Well, we made it! We hope 2026 is off to a good start for everyone. We’ve got a nice, modest hope for the year: that it at least it will be better than the last one. Happy Friday.

Happy New Year (Maybe?)

by William Kristol

Happy New Year!

But will 2026 be a happy year for the republic?

It will be a crucial one. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to cite Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 1: In “the crisis at which we are arrived,” a “wrong election of the part we shall act” would “deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”

So what will 2026 be? A year of fortune or misfortune? Well, as the pitcher Joaquín Andújar once said, “You can sum up the game of baseball in one word: ‘You never know.’” What’s true of baseball is true of politics.

The year will be important and its outcome indeterminate. So I thought it might be helpful to very briefly sketch out five possible paths for the year ahead.

1. Very good news: We turn the corner.

Trump’s popularity continues to decline as he loses his grip and his administration becomes more chaotic. Republicans on the Hill increasingly desert him, and so Congress begins to act as a check on his administration. The Supreme Court steps up and mostly supports lower courts trying to sustain guardrails. Accommodating elites begin (finally!) to jump ship.

Abroad, Trump fumbles and bloviates, but we avoid disaster. Europe helps Ukraine, and Putin’s weaknesses are increasingly exposed.

November is a wave election, as in this 250th anniversary year, the public rallies to the principles of the Declaration and against nativism, extremism, and authoritarianism. Democrats win both the House and the Senate. Trump becomes a true lame duck.

This turn of events is unlikely but not impossible. Indeed, if things start to go in the right direction early in the year, we could see a happy snowball effect.

I’m going to (optimistically, but hey, it’s the new year) give this scenario a 20 percent chance of happening.

2. Good news: We see light at the end of the tunnel.

This is a more modestly upbeat scenario. The balance of power moves somewhat against Trump, and the authoritarian hold within and beyond government weakens. Democrats win the House easily and come close in the Senate. All in all, at the end of the year, there is less of a sense than there is now that Trump and Trumpism have a grasp on the future, let alone the mandate of heaven.

The year will be a tough slog in the right direction—but it will be the right direction.

I give this scenario a 20 percent chance as well.

3. So-so news: The status quo holds.

The forces of liberty and democracy hold their own, but only just. Things stand at the end of 2026 about where they were at the beginning. Democrats win the House narrowly but the Senate remains comfortably Republican, the Supreme Court remains an unreliable weathervane, and while elite accommodation may not intensify, it doesn’t reverse. Ukraine and for that matter NATO are able to hang on, but barely. So the fight continues.

Normally, one would think a more-of-the-same scenario the most likely of all, but I’m doubtful. The present balance of power in both the nation and the world seems precarious. I think it more likely than not that things break in one direction or another.

So I give this a 15 percent chance of happening.

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4. Bad news: The slide continues.

Things continue to move downhill. Public support for Trump stabilizes and even ticks back up a bit. And so the Republican party and the Court continue to duck, ICE continues to grow and increasingly becomes a Praetorian guard acting without much of a check outside the law, Hegseth moves ahead with reshaping the military, and the Justice Department gets away with an Epstein coverup. The Trumpist movement continues to radicalize even as elites keep on going along, and things like the Trump-Kennedy Center, the “Arch of Triumph,” and other grotesqueries get normalized.

The prospects for a reversal of political momentum in 2027 and 2028 seem daunting. The transformation of U.S. foreign policy from global leadership to self-interested bullying continues. Ukraine’s future is grim.

I give this unhappy prospect a 25 percent chance of taking place.