A Blessing in Disguise

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, October 16, 2026

 

One problem with belonging to a political party composed of Leopards Eating Other People’s Faces is that the leopards eventually start eating each other’s faces.

 

Until recently, most of the mastication has happened at the grassroots level. For instance, some Trumpists of Indian ancestry have been dismayed to find that parts of their own base don’t care much for Indians, just as many Trumpists who support Israel have discovered some don’t care much for Jews. Who could have guessed that a movement of tribal postliberal demagogues might end up with a cohort of bigots that makes no exception for the suckers in its own ranks?

 

At long last, though, face-eating has begun inside the White House.

 

With a possible electoral disaster impending, the knives are allegedly out for chief of staff Susie Wiles. Donald Trump didn’t consult her before appointing his new (and now former) press secretary, the Washington Post claims, a move that “was viewed internally as undermining Wiles, creating the impression of a less-disciplined operation and an unsettled center of power inside the West Wing.” Elite toadies ranging from Stephen Miller to Bill Pulte to Lee Zeldin have reportedly already begun “angling” for her job in case a vacancy should open.

 

Meanwhile, former Trump lawyer Alina Habba Mildon apparently met with Trump last week to accuse Kennedy Center supremo Ric Grenell of what sounds an awful lot like embezzlement. Mildon claims that her husband sent millions to a bank account “at Mr. Grenell’s direction” in exchange for a promise that her husband would get to feed at the trough of Venezuela’s oil riches. (Grenell was Trump’s special envoy to that country before being demoted to entertainment impresario.) Of that money, $5.6 million was supposed to go to the Kennedy Center. According to Mildon, it never did. Grenell denies everything.

 

Only in this administration would the president be asked to mediate a dispute over whether a pay-to-play bribe made to one of his deputies failed to produce the specified “play.”

 

That’s not all. A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal reported that Pulte, in his role as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, “clashed” last year with then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Pulte had dug up evidence of possible mortgage fraud by Trump enemies like New York Attorney General Letitia James and was frustrated that Blanche wasn’t pursuing the matter more aggressively. So, according to the Journal, he dug up Blanche’s own mortgage paperwork—presumably to see if he could find any irregularities he might use as leverage against him, to hurry him along.

 

That’s still not all. The Atlantic reported yesterday that it wasn’t just distaste for public executions that led J.D. Vance to oppose Pete Hegseth’s now-canceled Nidal Hasan snuff film. “One administration official told us that Vance’s response reflected his general frustration with Hegseth, who, like Vance, is said to harbor 2028 presidential ambitions,” the magazine alleged. Part of that frustration surely also has to do with Hegseth having pushed out Dan Driscoll, a longtime friend of the vice president’s, as Army chief. Payback will come at some point for Secretary Pete.

 

All of this face-eating has me wondering whether some leopards might secretly be hoping that they’ll get to feast on something more appetizing next year.

 

The downside for the Republican Party of controlling the government over the past 21 months is that it’s had no foil—no enemy to unite against, no opponent with whom to share blame for America’s misfortunes, no faces worth chewing on. So it’s eating its own. That fractiousness might persist if the GOP retains its House and Senate majorities on Election Day, ensuring two more years without a foil for a party that’s already facing an uncertain post-Trump future.

 

So if you’re a loyal partisan Republican, maybe you (gasp) shouldn’t want the GOP to overperform.

 

There’s no point trying to convince partisan conservatives that their party will benefit morally or civically from being repudiated at the polls this year. The sort of anti-anti-Trump chumps who’ve gone on pulling the lever through 10 years of Trumpist depravity are deaf to such things. But I wonder if they’d consider an appeal to their partisan power-lust—that is, an argument that the GOP will benefit strategically from a midterm loss. Is there a case to be made that the party will accrue more power on balance over the next two election cycles if it loses this year?

 

For conservative Republicans, could the blue wave be a blessing in disguise?

 

2028.

 

The case that conservatives might be better off with a Democratic Congress falls apart instantly if you think there’s a chance the president will spend his final two years in office governing in a reasonable manner. If he intends to embrace popular policies that will improve Republicans’ chances in 2028, then wanting the GOP in charge of the House and Senate to enact those policies is a no-brainer.

 

But he’s not going to do that, is he?

 

Trump will get worse. The fact that figures as loathsome as Pulte and Miller stand a chance of replacing Wiles as chief of staff tells you all you need to know about what his lame-duck era will look like. Liberated from any longer having to care what voters think, the president is about to go full Trump. And going full Trump will not make the Republican Party more popular come 2028. On the contrary.

 

That’s the first argument for why partisan conservatives should prefer a Democratic Congress. Democrats might save the president from some of his most self-destructive excesses by using their legislative leverage to thwart him, sparing Vance and Republican candidates downballot in 2028 from having to answer for those sins. If the president wakes up next year and decides, say, that he wants to start sending weapons to Moscow to help the Kremlin in its heroic crusade against Ukraine, a Democratic Congress might start cutting off funding to federal agencies to force him to relent.

 

But a Republican Congress? After Trump’s barnstorming helped deliver an unexpected midterm victory for them? I wouldn’t bet a dime on them intervening. And if they don’t, how do you like J.D.’s chances two years from now when he’s stuck having to explain to swing voters why arming the Russians was a good idea?

 

Having a common enemy to rally the right against is another key Republican benefit from a Democratic victory, as I suggested above. As Trump’s heir apparent, the vice president is facing a very dicey outlook if his party remains solely culpable for whatever insanity this country will spend the next 27 months being subjected to.

 

With the GOP in control of Congress, Vance will own the president’s failures completely in the 2028 election. He’ll also have his work cut out for him in trying to hold together an increasingly untenable Republican coalition of “America First” postliberals and traditional conservatives. As Trump staggers toward retirement, those factions will compete ferociously for control of the GOP’s direction. And, having spent more than five minutes observing the VP, I’m skeptical that Vance’s animal charisma will be enough to unify them.

 

A Democratic Congress might solve those problems for him. As Democrats begin antagonizing Trump, most of the right will do what it always does: putting aside differences and coming together behind him. And Vance will suddenly have a ready scapegoat whom he can blame for any policy disasters that America stumbles into. In the scenario I raised about Democrats shutting down the government to block some Russia-friendly Trump gambit, for example, the VP could and would spin any subsequent economic downturn during the president’s term as a product of that shutdown—whether that’s true or not.

 

We need to put Congress back in Republican hands to restore the glory days of 2026, he’ll say on the trail two years from now. And partisan conservatives will nod thoughtfully.

 

There’s one more reason those partisans might logically prefer to have Democrats in charge next year. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the GOP might benefit politically from having the opposition performing oversight of Trump.

 

Team Trump’s graft has been so flagrant and so grotesque that, according to a new Fox News poll, “corruption in government” is now the issue about which voters say they’re most concerned. “Inflation and high prices” has fallen to No. 2. Do you realize how unethical an administration has to be to make civically catatonic Americans care more about corruption than they do about the cost of living when diesel is $6 a gallon?

 

Do you further realize how much worse the White House’s graft will get over the final two years of Trump’s presidency if his party remains in charge of Congress, scrupulously indifferent to what he’s up to? MAGA’s heroes will steal everything that isn’t nailed down. And if they do, as much of a political problem as corruption is for the GOP right now, it will be an order of magnitude greater for Vance and his party come 2028.

 

The one thing that might cause the president and his cronies to keep their noses somewhat cleaner for the rest of his term is putting Democrats in charge of the House and/or Senate next year, armed with subpoena power. If that happens and the graft tails off, the vice president will be poised to argue in 2028 that Trumpist corruption is old news. “Some people around the president behaved badly in 2026,” he might say, “but then Donald Trump cracked down.” Afflicted with famously short memories and attention spans, American voters might buy it.

 

There are other things we could say here about why a Democratic Congress would be better for conservatism. Shaming the right by exposing Trump’s corruption would be good for Reaganites in the long term, for instance, because it would demonstrate that postliberals can’t be trusted with power. Likewise (and as strange as it may sound), having leftists in charge of the House and Senate until 2029 would probably make the government more fiscally responsible. Democrats will oppose Trump’s atrocious tariffs and runaway spending out of partisan spite, but Republicans will not.

 

The partisan conservatives we’re trying to persuade don’t actually care about conservatism on the merits, though, only about whether the laundry they’re rooting for gets to be in charge. So let’s move on.

 

Nominees.

 

I struggle to see any downside for right-wing partisans in Democrats winning the House. If your partisanship is so nihilistic that you’d prefer that the public simply not know how much racketeering our Republican head of state is engaged in, I suppose that’s a reason not to want the opposition in charge of the House Oversight Committee.

 

And if you can think of some important legislation that Trump hopes to pass over the next two years, that would also be an argument for preferring a GOP House majority. But if you do think of it, let me know. I’m stumped.

 

Given how dysfunctional Speaker Mike Johnson’s Republican conference has been this year and the probability that Democrats will gain at least a few seats next month, a Republican midterm “victory” might leave the party with a one-vote majority and a total inability to govern. Under those circumstances, isn’t it better to be in the minority, making life hell for Hakeem Jeffries instead?

 

There’s no good partisan case for wanting Republicans to retain the House—but there is a case for wanting to retain the Senate, which is responsible for confirming presidential nominees, of course. Judges judges judges was the argument in 2016 for conservatives to embrace Trump’s immorality, and judges judges judges remains the argument in 2026 for them to keep pulling that lever for garbage.

 

What type of judges, exactly, are partisan conservatives expecting in years seven and eight of a Trump presidency, though?

 

That’s probably a stupid question to ask. Again, these people don’t care about conservatism on the merits, so whether they get an Amy Coney Barrett or an Emil Bove, a Neil Gorsuch or a Todd Blanche, for the next Supreme Court vacancy is probably academic to them. They’ll get a Republican, and any Republican is good. (The motto of anti-anti-Trumpism, by the way.) But let’s be clear: They’re almost certainly not going to get someone of the caliber of the conservative triumvirate that the president added to the Supreme Court during his first term.

 

One of the few times Trump has ever admitted error in office came last month when he whined that Barrett, Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh had let him down again by blocking his attempt to restrict mail ballots in November. “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote on Truth Social, “they are merely a shell of their original selves.” If I’m right that his postliberalism will grow more extreme after the election, when he’ll no longer need to care about public opinion, we should expect his taste in judicial nominees to grow more extreme as well.

 

Loyalists, not originalists. Toadies, not constitutionalists. A Republican Senate will rubber-stamp Trump’s nominees, fearing that every vacancy that goes unfilled before 2029 will eventually be filled by a Democratic president. A federal bench stocked for decades with eminent Federalist Society eggheads will be heavily diluted with Trumpists.

 

Which, I admit, would be a sort of poetic justice for anti-anti-Trumpers. Partisan conservatives rationalized supporting Trump 10 years ago by convincing themselves that doing so was necessary to keep the judiciary conservative. It’d be a fitting reflection of their ideological bankruptcy if they were to turn out next month to keep the Senate red, enabling the president to start unmaking judicial conservatism.

 

Again, though, that argument won’t appeal to the partisan mind. Ask an anti-anti-Trumper whether they’d prefer putting Aileen Cannon on the Supreme Court to letting Senate Democrats hold open a court vacancy so that the winner of the 2028 election can fill it, and they’ll look at you like you’re crazy. (Any Republican is good!) So here’s a more pragmatic reason for them to think twice about two years of the Senate GOP rubber-stamping any ol’ judicial candidate whom Trump happens to nominate: It’s going to turbocharge Democrats’ appetite for court-packing.

 

Democrats will pack the court eventually no matter what happens next month, partisans will say. Maybe—it depends on how big their Senate majority is after Trump leaves office, assuming they have a majority at all, and whether they regain the White House. But the spectacle of Senate Republicans approving obviously unqualified Trump hacks to the Supreme Court will finish off whatever misgivings remain on the left about expanding the court and “balancing” it with hacks of its own. If the right dispenses with all pretense that it’s selecting judges based on merit or judicial philosophy rather than their willingness to deliver certain outcomes, the left will treat that as license to dispense with any pretense that it, too, still cares about judicial norms.

 

If, on the other hand, a new Democratic Senate majority managed to block some of Trump’s judicial nominees, that might tilt some on the left back toward thinking that radical reform of the judiciary is unnecessary. The old ways of influencing the composition of the bench still work; all Democrats need to do is win elections.

 

Of course, judges aren’t the only presidential nominees whom the next Senate will consider. Lord only knows what an unleashed lame-duck Trump might find under the rocks he’ll turn over to fill vacancies in his Cabinet as they emerge. The worse his appointments are (Attorney General Bill Pulte? Defense Secretary Kid Rock?), the worse his administration will function and the more probable an electoral backlash to the GOP in 2028 becomes. For self-interested reasons, then, partisan Republicans should want Congress to impose some quality control over the president’s horrendous personnel choices. A Senate led by their own party won’t.

 

Failure.

 

I realize that none of this is likely to persuade anyone, though. For two reasons.

 

My original point about face-eating is probably overblown. I do think Republicans are more likely to go on feuding with each other if they don’t have a Democratic foil over the next two years, but one could easily argue the opposite. The finger-pointing and recriminations that would follow a midterm blue wave might accelerate the right’s fractiousness and ignite political war between conservatives and postliberals. We might wake up on November 4 to find faces being eaten everywhere, as far as the eye can see.

 

It would be like a chud version of Night of the Living Dead.

 

Besides, one should never underestimate the right’s ability to manufacture catastrophist “Flight 93 election” bulls–t to paper over its divisions and restore unity. No matter how fractious things get within the GOP, they’ll come up with something in 2028 to explain why a Jon Ossoff presidency would mean the end of civilization. You don’t need a foil when you’ve got a political movement that subsists entirely on propaganda.

 

The other reason no one will be persuaded is that partisanship in one election can always be rationalized by partisanship in every future election. Sure, it might be better on balance for the GOP if Democrats controlled the legislature for the next two years—but every seat liberals win next month is a seat Republicans will need to win back in 2028. That will make winning control of Congress harder during that cycle. And if winning is harder in that cycle, it might be even harder in the next cycle, when yet more seats might need to be regained.

 

Play that out and you’re forced to conclude, conveniently, that it’s never proper to vote against the team. Do it just once, and you’re potentially voting for … well, for the end of civilization.

 

That attitude explains how a party of Leopards Eating People’s Faces managed to get reelected after it tried to eat American democracy’s face on January 6, and how it stands a fair chance of holding on to the Senate next month despite its leader very publicly trying to eat Ukraine’s face right now. There’s no conservative appeal to be made to someone who’d rather be governed by fascists than by garden-variety Democrats simply because of the laundry they’re wearing. There’s a name for people like that, and it isn’t “conservative.”