It is often said that this election or that election “is the most important of our lifetimes.” I make no such declaration about the congressional elections this year that mark the midpoint of Donald Trump’s second term in the U.S. presidency. What I will declare is that 2026 is a crucial year of action for the conspiracy whose aim is to destroy American democracy and establish white-supremacist authoritarianism. And 2026 is, therefore, also a crucial year for the movement to preserve American democracy and constitutional order.
It has been usual in this country for the winning presidential candidate to have coattails long and broad enough to carry a substantial portion of his party’s congressional candidates into office at the time of his own election. This pattern held true with Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2024. Also usual in this country is that the midterm elections bring a reversal of fortunes for the president’s party in Congress. That is widely expected to be the case in the midterm elections in November 2026.
Some, though — and I count myself among them — expect not merely a reversal of fortunes for the congressional GOP in November but an absolute demolition in favor of the Democratic Party and the country’s welfare. Beyond expecting this outcome, I earnestly desire it, for the good of the country. The anticipated rout is being correctly read as growing public distaste for Trump’s policies and actions in the presidency.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
The sealing of the country’s southern border against an indiscriminate influx of migrants from countries near and far is perhaps the president’s most useful and popular accomplishment, but Americans generally have been appalled by the Trump administration’s tactics in that other part of the immigration crackdown: the detention preparatory to removal of undocumented people from the country.
Trump and his officials have been shockingly dishonest in characterizing undocumented migrants as “the worst of the worst” to justify treating them like diseased animals. They are rounded up, chained, penned and hustled out of the country, even to far-distant jurisdictions to which they have no connection. And many brown-skinned U.S. citizens have been swept up in the government’s racist immigration dragnet and been abused alongside the falsely labeled “worst.”
Aside from stopping the unrestricted migrant inflow, little else about the Trump administration recommends it to the voting public, whereas that public finds that a good many of Trump’s actions and those of his administration are distasteful in the extreme. Trump has two primary missions: gratifying his bloated ego and grifting to fatten his family’s purse on one hand; and building the foundations of white-supremacist authoritarianism on the other hand.
The latter of those two primary missions is the one that presents an existential danger to the country’s existing governance structures. We merely have to look to the former apartheid South Africa, or to any of old Europe’s colonial societies, or to the United States in the slave era and then Jim Crow to see the contours of white-supremacist dictatorship that the far right in this country wishes to impose upon us.
So why is 2026 so important? It is important because of the midterm elections on Nov. 3. If we are so fortunate to have elections uncorrupted by Trump’s goons and abettors, a Democratic majority with a proper democratic spirit will be elected to the House of Representatives, a signal to Trump that when that majority is seated in January 2027, he will face congressional opposition and be held to account by Congress for the first time in his second term. (If we are truly lucky, we will have a Democratic-majority Senate as well.)
Up to now, the Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate have lain prostrate in fear before their corrupt emperor. In their cowardice before Trump, their only use has been to demonstrate to the country what sort of people ought not to be elected if the general desire is to have honest representation and a check upon the executive branch of our government.
The coming November elections constitute the greatest danger yet to the far right’s takeover project in Trump’s second term, so the coming months necessarily will reveal the mad schemes that the most desperate in the far-right faction will float or even try to effectuate to circumvent the will of the electorate. One of the far right’s regrets about Trump’s first term is that it did not act with sufficient speed and boldness (the Jan. 6 attack on Congress notwithstanding) to seize control of power in this country. That faction faces a ticking clock in the months between now and November to make an all-or-nothing lunge to grab the levers of power.
Will Trump and his acolytes try to use the National Guard or formations of the regular military to overturn the Constitution? Will the masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security be turned loose on voting centers in Democratic strongholds to interfere with the elections? Such tactics have been used in other countries; why not here? All that Trump has to do is say that he is deploying the National Guard — again — to address crime, and his foot will be upon the fateful threshold. Only a lack of the will to dare on the part of the fascist-minded in this country has so far spared us that scheme and its trauma on a national scale.
I cannot forecast how the forces of darkness will go about their plans in this year that is yet in its infancy. They have earnest and dreadful desires. But those desires face obstacles, not the least of which are we who love American democracy and the United States Constitution and will accept no other master over us. These coming months may form the year in which good and evil once again clash resoundingly over the direction and nature of this great and greatly beloved country. Stand ready, fellow democrats! Stay woke!
Democracy Warrior 