With no real national leadership or fresh message and weak fundraising heading into this year’s midterm run-up, Democrat centrists and progressives are feuding and have had no agenda to offer beyond “Trump bad” and “affordability.”
Alas, Republicans have a well-established tradition of halfhearted midterm voting and a proclivity for their own self-defeating ideological squabbles. That alone threatens the GOP’s slim control of Congress and would stymie the conservative agenda through 2028.
But — Attention, everyone! — if Democrats capture enough Republican seats in both chambers this fall, we will undoubtedly encounter yet another impeachment of President Donald J. Trump. And while conviction and ouster would require the higher bar of two-thirds of the Senate (which would necessarily require some Republican votes in addition to the Democrats), that possibility can't be wholly ruled out. Were that to come to pass, it would mark the first legally successful ousting of a president in U.S. history.
And what fearful broader results might erupt from that precedent, not just violent rhetoric and lengthy legal cases?
That is what’s really at stake this year: a fundamental transformation of our government system that could transform the standard four-year presidential term into presidencies whose duration is subject to legislative votes of confidence through impeachments that could oust the commander in chief at any time.
Nancy Pelosi’s two House impeachments in Trump’s first term were mere stunts. They were designed, like all the other hoaxes and lawfare cases, to ruin his finances, business, and reputation for reelection.
They failed miserably for one main reason: Trump’s Republican Party controlled the Senate, and not nearly enough Republican senators supported his ouster. However, if Democrats win enough races there on Nov. 3, that legal roadblock becomes less certain.
Is anyone naïve enough to believe that after 11 failed years of serial, bitter attempted sabotage of Trump’s presidencies, frustrated Democrats would not try this before 2028?
If you string this scenario out a ways, a successful impeachment of Trump would make JD Vance president. His nomination of a new vice president would require confirmation by the same Congress that just overthrew Trump.
That process took months in a different era when Gerald Ford succeeded Republican Richard Nixon in 1974 and chose Nelson Rockefeller as his VP. Democrats controlled both houses then and stretched confirmation out four months.
If a partisan Democrat Congress kept going now, why not impeach Vance, too? That – are you sitting down? – would elevate the House Speaker to the presidency, one way for Democrats to regain the White House.
Currently, the Democrat House leader is Hakeem Jeffries (NY-08), the nebbish from Brooklyn who helped manage Trump's impeachments.
At minimum, we'll be saddled with the absolute circus of Impeachment Theater. And if the nightmare scenario theorized above seems far-fetched, think back on some recent times:
The seamy Russiagate hoax with peeing prostitutes that the FBI pretended to believe, a presidential son and coke-head making millions from foreign countries off his father’s name, an unaware president unable to speak or think coherently, and media covering his reelection campaign as if it was credible. Or even Trump's 2016 win.
This is what’s at stake this year.
We’re just nine days from the first anniversary of Trump 2.0. And 42 Tuesdays away from those fateful midterm elections that will determine so much about the 47th president’s agenda and history in his final two years.
Given the blizzard of actions, legislation, and controversial Trump decisions in the first 24 percent of this term, some presidents might be satisfied with that record for an entire term.
The Trump name will be on no ballot anywhere in November, though Democrats will try to make it all about him. Modern midterms have become oblique interim verdicts on a sitting president’s job, which are rendered on his party in Congress.
Mainstream media has already pronounced a looming – and wishful – political doom on Trump, the Democrat Party’s zombie nightmare who just won’t go away despite all their hoaxes, trials, and impeachments.
Soon, you’ll be encountering more “news” stories raising questions about Trump’s age and health. Photographers have caught him blinking at times, suggesting he’s fallen asleep in public, as you-know-who did routinely. Reporters have also eagerly noted occasions when Trump failed to hear a reporter’s shouted question.
Trump turns 80 in June, still nearly four years younger than his predecessor, the oldest president ever, who had trouble with screen doors and speaking coherently. Please, let me know if Trump ever asks an audience where a dead member of Congress is, as Joe Biden did.
Trump has had none of those problems, and instead of staff hiding him from the public as Biden’s did, Trump engages with media regularly, often several times a day. His social media announcement of the Venezuelan operation came around 4 a.m.
History suggests Republicans will lose their slim House control in November and maybe the Senate, too. In the 20 most recent midterm elections, a president’s party has lost Senate seats in 15 and House seats in 18 — losses there averaging more than 20 seats.
Currently, the GOP holds 53 of the 100 Senate seats and 218 to 213 in the House with four vacancies.
That would be a disaster for the president’s policy and political agenda. I wrote this past week about Democrats’ top campaign vow to motivate their midterm voters: Trump’s immediate impeachment. If his base stays home, that could come.
It’s familiar and predictable red meat designed to motivate the Never Trumpers. Trump has inhabited their minds since he declared in 2015, eliminated 16 mostly veteran GOP politicians, and then, worst of all, in an historic upset, denied Hillary Clinton her rightful Oval Office inheritance.
Democrats are notorious promise-makers and promise-forgetters. But it won’t take much of an election win for them to erase the slim Republican majority in the House and, perhaps, the Senate.
We’ll see if that’s enough of a threat to turn out GOP midterm voters en masse for a change.
Beware of applying the past too strictly to Trump. History – and media – suggested a rookie politician in his very first campaign had no chance of winning a presidential election.
Let alone one against Clinton. She was so sure her destiny involved becoming the first female POTUS that she didn’t bother campaigning in some strongholds that, in turn, didn’t bother to vote for her.
Over the years, with the help of complicit media and the FBI, Democrats generated that malicious hoax about Trump. Then impeachments and a broad array of lawsuits and forced indictments to break him financially and emotionally, any one of which would have torpedoed the career and life of a normal politician.
As you may have noticed, Trump is not a normal politician.
And then in 2024, for the first time in 132 years and only the second time in U.S. history, a defeated president was reelected for a second nonconsecutive term.
More unexpected will occur this year. Here’s some of what we know so far:
- The date for the president’s annual State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress is now set for Feb. 24. That will be a closely-watched listing of achievements and new goals.
- More than four dozen members of Congress have announced retirements this year, including longtime duds like Pelosi (CA-11) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). More will come. No one could possibly be older, but this could inject fresh new blood into a Congress with historically low job approval. Or not. Hope springs eternal.
- By summer, the Supreme Court will issue several major decisions, including Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship.
- The Winter Olympics come next month in Italy. The World Cup starts in summer with an expanded 48 teams competing in 104 matches in 16 cities across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
- July 4th marks the 250th birthday of the United States with a wide array of nationwide celebrations planned all year.
- Sometime after early February, NASA plans to launch the Artemis II mission, sending four crew members on a 10-day flight around the Moon and back, testing the capsule and launch rocket for later flights and the first landing there since 1972.
- Much political and media attention will focus on the economy in 2026. The GDP report for the third quarter, delayed by the Schumer Shutdown, showed unexpectedly strong growth of 4.3 percent annually from July through September.
That’s good news for Trump, who needs to convince voters that things are better now, that inflation remains tamed under 3 percent annually, that the southern border is closed, criminal deportations are underway, and that he’s reduced drug prices with Big Pharma.
Presidents can’t order lower prices, as many might like. They can, however, affect supplies, which control prices. Hence, gas prices are down, as are costs for some foods like eggs and other staples. Gas, which averaged $3.24 a gallon when Trump took office, ended the year at $3.02.
- In foreign affairs this year, the uncertain Venezuelan coup aftermath will dominate. Key now will be a peaceful transition from bankrupt socialism and dictatorship to free enterprise democracy, no easy task with most of the old socialist regime still in place.
- Trump’s quest for some kind of peace in Ukraine – sometimes it seems any kind of peace would please him — will continue. Russia’s Vladimir Putin continues stalling a real settlement, hoping to continue territorial gains and weaken Western patience and resolve. Trump has shown more patience with him than European allies.
- After his first term, Trump boasted of not launching any new foreign military commitments. This term, he’s ordered massive bombing attacks that set back Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. This weekend, he ordered air attacks on ISIS elements in Syria.
- Trump has threatened Iran with unspecified military action if the mullahs continue to kill regime protesters, which they are doing.
Other than any of this, 2026 looks pretty quiet, right?
