Trump assaulted freedom. Americans are fighting back. That's the story of the midterms
Trump assaulted freedom. Americans are fighting back. That's the story of the midterms
The GOP prefers a dictator. Voters don't.
Election Day for the 2026 congressional elections is tomorrow. The future of democracy is at stake. Here are some final thoughts on the most consequential midterm of our lifetimes.
Voters are mad. The conventional wisdom is that it’s over inflation and the economy. They have good reason to be. As I have said a few times, we are all feeling the effects of a triple whammy: illegal war, illegal taxes (tariffs) and illegal deportations. Before January 2025, Bidenomics was working. Wages were going up. Inflation was falling. But then Trump returned and almost instantly reversed all those gains. He promised to bring down costs. He raised them instead. The midterms are being framed as judgment on a broken promise.
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SubscribedThe conventional wisdom is wrong. He promised whiteness and delivered. Using the power of the federal government, he set out to bleach multiracial democracy: to purge institutions and civil society of commitments to equality, inclusion and justice for all. His project might have succeeded fully if not for the fact that whiteness backfires economically, as always. Farmers, trucking companies, construction firms, union members, the white working class generally – they are getting what they voted for. What they are mad about is feeling the pain of their terrible choices. On the strength of that rage, Trump and the Republicans are poised to lose GOP strongholds like Texas. The Democrats’ challenge will be figuring out how to reintegrate these voters into the larger project of democratic pluralism.
Whiteness triggered a political reaction as well as an economic one. In addition to No Kings protests, which have smashed records in terms of their size, Hispanic voters are early voting in numbers so massive they suggest the intention of punishing Trump for unleashing a secret police force on their communities and its wholesale violation of their constitutional liberties. Black voters are acting similarly, only in reaction to this year’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act. “Southern politics had settled into a truce where African Americans got guaranteed representation in exchange for Republican statewide dominance,” said Josh Zingher, a political scientist at Old Dominion. “The Supreme Court ended the truce.” Zingher suggested that the largely white press corps is missing that this is a fight for freedom.
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Trump assaulted freedom. Economics is only one aspect of a larger agenda, but it’s the aspect that gets the most media attention. Freedom and economics are not separable, however, as old neoliberals like Milton Friedman used to say. The consequences of betraying the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the rule of law are not theoretical. They are deeply and powerfully felt by individuals and communities, though it will take time before they are fully understood. For now, the press corps is focused on telling the story about voters punishing Trump for “policy failures.” However, the story should be about voters punishing Trump for his crimes, and the broadbased demand for the restoration of law and order.
Trump’s are high crimes and misdemeanors. Here’s a partial list from a Times editorial urging the electorate to hold the president and his party accountable on Tuesday. “He has broken his oath to defend the Constitution by trying to rewrite it on his own. He has refused to honor Congress’s power of the purse and misused national security laws for political ends. He has defied federal court orders on Medicaid funding, deportation orders and more. He has dismantled the Justice Department’s legacy as an impartial enforcer of federal law, turning it into an instrument of retribution against his adversaries while canceling investigations into his allies. He has appointed inept sycophants to oversee crucial government functions, including law enforcement, national defense and public health. He has sought to disenfranchise large numbers of voters, claiming fraud that cannot be found, and championed an extreme new approach to partisan gerrymandering.”
The Republicans in the Congress are complicit. They have done nothing to stop a crime spree that has robbed the people of their rights, freedom and wealth. They stood by while he dismantled federal agencies without congressional approval, squandered US credibility abroad, sabotaged global alliances, and undermined public trust. They looked the other way while he enriched himself with tens of thousands of illegal stock trades. They are blind to the billionaires who are bribing him in plain sight. They didn’t mind his sham prosecutions of perceived political enemies. And they allowed for his most destructive choices: his decision to impose illegal taxes (tariffs) and to attack Iran. The Republicans are fond of saying that America is a republic, not a democracy, but by their actions, they don’t believe even that. They would clearly prefer a dictator. Their problem is voters no longer falling for the scam.
The GOP also masked Trump’s dementia. They said his victory was a mandate to rule in the name of “real Americans,” so mentioning his dementia was an implied affront to that mandate. But as his power fades, so does the taboo. The Times (finally) ran a story Sunday, in uncharacteristically blunt language, analyzing how much Trump has deteriorated. “The president in his second term has used 19 percent more all-or-nothing words like ‘always,’ ‘never,’ ‘everything’ and ‘totally’ at rallies than he did a decade ago and 5 percent more than in 2024, a sign of black-and-white thinking that experts say often accompanies advancing age or cognitive decline,” the Times said. With AI-assisted analysis, the Times found Trump “makes rambling or confusing digressions in his rallies and speeches two and a half times as often in his second term as in the 2016 campaign, although roughly the same as in 2024.”
When I say blunt, I mean blunt. The Times:
“The weave seems to be getting weavier.”
“He is profoundly and proudly undisciplined. He says things that are manifestly unhelpful to him.”
“He wanders from thought to thought, often without finishing a sentence, embedding one off-the-cuff story within another.”
“His focus on the male anatomy, for instance, has become remarkably pronounced lately.”
“He snaps at reporters so often now that he barely waits for their questions before calling them ‘sick’ and ordering, ‘Quiet!’”
“His exhortations to supporters to vote have grown more vulgar and violent as well.”
“He depicts himself as all-powerful.”
“The commander in chief who recently threatened to ‘annihilate’ Iran complained bitterly that he did not win the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Trump’s dementia is a wild card. Some fear he will escalate the Iran war in a rage after the midterms, widening it to include Gulf allies already under siege. The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend on the true extent of the destruction of US bases in the Middle East. During the first six months of the war, Iran hit over 270 buildings in 24 installations in seven countries, causing billions in damage. That dynamic would surely get worse if he escalates the war. Politico reported this morning that allies fear he’ll go all-in for Russia, even more than he already has, by pulling US troops out of Europe, cutting off NATO funding, leaving nations exposed to Vladimir Putin’s imperialism. He’s capable of activating NATO’s Article 5, which says an attack on one is an attack on all. There are rumors that Benjamin Netanyahu, whose power is also waning, could talk Trump into triggering Armageddon.
The midterms are about freedom and taking it back. That’s a narrative worth cementing right now in the public consciousness, because his reaction to losing the midterms will underscore it, therefore deepening his unpopularity and perhaps emboldening grassroots resistance more, hopefully creating conditions to restrain him in case he goes totally bonkers with military power. At home, he will almost certainly try some kind of second coup attempt. A judicial version is already taking shape. Today, he asked the Supreme Court to intervene in an entirely phony California case involving 20,000 mail-in ballots. Harder displays of oppression may come if those softer forms fail (and they will fail). The president plans to dispatch 1,000 “poll monitors” in search of “fraud” in a bid to create a pretext of defying voters’ will. If the story is about economics this month, it will be about freedom next month.
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© 2026 John Stoehr
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