The Real ‘Flight 93’ Election

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

We all know the famous “Flight 93” essay from the 2016 election, arguing that the stakes in the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were existential.

 

It was definitely better that Trump won in 2016, but Mike Anton’s argument was overwrought. His contention that a Clinton win would cement Democratic electoral dominance forever, such that Republicans needed to charge the cockpit or die, was implausible at the time, and seems more so in retrospect.

 

If Hillary had won in 2016, in all likelihood she would have been gone in 2020, washed away by the pandemic just like Trump was.

 

We had a real-world test case of a bad Democratic politician winning the presidency in recent years — the Biden presidency didn’t result in the end of the republic, just an ineffectual single term.

 

Anton put a lot of weight on immigration policy. It’s hard to imagine how Hillary’s policy could have been worse than Joe Biden’s. He created a de facto open border, and the consequence wasn’t the destruction of America or of the GOP, but a public backlash that helped return Donald Trump to the White House.

 

This time, though, really might be different.

 

Democrats are now seriously contemplating measures that wouldn’t have occurred to Hillary Clinton circa 2016.

 

Endorsing some version of Court-packing, or “Court reform,” as Democrats insist on calling it, is becoming orthodoxy among mainstream Democrats.

 

A couple of weeks ago, James Carville said that Democrats should pack the Court and add the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states in 2028 if they get unified control of Washington.

 

Now, Carville is just a political pundit, although a prominent one who has been a relative moderate in the Democratic context. But the immediate past Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, who has some chance of winning the 2028 nomination, associated herself with the same ideas the other day. She added abolishing the Electoral College to the list.

 

If all these were to become consensus Democratic agenda items in 2028, they would constitute one of the most radical political platforms of a major political party in American history, perhaps the most radical.

 

Court-packing alone would be a seismic, system-changing event. Likewise, abolishing the Electoral College, which has been foundational to our presidential elections from the beginning.

 

The common theme of all of this would be guaranteeing outcomes — four new progressive justices, four new Democratic senators — in blatant power grabs undermining the legitimacy of the institutions in question. The Court and the U.S. Senate would never be the same, and that would be the point.

 

The effect on our politics would be toxic.

 

What would a world look like where a substantial portion of the country thinks the Supreme Court is a sham, and not because the Court is issuing opinions it doesn’t like, but because the Court has actually been fashioned to produce a predetermined ideological result through a grotesque end run around the rules?

 

Democrats will say Republicans have already done this, even though the GOP operated within standard procedures to forge the current conservative majority.

 

Did Republicans play hardball? Sure. But their influence on the composition of the Court depended on winning presidential and Senate elections and taking advantage of fortuitous timing to confirm justices the way they’ve always been confirmed.

 

Manufacturing new seats out of nothing, or forcing the retirements of conservative justices by fiat, would be a blatant rigging of the Court.

 

If a portion of the country thinks that it no longer needs to abide by the Court’s decisions, that obviously creates the predicate for serious civil strife. The same is true if the Congress is no longer seen as legitimate after it is packed with newly minted Democratic senators.

 

Democrats feel justified in embracing any means to match and exceed Trump’s comprehensive aggressiveness. Trump’s provocations — the lawfare, the executive overreach, the wars without congressional authorization, the gerrymandering — all have ample precedent among prior Democratic presidents. Democrats, of course, don’t see it that way, and they fear and loathe Donald Trump more than they have any other Republican president.

 

In reaction, should they sweep in 2028, they may try to push the American constitutional order past an event horizon from which it will never return. In other words, twelve years after we were told to charge the cockpit or die, the stakes for our system really could be existential.