Tag: midterms

When putsch comes to shove

Leadership matters, and wise and decorous leadership is greatly to be desired. A great nation ought to have such leadership. But our particular nation appears to have lost its way and elevated a thoroughgoing degenerate to its presidency.

I am close to despairing over the situation. Day by day, I hope that Donald Trump will have an epiphany and undergo a damascene conversion from delinquency to decency. Day by day, I meet disappointment.

The only nationally beneficial policy of Trump’s that I can identify is his having put a stop to the virtually uncontrolled flow of migrants into the country across the southern border. But any Democratic president in possession of a proper pair could have achieved the same result, and without the gratuitous viciousness of Trump’s crypto-secret police, the agents of ICE.

Speaking of “crypto,” that has been one of the principal vehicles of the Trump family’s disgraceful grifting off the presidency. Trump’s nuclear family has made billions of dollars through various schemes and stratagems enabled by Trump’s presence in the White House. And then there is the spectral son-in-law Jared Kushner, always slithering about in search of something ripe for profitable snatching up.

The country has been saddled with a dangerous buffoon and his idiotocracy because of the vileness and/or stupidity of Trump voters. Well, sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. Unfortunately, most of the rest of us are in on the reaping when we did none of the sowing that has yielded the tornadic disaster that is Donald Trump in office.

My greatest immediate fear about Trump, though, has sprung from his obvious determination to interfere with the midterm elections coming in November to give Republicans an unfair advantage so that they can hold the House of Representatives, to his corrupt benefit.

This month, though, the U.S. Supreme Court finally quashed Trump’s attempt to interfere with Americans’ access to voting by mail. In Executive Order 14399, signed on March 31 of this year, Trump made a desperate lunge to drag the various states’ electoral systems under federal control sufficient to allow him to bar vast numbers of American citizens from voting in federal elections, especially in the congressional midterm elections on Nov. 3. These midterms are, after all, what will decide whether Congress grants him unobstructed passage to the end of his term with license to do as he pleases — or Democrats take over in the House and bring him to heel.

The Supreme Court turned down an appeal by the Trump administration seeking to overturn lower-court rulings barring the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out the Trump order that the USPS play a regulatory role in the coming elections. Ruling in United States Postal Service, et al., v. California, et al., a court majority issued this unsigned order:

The application for stay presented to JUSTICE JACKSON and by her referred to the Court is denied. The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction. And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay.

Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Trump’s most reliable votes on that bench, dutifully dissented.

For now, mail-in voting appears to be safe for the midterm elections, shielded from Trump’s corrupting touch. And I believe earnestly that when putsch comes to shove, a majority of Americans will vote as if they mean to give the coup-maker in chief the great heave-ho.

I am thoroughly sick of Trump and his malice-driven approach to the world. He has impulsively embroiled his country in an utterly foolish war with Iran and now resorts to fantasy because the conflict has proved to be a terrible snare and a tangle that he seems incapable of escaping. He had expected Iran to fold in days and come crawling to him to sue for peace. But the opposite has happened.

And so every few days for months now Trump has been threatening to annihilate Iran or been saying that Tehran is desperate to make a deal to end the war, or, that talks are at a fruitful stage and that a deal is imminent. The evidence from the real world is that no deal is imminent and that the Iranians are not desperate to make one. In fact, they have most decisively seized Trump by the short and curlies: Iran itself has throttled the shipping of petrochemicals through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s allies the Houthis in Yemen are starting to do the same in the Red Sea.

In consequence, petroleum and natural gas is not leaving the Persian Gulf in the quantities needed to sustain the world’s economies. So around the world, the cost of energy derived from crude oil or natural gas has risen steeply, setting back the global economy. Here at home, the cost of diesel, the fuel that moves the entire U.S. economy, has risen to levels never seen before in this country. It all means higher prices across the board for you and me.

A billboard beside the Sussex Highway just north of Laurel, Delaware, , on Aug. 24, 2026, points out the steep increase in the cost of gasoline since Donald Trump launched his war against Iran. (Photo obtained by Gilbert Dunkley)

Thank you, President Trump, you clown! You could have whipped the inflation that was a holdover from the Biden administration — indeed you said while campaigning that this was a priority for you — but now you say that the concept of “affordability” is a “hoax.” Your brainless tariffs on imports also have helped to stoke inflation, and to this day you seem not to have grasped the basic idea that other countries do not pay the tariffs you impose on the goods they manufacture and send to buyers in this country. It is the buyers in this country who pay the tariffs. Your tariffs are a backdoor tax on Americans. But you can’t see that very basic thing, because you are stupid.

How stupid? This stupid: When you came to Washington for your second term in office, the magnificent John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts was a thriving institution. Then you maliciously decided to put yourself in charge of it and put your name on the building, above the name of the assassinated president for whom this institution is a living memorial created by Congress and dedicated to this one person. In the ensuing social and legal fight for the soul and control of the Kennedy Center, performers have abandoned the place because of you, and decent people refuse to enter the building while your name is on it and control of it is in your hands, and so it is going broke. And still you refuse to give it back and go on about your business. Now the whole place is fenced off and closed to the public. This tragic episode encapsulates your whole ethos: malice, toxicity and the rapid decay of so much that you touch.

I can tell you this, Donald Trump: You fancy yourself a great man, but on the day that you leave the White House, by whatever means you leave it, there will be global rejoicing not seen since the end of World War II. I pray that God hasten the coming of that day.

Trump is desperate as midterms near

Donald Trump is increasingly desperate for a way to forestall the reckoning that he knows will begin when the 120th Congress is seated in about 11 months, and it appears that for him the solution is somehow to defuse the Republican-destroying grenade that is the midterm congressional elections coming up in November.

Despite the fervent desire of Trump and the efforts he is making, I expect that in January 2027, Democrats will be decisively in the majority in the House of Representatives. That Democratic majority will energetically undertake the task of holding President Trump and the rest of the executive branch accountable for administration policies and arbitrary presidential actions that have gone unchallenged under the Republican majority led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in the 119th Congress.

I think the president has long recognized that the voters of this country will quickly sicken of him once his chaotic policies start to cause them pain and even embarrassment, so, like most of the dictator-minded around the world, he sees elections simply as an entryway that must be barricaded behind him as soon as he is safely inside the citadel. He tried to wall himself inside in his first term, but he did not act quickly enough and was frustrated by what he called “the deep state” but what I call the blessed institutions of our democracy.

Having persuaded a majority of voters to give him a new term in office, he is wielding some of his old tricks and deploying new ones to try to neuter this year’s midterms, but these elections are going to be a really hard nut to crack. So, what are his old tricks? Basically lying brazenly about a nonexistent problem of substantial electoral fraud in certain states — majority-Democratic states, of course. This approach leads us to his new tricks: a multi-pronged assault on the system of congressional elections.

That assault began with Trump’s persuading the hardly reluctant majority-Republican legislature in Texas to execute an outside-the-schedule redrawing of that state’s congressional maps to make an additional five or so of Texas’ seats in the U.S. House predictably Republican. The president has encouraged legislatures in other red states to do the same, and some have completed that process or are attempting it. Naturally, legislatures in some blue states have responded to this mid-decade redrawing of congressional voting maps by doing or attempting the same maneuver in their jurisdictions. (Here is an easily read breakdown from the National Conference of State Legislatures on how that effort stands across the country.)

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026, viewed from Pennsylvania Avenue NW and with fresh snow coating the landscape. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

And Trump’s FBI on Jan. 28 searched the elections agency in Fulton County, Ga., and carted away information including ballots and other records pertaining to the 2020 presidential election. You may recall that after he lost Georgia to Joe Biden in that election, Trump tried to persuade Georgia’s secretary of state, a Republican, to “find” a specific number of votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. That official, Brad Raffensperger, quite correctly refused to commit a crime to help the president stay in office.

The raid executed last week by the FBI is part of the president’s persistent lying about the 2020 election. But with the midterms just nine months away, the FBI intervention has the real potential of interfering with the voting process in Fulton County, which is home to Atlanta and has the largest bloc of voters in the state of Georgia.

Further to that FBI raid, why was Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, present on the ground during the operation? She runs the agencies that are concerned with foreign intelligence, and the FBI is definitely not within her remit but falls under Attorney General Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice. And why did Gabbard patch Trump through on speaker phone to say encouraging words to FBI agents involved in the search of the elections office? Her presence and his direct interest are further indication to me that he is committed to monkeying with the midterm elections.

Two posters placed in the wealthy D.C. suburb of Chevy Chase, Md., by the nonpartisan Nuclear Threat Initiative were seen on Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026, to have been adulterated and incorporated into a tableau denouncing President Trump’s authoritarian bent and the aggressive enforcement posture of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and defending immigrants targeted by ICE. The president is largely reviled in D.C.’s liberal suburbs in Maryland and Northern Virginia.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Then there is Trump’s call in recent days for Republicans in Congress to “nationalize” the congressional elections. In our system, elections are administered by the states. The Constitution says in Article I Section 4 that it is to be so:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, …

As you can see, Section 4 also says that “the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” It is this provision that Trump apparently wishes to exploit to bring all elections for national office under the control of the federal government. With elections to Congress managed by a central federal authority, Trump and his crooked minions could simply declare whatever results were favorable to Trump. They could also disqualify inconvenient state or district results as being fraudulent. But, praise God, the framers of our Constitution had the nous to anticipate the emergence of someone like the Dear Leader. Thus, our voting system, jurisdictionally fractured by state, territory and district, is a shield against a single corrupting hand.

Remarkably, in response to Trump’s urging that congressional Republicans nationalize congressional elections in 15 states, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said a firm no.

“I’m supportive of only citizens voting and showing ID at polling places. I think that makes sense. … But I’m not in favor of federalizing elections, no. I think that’s a constitutional issue,” Thune told reporters, according to the publication The Hill.

This was a remarkably assertive piece of resistance to a Trump proposal by a congressional Republican leader, given that such folk have been largely asleep insofar as holding Trump to account during the entire first year of his second term. The fact is that states are highly possessive about the rights that the U.S. Constitution accords them, and the states’ individual right to organize their own elections is deeply cherished. So, I cannot see more than a handful of representatives and senators — if any at all — coming out in favor of Trump’s call for congressional elections to be federally run in a particular set of states. That idea is just a nonstarter. Ain’t gonna happen.

But the administration is employing multiple tools in its search for a way to meddle with the midterms and head off the Democratic Party rampage that is seen as imminent. For instance, as Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in a Jan. 27 essay, “(Attorney General Pam) Bondi’s Justice Department has demanded access to the voter records of 44 states and Washington, DC, and it has sued more than 20 states for not complying. Two courts have already ruled on the side of the states.”

And then there is, potentially, the military option.

We all know that Trump has conjured publicly with the idea of turning the regular U.S. military loose in majority-Democratic parts of the country. He has, in fact, deployed or has tried to deploy National Guard troops in various Democrat-heavy areas, including California and here in Washington, D.C. What began as a Guard deployment last summer to bolster law enforcement during a one-month crime emergency that the president declared in D.C. has become a troop presence on the streets of the nation’s capital that will stretch at least until after the midterm elections in November.

When you consider, in addition, that the White House security perimeter has been enlarged by the use of crowd-control fencing to include Lafayette Park adjacent to the White House grounds, one suspects that Trump and his nearest sycophants are hedging against a popular rising of the people this year in response to some anti-democratic provocation emanating from the White House.

National Guard troops wait to cross a street in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. Since the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard soldiers near the White House on Nov. 26, 2025, with one dying and the other left gravely injured, Guard troops patrolling D.C. in a deployment ordered by President Trump have adopted a far more alert stance when in a static position. As seen in this image reflected in a vehicle wing mirror, they face outward to be able to spot a threat approaching from any direction.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

I do not know how Donald Trump plans to interfere with the midterm elections, but the evidence of my eyes and ears tells me that he is furiously casting about for some way to stop the blue wave that is rolling toward Capitol Hill. That wave will wash away the compliant Congress that he has so far enjoyed in his second term and replace it with a legislature with backbone and a bad attitude toward him. This prospect fills him with dread. Because he is a walking, talking, certifiable lunatic, I do not rule out any rash act of self-preservation on his part.

Thus I say to all my fellow democracy-loving Americans: “Screw your courage to the sticking place.” Get your marching shoes ready! Our country might face a crisis this year from which only we, in the streets in our numbers, can extract it and set it back on the straight and narrow.