Everyone is right to expect a big blue wave—maybe a tsunami—in the midterms this fall. Even with all of the gerrymandering, the odds of Democrats winning control of the House are strong. The Senate, which Republicans now control 53-47, is much closer, which makes it more likely to be the locus of a constitutional crisis.
Donald Trump is a chaos agent, and his fear of impeachment and a Senate trial are making him desperate and more dangerous. He can’t cancel the midterms, but he will use the enormous powers of his office to try to invalidate the election of Democrats, even where the margins aren’t close.
It’s easy to miss that a slow-motion rolling coup attempt is already underway, staged by Stephen Miller and, of course, Trump himself. When Trump told The New York Times early this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in 2020, that was a clear signal that he will likely try to do so after the midterms.
In the not-so-fanciful scenario below, I try to show that only a powerful outside-inside resistance can save us from a constitutional crisis late this year.
The outsiders are all of us, working for a Democratic landslide starting this summer, getting out the early vote, and poll watching on November 3, then taking to the streets in November, December, and January, probably under the No Kings umbrella.
The insiders, if they have the patriotism for it, are former presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden; former vice presidents Quayle, Gore, Cheney (represented by his daughter Liz), Pence and Harris; former Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer; former federal Judge Michael Luttig (representing thousands of lawyers and retired judges), former Fed Chair Jerome Powell and investor Warren Buffett, among other luminaries, who need to be in touch with each other and prepared to speak as one when Trump’s coup attempt goes operational. Call them meta election observers. We’ll need them.
Maybe Trump will be so weak politically that he won’t try anything. But that didn’t stop him on January 6, and he’s more emboldened now. Immunity has bred impunity.
The following is all-too-plausible. I’m pretending it’s January 3, 2027, and this is a roundup story about how we got to this sorry pass. Everything before July 1, 2026, is accurate; everything after is speculative:
Washington, January 3, 2027…
The 2026 Election Crisis eased today as both houses of Congress accepted the states’ certificates of election and, on the first day of the new session, completed the peaceful transfer of power from Republican to Democratic control.
Powered by big Democratic victories in November, Democratic Rep. Hakim Jeffries was easily elected the new House Speaker. The Senate can wait before electing a majority leader, but the vote to seat the five newly-elected Democrats assures that the new leader will also be a Democrat.
The resolution of the crisis came after more than two months of efforts by President Trump to overturn the results of the midterm elections with unfounded accusations of vote fraud. His efforts sparked mass protests, which gave him a pretext to invoke emergency powers and interfere in elections that, under the U.S. Constitution, are handled by the states. Republican lawmakers only broke from Mr. Trump today under pressure from a group led by all living former presidents, vice presidents and Supreme Court Justices.
Mr. Trump never made any secret of his intentions, explaining to Republicans in January of 2026 on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection:
“You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,”
That month, he informed The New York Times that there were no external limits on his power:
“There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”
In a Reuters interview, he was more specific:
“When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
The roots of the crisis go back to 2016, when Mr. Trump, with the help of the Russians, sowed doubt about the integrity of the American election system, even though it is decentralized. He did so again in 2020 and 2024, despite multiple investigations that have shown that American elections are cleaner and more secure than at any time in U.S. history. Out of the billions of ballots cast in the last 25 years, election officials and prosecutors have identified only a few cases of non-citizens voting, and that was by accident.
Mr. Trump hoped gerrymandering would help Republicans hold power. After Texas, California, and eight other states drew new maps, it was clear by late June of 2026 that the gerrymandering wars netted six seats for the Republicans. Added to the three-vote GOP margin in the outgoing Congress, that meant Democrats had to flip 10 out of the 25-30 most vulnerable Republican seats to take control, which, throughout 2026, even many Republicans considered likely.
Frustrated by his continued poor prospects in the midterms, Mr. Trump planned several other ways to restrict voting. He pressured Republican lawmakers to pass the SAVE Act, which banned all mail-in voting and required proof of citizenship to vote. The bill would have disenfranchised tens of millions of women whose birth certificates, if they could even find them, do not match the married names they used to register.
As the federal bill floundered, Mr. Trump in March signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to compile state-by-state citizenship lists with personal information (e.g. Social Security numbers and phone numbers), and instructing the Justice Department to investigate groups distributing ballots to ineligible voters, though there is no evidence of any such groups ever doing so.
An April executive order banned mail-in voting. When that was challenged in court on the grounds that the Constitution explicitly says states determine the rules of elections, Mr. Trump changed tactics. He leaned on the U.S. Postal Service, an independent government entity, to issue a new rule requiring post offices to refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in states that won’t give the Trump Administration the records containing personal information demanded in the March executive order. After 23 states filed suits to block these breaches of privacy, three courts in early 2026 ruled against Trump, who continued his efforts to discredit mail-in ballots, now used by 30 percent of voters.
Ever since his second term began, Mr. Trump has focused on expanding his emergency powers. On September 25, 2025, he signed a National Presidential Security Memorandum, known as NPSM-7. This extraordinary document grants the president broad wartime powers to designate Americans as possible terrorists if the federal government considers them or their sponsors “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian” or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” NPSM-7 gives the Trump Administration a green light to target any protester, violent or not, and anyone working on any Democratic campaign or voter registration drive, and to treat political speech as terrorism.
The president also possesses classified emergency powers in the form of PEADs (Presidential Emergency Action Documents), which were developed during the Eisenhower Administration as a single instructional book in case of a nuclear attack on Washington. Such powers include the authority to detain individuals designated as terrorists, restrict movement, seize property, and assume control of communications systems.
Mr. Trump has also spoken several times about invoking the Insurrection Act, but the sweeping powers he already enjoys—through NPSM-7 and PEADs—may be easier to implement.
Mr. Trump’s is still trying to spread his debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In February of 2026, FBI agents seized truckloads of 2020 ballots from the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta, despite no evidence of wrongdoing. The probe—a kind of dress rehearsal for the midterms—began with an election denier working in the Trump White House. Tulsi Gabbard, then director of national intelligence, was on the scene, an early sign that Mr. Trump might make use of intelligence services in domestic politics, a violation of federal law.
In a second rehearsal for the coming confrontation, the FBI in June of 2026 tried to intimidate Ohio Democrats by raiding the Cleveland office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a George Soros-backed progressive group. Federal agents searched the homes of people associated with the group, and a board member of the grassroots organization accused the agents of “intimidation tactics and harassment.” The FBI operation laid the groundwork for post-election accusations of voter fraud in Ohio.
A third rehearsal, focused on delegitimizing the whole idea of elections, came after the June California primary. Because of its extensive use of mail-in ballots, California, which has a reputation for clean elections, takes days to count the vote. Mr. Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and federal prosecutors in California all took this as evidence of fraud, and prosecutors opened bogus investigations.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified that he could not rule out sending troops to polling places, even after warnings from lawmakers that doing so would be clearly illegal.
Attorneys trying to block Mr. Trump’s efforts later acknowledged that they had not done enough to deter abuses by threatening pro-Trump lawyers with disbarment and civil suits if they intervened in the midterms, and by warning government officials that, unlike the president, they enjoyed no immunity from prosecution.
As the campaign heated up, Mr. Trump’s numbers continued to sag. He thought that he had put the Iran War behind him with his June 19 deal. But the ceasefire expired in late August, and Iranian negotiators were determined to embarrass the American president. This ensured that Trump’s failures in Iran would be back in the news over Labor Day, just weeks before early voting began. Inflation came down a little, but not enough to help Republicans.
In October, Elon Musk and the crypto and AI industries poured tens of millions into Republican campaigns. This affected the outcome of several contests, but it would not prove decisive overall. As in Wisconsin’s 2025 judicial elections, Musk’s involvement boomeranged on any Republican taking his money. And outspent Democratic candidates compensated for all of the SuperPAC money being used against them with effective ads charging that their opponents were “bought by billionaires.”
As early voting began, “No Kings” rallies drew 15 million people nationwide. The message from organizers was that if even 10% of attendees volunteered to get out the vote, the Democratic operation would easily exceed Barack Obama’s 2008 million-member Election Day operation as the largest political organization in U.S. history.
At three of the more than 2,100 “No Kings” events, some of the same violent protesters who disrupted peaceful vigils outside an ICE detention center in New Jersey made news by clashing with police.
With that pretext, Trump announced that he was sending ICE and other federal law enforcement personnel to polling places, as recommended by Steve Bannon after ICE agents were deployed in airports. The decision was fiercely resisted in federal court and caused another sag in Trump’s popularity..
On Election Night, 2026, the trend line for the midterms was apparent early. Just as in special elections in 2025 and 2026, Democrats romped. By 1:00 a.m., it was clear that even with many mail-in ballots still uncounted, Democrats would have at least a 20-seat majority in the House. Most of the new seats were in states with Democratic governors, which meant there was little chance the results would not be certified. The Senate was much tighter, but Democrats were on track to pick up five seats, giving them a 52-48 majority.
As he did in 2020, Mr.Trump went on TV late in the evening to say that Republicans had won “by a lot” and this time he said he would use all of his authority to investigate and prosecute Democrats for vote fraud. They’re crooked and we will lock them up,” he said of Democrats.
At 3:00 a.m., the president called Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas, where James Talarico had claimed a narrow victory and Ken Paxton announced he would not concede—ever. With Latino voters streaming back to the Democrats, two of the five new seats created by the new maps that had set off the mid-decade redistricting frenzy had gone blue, plus TX-15, where a popular singer knocked off an incumbent.
To calm Trump down, Abbott told him what he wanted to hear, despite the lack of any evidence: “There is massive voter fraud underway in Texas, Mr. President. Not everywhere, but along the Rio Grande and in Austin, Houston, and a few blue areas of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro. The secretary of state, Jane Nelson, is my appointee, and you can rest assured, she will not be certifying Talarico or those three other Dems before we have full recounts and investigations.”
Over the next month, with control of the Senate still hanging in the balance, the national conversation turned to certification of elections, which is a ministerial duty with no discretion by county officials or secretaries of state, especially after recounts.
In North Carolina, Democrat Roy Cooper flipped the seat held by retiring Sen. Thom Tillis, and the bipartisan North Carolina Board of Elections certified his election. But Trump made sure that Attorney General Todd Blanche reminded the three Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys in North Carolina that he expected them to open fraud investigations.
One of the brightest spots for Democrats was the election of Paralympic gold medalist Josh Turek in Iowa. But U.S. Attorney Leif Olson, a hardcore Trump loyalist in a state where the GOP is extremely pro-Trump, announced a criminal investigation of voter fraud and bristled when reporters pressed him for evidence.
Georgia was a mess. Senator Jon Ossoff, a hot Democratic prospect for 2028, won by a healthy six points, but even a much larger margin would not have prevented Mr. Trump from crying foul. The president couldn’t call Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger again, looking to “find” votes, as he had in early January of 2021. But he didn’t need to. After the 2020 election, Georgia adopted new administrative rules that invite many election officials to investigate results before certifying, a recipe for slowing the process.
Earlier in 2026, a Trump-appointed federal judge upheld the Justice Department’s raid on the Fulton County Courthouse and its seizure of 2020 ballots, despite no evidence of tampering. This gave Blanche an excuse to send the feds in to seize all 2026 Fulton County ballots and election equipment. Election officials there sat down in front of the voting machines and were arrested for obstructing a federal investigation, but their civil disobedience went viral and was copied everywhere FBI raids took place.
In early December, No Kings produced another day of huge protest, but this time Mr.Trump told his followers to stage counter-protests at the same sites. The Proud Boys, including some of the same violent insurrectionists pardoned by Trump, began beating peaceful anti-Trump protesters. When a few fought back, Trump had the pretext he needed to invoke NPSM-7 and PEAD.
The FBI raided the homes of law-abiding anti-Trump activists, including No Kings organizers, as it had in Ohio in May of 2026. Under NPSM-7, hundreds were designated as “domestic terrorists” and jailed. And under PEADs, Mr. Trump could act now and worry later about civil liberties.
With Mr. Trump now running a police state, former presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices finally came off the sidelines. On December 22, a hastily-organized Committee on Election Integrity issued an open letter in support of certification of the legitimate winners and filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the president’s use of NPSM-7 and PEAD powers—intended for nuclear war—was unconstitutional in domestic politics.
The same morning, former Fed Chair Powell, a member of the committee, told CNBC that he expected the market to lose one-third of its value if the election results were not respected and the U.S. was seen as no longer being a democracy. A day later, the organizers of No Kings called for a general strike starting January 6 that promised to shut down the U.S. economy until the will of the people was respected.
On December 28th, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that NPSM-7 and PEADs did not apply in domestic politics and that while fraud investigations could continue, they could not delay the resolution of the midterm elections. The majority opinion noted that under the Constitution, the Senate alone determines who should be seated in that chamber.
That set up the historic Senate vote before noon today, in which Republican lame ducks Cassidy, Collins, Cornyn, and Tillis (plus Murkowski) voted with the Democrats to seat the new members. At noon, all the senators-elect became senators.
Under the Constitution, the vice president is president of the Senate, but he has no role in determining the composition of that body. All that was left for Vice President Vance was to announce the results and bring down the gavel, symbolizing the failure of Mr. Trump’s efforts to steal the election.
Subscribe to Old Goats with Jonathan Alter, where this article originally appeared.
Resources to join the fight against what former Reps. Dick Gephardt and David Skaggs and former Sen. Tim Wirth call a “rolling coup”:
Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote For This, by Ira Shapiro and Anne Kim
