The Day After

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, February 03, 2026

 

The surest sign that the GOP’s midterm prospects are collapsing is that evidence of it has punctured the right-wing information bubble. Only the most irresistible realities are capable of breaching that containment dome; if no less a populist than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is warning the faithful to brace for impact, the outlook is officially grim.

 

I have a strategic suggestion for Republicans looking for ways to turn back the blue wave. Have you considered … simply doing nothing while Democrats tear each other apart?

 

That’s the strategy that’s going to keep John Cornyn’s Senate seat in Texas red. The Democratic primary there was rocked on Monday by a claim that candidate James Talarico, who’s white, called former candidate Colin Allred a “mediocre black man” in a private conversation last month. Talarico insists that he said Allred’s campaign was mediocre, not Allred himself, and the apparent racial implication in the remark is undermined somewhat by the fact that he allegedly described his opponent, Jasmine Crockett, as a “formidable, intelligent black woman” in the same breath.

 

No matter. After the news broke, Allred retaliated with a video in which he endorsed Crockett, lambasted Talarico as a “hater,” and urged young black men in Texas to thank Talarico for “taking off the mask” and showing them who he really is. Crockett herself followed up with a statement lamenting that it’s “unfortunate that, at the start of Black History Month, this is what we’re facing.” The primary has been racialized.

 

And so a state that might have been winnable by Democrats in a true blue-wave election is almost certainly out of reach. Crockett can’t win because she’s spent years antagonizing Texas’ Republican majority, and now Talarico can’t win because some liberals who otherwise might have turned out for him in the general election have been told he’s guilty of crimes against progress.

 

Sitting back and letting the dopes in the other party destroy themselves: It was a winning strategy for Democrats in Georgia in 2021, and it’ll be a winning strategy for Republicans in Texas in 2026.

 

The problem for the GOP is that it can’t count on a Talarico-Crockett debacle to deliver every swing state. Republicans need a more proactive approach to repulsing the blue wave, which is why the president hatched his ruthless middecade gerrymandering scheme last year. But that strategy might be about to run aground, foiled by the fact that Donald Trump is plummeting toward “venereal disease” levels of popularity with Hispanic voters. Republicans need a Plan B.

 

So yesterday Trump proposed a new idea. What if Republicans in Congress simply seized control of this fall’s midterm elections from the states?

 

Pre-spinning disaster.

 

“The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” he told podcaster turned G-man turned podcaster Dan Bongino. “We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes. We have states that I won, that show I didn’t win.”

 

The Constitution does empower Congress to supersede state laws regarding the time, place, and manner in which federal elections are held. It says nothing about a role for the president, though, notwithstanding Trump’s pretenses to the contrary. Apart from sending the FBI to raid ballot warehouses in Democratic strongholds and then calling up the agents afterward to rhetorically high-five them on a job well done, he has few lawful options to meddle unilaterally in November. His safest play is to do what he’s doing, imploring his cronies in the House and Senate to bigfoot state administration of elections.

 

What I can’t understand is this: What would a “good” outcome from that process look like for the president and his party?

 

Let’s say Congress took his advice and started tinkering with the “manner” in which this fall’s elections are held. Let’s further assume that the GOP ended up overperforming in that election, possibly to a surprising degree, with Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff falling curiously flat in deep blue Fulton County. What does America look like the day after an unprecedented midterm dubiously “nationalized” by the majority party in Washington leads to that party retaining power against all odds?

 

One plausible answer is that it doesn’t matter because Trump’s proposal isn’t in earnest. All he’s doing with his “nationalization” nonsense, perhaps, is pre-spinning a looming debacle in November.

 

After all, he must realize that not only are there not 60 votes in the Senate to pass a federal takeover of the midterms, there almost certainly aren’t 50. Even if Majority Leader John Thune were willing to try to eliminate the filibuster to advance the legislation—an appalling procedural irregularity to facilitate an appalling electoral irregularity—he would lose Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and a newly independent-minded Thom Tillis off the top.

 

Only one more Republican vote would be needed to kill the legislation, and I suspect there are enough federalists still left among the thoroughly debased Senate GOP to provide it. (Particularly given the foreseeable popular backlash to a power grab like “nationalizing” elections.) So Trump’s proposal to Bongino was probably little more than preemptive damage control: If and when the GOP is routed this fall, he’ll turn around and claim that the “cheating” on Election Day wouldn’t have been so rampant if only the weak Republican chumps in Congress had taken his advice.

 

In the meantime his soundbite will alarm and enrage Democrats, driving their enthusiasm to turn out this fall even higher, and convince some swing voters who doubted the president’s fascist instincts in 2024 that those of us suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” were right all along. A true strategic master stroke, sir.

 

But what if his nationalization scheme isn’t spin? What if he means it?

 

Nationalization.

 

One thing I never understood about the January 6 plot was what Trump and his accomplices imagined would happen if it worked.

 

Mike Pence stops the count of electoral votes in Congress. Joe Biden sues to compel the House and Senate to certify his victory, but a Supreme Court with three Trump appointees in the majority decides it has no jurisdiction to intervene. Congress declines to count the contested electoral votes from swing states won by Biden, and Trump is declared the winner.

 

And then everyone shrugs and goes back to normal? Trump serves out a more or less humdrum second term?

 

It’s preposterous. A post-coup America would have been unrecognizable and probably ungovernable. I suspect we would have faced a major secession effort among blue states, understandably no longer wishing to remain part of a sham democracy. The Democratic-controlled House and Senate would have been forced by their base to take draconian measures to protest the GOP’s autogolpe, likely resorting to an indefinite government shutdown until Trump resigned. (Impeachment wouldn’t have worked, of course.) We would have seen Minneapolis-style resistance in every major city and perhaps a general strike.

 

Would that have been a “good” outcome for the president and Republicans? Inevitably he and they would have been forced to decide whether to cross the Rubicon by deploying the military to crush riots and restore order. There would be no “America” left in any meaningful sense after an Iran-style crackdown, but that’s what Trump’s coup plot would have led to—or alternatively, to him quitting under pressure before reaching that point.

 

Either he would have lost all legitimacy as leader among everyone to the left of Ted Cruz, probably triggering a national crack-up, or he would have lost his job anyway despite the initial success of his coup plot. A bad outcome either way. Yet here he is again in 2026, going down a similar no-win path with the midterms.

 

Let’s say that congressional Republicans do end up nationalizing the November elections … and, despite the GOP’s best efforts to put a thumb on the scale in swing districts, Democrats win easily anyway. That would be a worse outcome for the president than if Republicans had done nothing, as he’d have lost his pretext for alleging that blue states’ unfair election rules had enabled cheating. National mandatory voter ID, new restrictions on mail-in ballots—and a big blue win anyway? It’d be Waterloo for right-wing electoral propaganda.

 

Or let’s say that Republicans nationalized the elections and mysteriously overperformed—but not enough to deny Democrats control of the House given how narrow the current margin in the chamber is. Furious at the GOP’s gambit, and quite properly alarmed about what they and Trump would do in the next election, the new liberal House majority might (and should) dig in on passing reforms to foreclose another nationalization attempt in 2028. The president would have wasted his one big opportunity to meddle in a national election on a comparatively inconsequential midterm instead of on the next presidential race.

 

Then there’s the third scenario, in which the nationalization scheme works precisely as intended. Republicans overperform on Election Day, suspiciously winning a number of seats in “nationalized” counties and House districts that they were expected to lose and retaining control of the House and Senate. Half the country, possibly quite a bit more, would come away convinced that those upsets were the result of vote-rigging—even if they weren’t—and would view anything the GOP does in the second half of Trump’s term as invalid. American government would face a legitimacy crisis beyond even the one it suffered during the unsuccessful coup attempt of 2021.

 

At best, Democratic voters would insist that their representatives grind an illegitimate Congress to a halt and begin plotting Trumpian-style acts of ruthless retribution for when their party regains executive power. At worst, we would end up with the sort of path-to-Iran nightmare I described earlier. Trump’s final(?) two years in office would be a historic fiasco.

 

The GOP’s reward for nationalizing the elections would be getting to nominally preside over a banana republic that had at last ripened fully, likely despised and/or distrusted by a majority of its own citizens and discredited throughout the Western world. Some triumph.

 

One move ahead.

 

Why the president can’t foresee all of this and grasp that nationalizing elections would produce a Pyrrhic victory, assuming it produces a victory at all, I don’t know. But failing to see one move ahead is a chronic problem for him and his flunkies.

 

The Greenland saga is an example. Before announcing his desire to acquire the island by any means necessary, he could and should have considered the likely consequences. European countries would bristle, plot economic retaliation, and begin turning to China to “balance” American power. Hawkish Republicans in Congress would blanch at the idea of the United States staking a Putin-esque claim to a friendly neighbor’s territory. High-ranking military officers might refuse to carry out orders to take the island by force on grounds that those orders are illegal, a violation of the NATO treaty.

 

It would be one thing if the White House had carefully weighed those costs and resolved to absorb them in the belief that the benefits of annexing Greenland more than compensated for them. Instead Trump talked a bunch of trash, appeared surprised by Europe’s resistance, and (for the moment) backed off. He alienated all sorts of allies, domestic and foreign, and got bupkis in return. It was predictable, yet somehow not predicted.

 

The ICE meltdown in Minnesota illustrates the same problem. Nothing was more foreseeable than that innocent people would get hurt, abused, and bullied after the president and Stephen Miller turned immigration enforcement into a secret police force authorized to violate people’s rights with impunity. Sure enough, two Americans ended up dead—whereupon Trump, feeling the political heat, made moves to de-escalate. What’s the point of creating an unaccountable goon squad if you’re going to get cold feet when they’re caught on video behaving like unaccountable goons?

 

There appears to be nothing behind either episode that we would recognize as coherent “strategy,” so I doubt there’s anything we would recognize as strategy behind his push to nationalize the midterms either. The reason he didn’t think one move ahead in Greenland and Minneapolis, I suspect, is because he remains convinced despite mounting evidence to the contrary that his 2024 victory gave him a popular mandate to do anything he likes. Meeting determined resistance that inflicts a political cost on him consistently surprises him by revealing a vulnerability that, on some level, he doesn’t believe he has.

 

That probably also explains his blind spot about nationalization. He can’t conceptualize that the GOP seizing control of the midterms on the orders of an authoritarian with one coup plot already under his belt won’t be taken by Americans lying down. He feels no need to plan for the day after because, in his mind’s eye, the day after will be a normal day, filled with gushy headlines about how the president’s brilliant plan to seize control of election administration led his party to glorious victory.

 

But I admit that I might not be giving him enough credit.

 

In this case, I can imagine that Trump actually has thought about what happens on the day after his scheme unfolds. He might well foresee the turmoil that a surprise Republican win in a nationalized election would unleash—Minneapolis is a sneak preview playing out day by day on his television—and calculate that a tainted victory is nonetheless still preferable to defeat.

 

That’s not because he’s worried about a new Democratic-controlled House investigating him or even impeaching him, I don’t think, as he has no reason to feel anxious about that. Thanks to Republican quislings in Congress, nothing will threaten his grip on power.

 

What he resents, I suspect, is the prospect of not getting to govern as Caesar for the second half of his term. Having a Congress that’s once again demonstrating a modicum of independence would spoil the monarchical reverie in which he’s spent the past 13 months. And having a blue wave descend at the polls would ruin the fantasy he’s entertained since November 2024 that Americans voted not so much for his agenda but for allegiance to him, to be guided by his instincts and priorities wherever they might lead. My guess is he would sooner rig an election that everyone understands is rigged than be forced to relinquish that fantasy.

 

So, while Congress almost certainly won’t grant his wish of nationalizing the midterms, we can count on the president to pull various lesser stunts aimed at tilting the electoral playing field. He’ll issue new executive orders purporting to force certain voting requirements on the states and hope that “his” Supreme Court justices come through for him. He’ll look for pretexts to dispatch the FBI to major Democratic counties in swing states in hopes of intimidating election officials there. He’ll pressure friendly state government entities, like Georgia’s election board, to seize control of election infrastructure in local left-wing strongholds and do the job that congressional Republicans won’t do.

 

And of course, as David French envisioned in his latest column, he’ll deploy ICE in Democratic cities sometime this summer or fall to give nonwhite citizens a reason not to risk leaving their homes on Election Day.

 

The lesson of January 6 is that the president will make America pay any civic price to spare him the narcissistic agony of having to admit defeat. In the end, his push for Congress to nationalize the midterms might be no more complicated than that. Remember, for postliberals, outcomes always trump process (no pun intended). If the country has to burn for the sake of victory, light the match.