The Missing Emergency

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, October 28, 2026

 

For the first time in the president’s second term, I’m surprised by his restraint.

 

Those of us afflicted with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” have been vindicated in almost every way since he returned to office, and insofar as we’ve been wrong, we underestimated how sinister he’d be. I expected corruption but didn’t foresee [gestures broadly]. I expected “retribution” but didn’t imagine the Justice Department would become a mafia law firm. I expected rapprochement with foreign fascists but didn’t anticipate Canada replacing Russia as the villain in some new national Cold War melodrama.

 

However bad you thought this would be, it’s worse. Except in one way.

 

Kevin Williamson wrote this morning about the next unthinkable disgrace “TDS” sufferers will inevitably be proven right about, the president’s coming plot to undermine the results after next week’s election and tear apart what’s left of the social fabric. But that reminded me of something about which I really was too pessimistic, it appears: I thought Trump would try to disrupt the midterms before they took place.

 

He has, sort of. The aforementioned mafia law firm sued Alaska last week to contest the results if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses his seat. And it continues to seek states’ voter rolls in hopes of standing up some grand conspiracy theory following the election about ineligible people voting en masse.

 

But if you had told me a year ago that, in October 2026, the president would be sitting at 37.4 percent approval, that his party would trail Democrats by nearly 9 points on the generic congressional ballot, that states as red as Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina would be in play, and that congressional Democrats would be teeing up all sorts of investigations into White House misconduct, I would have told you that Trump wouldn’t risk waiting this time until after the votes were cast to try to hold on to power.

 

If the blue wave looked like it might be too big for him to plausibly discredit afterward, he’d act preemptively and try to “postpone” the election by declaring some sort of nonsense emergency. He’d fail—I think—but he’d try.

 

He hasn’t tried, as it happens. Was my suspicion deranged even by the standards of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”?

 

The Saddam model.

 

I don’t think so. For starters, look at the people around Trump.

 

Some right-wing activists were egging him on early this year to declare an election-related emergency that “would empower the president to ban mail ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference.” More recently they’ve urged him to consider declaring martial law following the vote to justify the “commandeering of ballots and election equipment” to make sure no cheating took place. If you’re so far gone that you’ll entertain fascist responses to losing an election, you’re sufficiently far gone to entertain fascist ideas about how to prevent that election from taking place.

 

And someone who knows Trump well seems to agree. His former disciple turned enemy Marjorie Taylor Greene responded to a tweet in March speculating that the president would use some crisis, real or imagined, to cancel the midterms if things weren’t going the GOP’s way. “Yeah, I could see it,” Greene replied. “INSANE.”

 

But what about Trump himself? Has he said anything to warrant my suspicions?

 

Actually, yes. Last year in the Oval Office, Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters that Ukraine can’t feasibly hold elections as long as voters there need to fear for their lives by queueing up. “During the war you can’t have elections?” the president interjected. “So let me just see—three and a half years from now … if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections?” He was joking, but his jokes often double as trial balloons.

 

Less than three months ago he was interviewed by MAGA fanatic Wayne Allyn Root, who told him he could bypass Congress and effectively enact the SAVE America Act by diktat if he declared a national emergency. “If you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote,” Root advised Trump. To which the president replied, not joking this time, “Let me just say that stranger things have happened. Okay? I’ll leave it at that.”

 

Parsing individual comments risks missing the forest for the trees, though.

 

Zoom out and consider what Trump’s movement believes. Postliberalism is the idea that America is truly America only when the traditional ruling tribe holds power; by facilitating challenges to that power, Western liberalism has subverted the nation and undermined public order, which requires the tribe’s stewardship. It follows logically from that attitude that disrupting an election that’s likely to put liberals in control of the federal government isn’t just permissible but a sort of patriotic duty. If public order will break down unless right-wing chuds are in charge, then right-wing chuds must remain in charge—democratically or not—to protect America from anarchy.

 

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” the president tweeted less than a month into his new term, quoting another famous autocrat. That’s postliberalism. And that’s the sound of a man who, faced with an election that will almost certainly go against him, knows what must be done.

 

But Trump didn’t do what must be done.

 

He didn’t attempt to supersede state voting laws via royal decree. And he hasn’t connived to try to postpone the midterms, even though there’s an obvious “crisis” available to him that’s set to flare again after the election that he could use as a pretext for election meddling simply by instigating it a little sooner than scheduled.

 

“Some modern autocrats remain shameless jackboot men of the might-makes-right variety, but a very large share of them, a majority in the Western world, feel it necessary to pretend that they are acting under the color of law,” Kevin wrote. “Donald Trump and the seditionists who support him follow that model rather than, say, the Saddam Hussein model.” That’s true, and it’s borne out by the president’s preference for whining about election-rigging after the fact instead of pursuing election-canceling before the fact. But why does he hold that preference?

 

In less than a week, Trump has seen right-wing strongmen lose elections in Serbia and Brazil and watched his old friend Bibi Netanyahu lose his majority in Israel’s Knesset. The American left is poised to put an end to his own czarist reign in Washington in six days. Why didn’t the president, seemingly with little left to lose as an 80-year-old lame duck, try “the Saddam Hussein model” to preempt an election defeat by declaring an emergency this time around?

 

Delusions and luxury.

 

There are a few reasons, but let’s start with the craziest. I think Trump really believes Republicans might win.

 

Last week Washington Examiner reporter Byron York asked him what he thought of the projections that House Republicans are headed for defeat. “I just don’t see it,” the president told him en route to another rally. “There’s such enthusiasm. You’ll see, you’ll go there today.” Might that be a case of a politician simply putting on a brave face amid impending defeat?

 

I don’t think so. When York pressed him about his collapsing numbers, Trump scoffed. “The job approval, they said it’s 37, 38? I’m not at 38,” he answered. If he were running for office himself this year, he went on to say, “I don’t believe I could be beaten by anybody. I think that if I needed it, which I don’t, I think 60.” That is, 60 percent job approval.

 

A man who believes that might plausibly also believe that his energetic national barnstorming, aimed as it is at energizing disaffected Trumpists by symbolically placing himself on this year’s ballot, will pay off with a shocking GOP upset. Why would someone with a “real” approval rating of 60 percent, who graded his second term an “A+” a few weeks ago, want to short-circuit that upset by attempting to cancel the midterms? Why declare some phony emergency to stop the vote when he’s about to deliver power to his party the old-fashioned way, by winning at the polls?

 

This may be a rare case (possibly the only case), in other words, of America benefiting from the president’s delusional narcissism and ruthless informational self-siloing.

 

There’s probably something, too, in the psychology of postliberalism, especially Trump’s peculiar brand of it, that makes the idea of clinging to power by overturning an election through pseudo-legal means more comfortable than clinging to it by canceling an election before it’s happened.

 

A movement founded on reempowering The People by ridding Washington of its rotten elites would struggle to rationalize denying The People their usual say at the polls. Better to hold the vote and then contrive some nonsense after the fact that the results were tainted by foreign interlopers. Likewise, a movement that revels in victimhood will find reversing a “rigged” defeat more palatable than intervening to prevent that defeat from happening. In one case, they’re merely righting a wrong that’s been done to them; in the other, they’re engaged in the wrongdoing.

 

Trump’s brand of “luxury nationalism,” as I say, is also ill-suited—at least by postliberal standards—to justify something as draconian as canceling an election. Real nationalists have no qualms about imposing severe hardships on their people, very much including disenfranchising them, in the name of saving the nation. But the president’s con-artist spin on that ideology doesn’t easily allow for such things: Luxury nationalism promises Americans that they can have national greatness without sacrifice.

 

Not getting to vote in elections anymore would be, er, a pretty big sacrifice.

 

A transitional nation.

 

There are two additional points that aren’t often made in this newsletter. One is that Trump isn’t as bad as many of his foreign counterparts, and the other is that Western liberalism continues to influence even its enemies and saboteurs. And those two things are related.

 

Whether the president would try to “postpone” the election if he thought he could get away with it is an interesting question. My guess is that he would, for the same reason that any sociopath left alone in a room with cash in plain sight will take it unless he believes he’s being watched. It’s to his advantage to do so, and that’s that. But it’s also true that, as ruthless a gangster as Trump is, he’s always been a racketeer more so than a killer or fanatic. And part (or all) of the reason he isn’t worse, I assume, is because he grew up in a civic culture that made certain forms of gangsterism—like canceling elections—nearly unthinkable even to reptilian minds.

 

He’s never understood that his friend Vladimir Putin isn’t the same sort of gangster. Trump believes Putin is a kindred spirit, which is why he dangles economic benefits and chatters about business deals to try to get him to end the war in Ukraine. That’s the language of graft, the president’s native tongue. But Putin is already wealthy beyond imagination after more than 25 years as Russia’s capo di tutti capi and doesn’t care about being bought. He’s a fanatic who wants to rebuild Russia’s empire and be remembered for the achievement, and he’s willing to kill lots and lots of people—mostly his own—for the privilege.

 

If Putin believed an election was about to meaningfully weaken his hold on power, there’s no doubt what he’d do. He understands what the society he grew up in will permit. But so does Trump, and so his risk-reward calculation is different. If Trump tried to cancel or “postpone” the election and failed, what sort of uprising might he face? Would he end up removed or eventually imprisoned? Could he count on all of his Cabinet toadies, normally so loyal, to support him in crossing the Rubicon? Could he count on rank-and-file deputies, including American soldiers, to follow? Wouldn’t the Supreme Court almost certainly declare his executive order purporting to cancel the election unconstitutional? What happens then?

 

What would failure (or success) do to his own legacy, in which he’s clearly heavily invested?

 

A gangster who just wants to rename stuff, admire men’s asses, and have his palm greased would be foolish to risk his presidency on a doomed bid to short-circuit an election whose outcome won’t (much) affect his ability to do those things for the next two years. (2028, on the other hand …) Particularly when he can pursue pseudo-legal postelection routes to reverse the outcome instead.

 

And so, after nearly six years of searching, maybe we’ve at last found a silver lining in the president’s first coup plot in 2021. The fact that he came so close to succeeding, with so much Republican support, in trying to “cancel” that election after it happened may have convinced him that there was no need to try to cancel this year’s election before it happened. “Stop the steal” was proof of concept: With the right personnel in place, results can be overturned after ballots are cast. All Trump needed was people around him more loyal than Mike Pence and Bill Barr were. And, of course, slightly more creative thinking.

 

“Politically, legally, economically, and even scientifically, America is transitioning from a first-world country into a third-world one,” I wrote last year in a different context—and “transitioning” is the key word. Americans proved by reelecting Trump that they’re third-world enough not to be troubled by postelection coup attempts, but whether they’ve reached the degree of third-worldism where they’ll tolerate pre-election coups is uncertain even to the president. Given an opportunity to test his constituents on the point this year, he evidently decided to play it safe. Lucky us.