in our system, and I honestly don’t discount it altogether. Erratic people create unpredictable circumstances. But a world where Congress removes Trump from office is probably one where something catastrophic has already happened. It isn’t one where Republicans get routed in an election, and then ~half of the remaining GOP senators are chastened enough to find Trump guilty of high crimes.
My hopium scenario isn’t that fantastical. But victory alone could chasten a handful of Republican senators—enough to put Trump on a very short leash.
To reiterate, the scenario I have in mind is quite unlikely. It would require Dems to do a bit better a month from now than today’s polls suggest they will. And it would require a subset of Republicans to respond to a drubbing like normal politicians, rather than right-wing tribalists. The point isn’t that I think this will happen, just that I think it could. So I want to lay it out in detail. But I’ll be doing so on the way to establishing why it’s important for Democrats to adopt a confrontational posture now in the event that they win the election more narrowly, or that Republicans choose to swirl the bowl with Trump all the way through 2028.
Imagine Democrats win 53 to 54 Senate seats. In theory they could win more, but the threshold is probably 53, by holding Georgia and Michigan, and flipping all (or all but one) of Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Kansas, Iowa, North Carolina, and Maine.
This would deliver Republicans a severe psychic shock. And between the shock and the forward-looking math, it’s not out of the question that a bunch of incumbent House and Senate Republicans would begin behaving more like a faithful opposition. The “fever” would break, at long last, after many failed predictions.
This is not what happened after the 2018 midterm. But eight years ago the circumstances were much different. Trump was much less unpopular; the economy was stronger and people liked it; Republicans gained seats in the Senate. In effect, the 2018 wave wiped out most of the remaining Trump skeptics in the GOP, so the party became more right wing overall.
Republicans thus interpreted the results (reasonably, for the most part) as a normal swing of the pendulum, rather than the beginning of terminal backlash to MAGA. The rump that remained in the House clung more tightly to Trump. And with a slightly larger Senate majority, Republicans could limit Democrats’ ability to rein Trump in.
That kind of cope won’t be available to them a month from now if Democrats flip six or seven Senate seats, including a few in deep red territory. Trump will have two years left, with little on the horizon that might make him more popular or less desperate. Democrats will likely complete the unfinished business of the mid-Census gerrymandering race Trump kicked off last year, creating a large pool of suddenly-endangered incumbent House Republicans. And (here’s the key) several Republican senators will suddenly understand themselves to be vulnerable in 2028.
For a mix of normal and anomalous reasons, a bunch of the same states will be in cycle next year: Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Georgia. If Republicans hold Florida narrowly in November, Florida will be in cycle for them next year, too. Wisconsin will also be in cycle.
And so there will be many, many Republicans who recognize: if we don’t relent, if we use our power to sustain Trump’s current level of impunity, we will be wiped out again in 2028. Two consecutive Democratic wave elections. Our best bet is to put him on as short a leash as possible. They would start behaving a bit like the Boll-Weevil Democrats of the 1980s, who defected to vote with Republicans a lot. Except instead of doing so to help a popular president of the other party, they’d be doing so to constrain an unpopular president of their own.
To impose real constraints short of impeachment and removal, Democrats would need a working majority of 60—that is, 53 or 54 of their own senators plus six or seven chastened Republicans who’d work cooperatively with Democrats on legislation and oversight, but especially on appropriations. Trump would still have veto power. But if he vetoed budget measures he’d be shutting down the government against the bipartisan wishes of Congress. He alone would be under pressure to cave.
A formation like that wouldn’t fix everything, but it would end many of Trump’s monarchical abuses. The impoundments, the Iran war, the trade wars, the weaponization of the Justice Department. It would expose an incredible amount of wrongdoing. Congress could present Trump with toothy anti-corruption legislation, and a bill to ban partisan gerrymandering across the country, and some of the other ideas I laid out in my truce agenda two months ago. It’d in effect give 2029 Democrats a head start on reviving liberal democracy.
How’s that for hopium!?
What are your favorite feasible-but-implausible post-election scenarios? Tell me a story.