The Red Card

Trump has readied an apocalyptic narrative as we head toward November midterm elections—but will he stop at words if the GOP loses?

[1,766 words: a 7-minute read]

NB: My Ukraine trip has been moved to late summer or early fall, so my posts will resume.

The celebration of the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is now behind us, and although there is much to be grateful for, even amidst the continuing erosion of American democracy, there’s reason to worry that we may be headed toward difficult, even dangerous times as the midterm elections near. In two speeches—delivered on July 3 and 4—Trump has already intimated how he’ll frame a GOP defeat: not as proof of democracy working, but as evidence of (I’m being serious, as you’ll see) a communist takeover.

Before I turn to what might happen between now and November, let me set the stage with a few thoughts about Donald Trump as a political phenomenon.

No matter what you think of Trump’s personality and politics, there’s no denying that he is a formidable politician, one who has transformed the country’s political landscape, perhaps more thoroughly than any president since the start of the 20^th century.

Though Trump personifies American privilege, he nevertheless succeeded in convincing millions of voters—nearly 63 million in 2016, 74-plus million in 2020, and more than 77 million in 2024, during which he won nearly half of all votes cast—that he was the anti-establishment candidate who would take down an out-of-touch elite that had betrayed working-class Americans by pursuing self-serving policies animated by globalization and free trade and entrapping the nation in wasteful, failed forever wars.

Trump crafted a message that both inspired voters and addressed their grievances. He understood earlier than most politicians that large sections of American society had come to believe that the economic and political system was failing them and that the deck was stacked in favor of the rich and powerful, who were becoming ever richer and ever more powerful. They saw his wealth as evidence that he could manage the economy effectively and could not be bought.

Beyond that, Trump has eroded one of the pillars of the American political order, the separation of powers—in part by turning the GOP into a cult that stands by him no matter what he’s accused of doing. The allegations include sexual assaults on women; the enrichment of himself and his family (Trump’s net worth has increased substantially since 2024 to a current $6.5 billion, according to Forbes, and, per other press reports, the fortunes of his wife, sons, and son-in-law have also soared); accepting a customized $400 million Boeing 747 from Qatar; and backing and later pardoning loyalists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, some carrying firearms—and praising them as “warriors” and “patriots” who were set up by the police.

Imagine how Congressional Republicans would have reacted if Barack Obama and Joe Biden had done anything remotely similar.

The GOP’s silence has a pattern.

It held even as Trump tried—unsuccessfully, because the courts intervened—to use the Justice Department to both seize control of state voter rolls and to gain access to voting machines used by some Missouri counties in the 2020 election, even though the Constitution gives states the right to organize elections.

It held as he pushed Republican-controlled states to gerrymanderelectoral districts to favor the GOP and called for elections to be nationalized“in at least 15 places.”

It held on the Epstein files, and it held when he raised the idea of a third term, which the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution prohibits.

On foreign policy, even though the majority of Americans turned against Trump’s Iran War, the House and Senate GOP have, with some exceptions, backed it.

Trump now effectively owns the Republican Party. He has done things that no one would have imagined possible before 2016 and, in consequence, has made the American political landscape unrecognizable. We may be moving toward bleak, even dangerous times between now and November: Trump has demonstrated that he will do almost anything to safeguard and expand his power and justify it on the grounds that there can be no legal limits on his actions because they are all aimed at saving the country.

He also has a long history of rejecting election results he doesn’t like and still insists that he was cheated out of victory in 2020. Indeed, even now, the FBI, led by another election denier and an unquestioning Trump loyalist, Kash Patel, has assigned 260 of its investigators to review the tally of the 2020 vote in Fulton County, Georgia, which is central to Trump’s claim he was robbed of victory in that year’s presidential election.

Against this background, can we be certain that Trump will not challenge the midterm election results by claiming vote-rigging, if the GOP loses the House in November, particularly if his party also loses the Senate? The question is not whether he can legally do so but whether he would try—and whether the Congress and the Supreme Court would be able to stop him.

He has compelling reasons to prevent the GOP’s defeat in November. That outcome would make it impossible for him to continue wielding near-unchecked power. The Democratic majority would open investigations into issues ranging from the Epstein files to his and his family’s recent massive financial gains, reportedly helped by federal contracts for his sons’ businesses. Trump would find it much harder to appoint manifestly unqualified people to replace the current heads of, for example, the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the Defense Department. He’d no longer be able to count on easy Senate confirmations for his nominees to fill Supreme Court vacancies. Stated differently, a Democratic win in the midterms would put an end to the all-powerful Trump 2.0.

Trump has other strong reasons to worry about the possibility of a November electoral defeat.

His poll numbers are now at an all-time low—60% disapprove of his job performance and only 35% approve. The Iran War has proven unpopular, and the surge in gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer prices has particularly angered voters, including those in MAGA. Gaza has also become a live-wire issue on the left flank of the Democratic Party. Israel’s demolition of Gaza and killing of at least 70,000 people, and likely tens of thousands more given the bodies still buried beneath the nearly 70 million tons of rubble, were highlighted by Zohran Mamdani during his successful run for mayor of New York. The fallout from Gaza has cost establishment incumbents primaries in New York and Colorado and fueled insurgent Senate campaigns in Maine and Michigan.

The rise of the progressive left, particularly its appeal to voters below age 40, may not amount to a sea change comparable to the emergence of Trump and his MAGA movement, but it has still rattled the Democratic establishment. Trump has also taken notice, and his recent rhetoric demonizing the left shows that he sees it as a threat to GOP candidates in the midterms—and therefore to himself.

The president has already given us a preview of the themes he’ll use as a counteroffensive in the months leading up to November. In a July 3 speech, delivered with Mt. Rushmore as a backdrop, he charged—channeling Sen. Joseph McCarthy—that the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the “godless communist morality” that “has killed 100 million people just in the last century alone.” He mentioned “communist” or “communists” five times. Then he warned apocalyptically that “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty…. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

The communist threat figured much less prominently in the president’s July 4 speech, and when he did mention it, he didn’t associate it with progressives in the Democratic Party. Still, he vowed that “America will never be a communist country” and that communism would not be allowed to “rear its ugly head” here, implying that it remained a threat. His speech of the previous day left no doubt about what he regarded as the source of the threat.

Trump wasn’t treating his audience to potted history on these two occasions; he was tying the Democratic Party, especially its progressive wing, to communism and accusing it of plotting to destroy American democracy and—by raising the history of slavery and the dispossession of Native Americans—of lacking patriotism and dishonoring the United States, adding for good measure that progressive Democrats favor“illegal migrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”

His message was, and will be in the months to come, that Democrats are subversives, not “real” Americans. That’s a way of preparing the ground for justifying any extraordinary actions he might take to prevent their victory in November, supposedly to “save” the country. The idea that the United States could soon become a communist-ruled country seems nutty, but laughing at it on those grounds fails to recognize that Trump’s doomsday, après moi le déluge warnings are crafted to convince voters that the threat he warns about may require extraordinary decisions come November.

You might say, “Well, big deal. Trump says a lot of things. Yes, the runup to the midterms may well get ugly. That’s standard in politics.” But Trump should be taken seriously precisely because he’s not just a demagogue—a man of words. He’s also a man of action who has enormous power. He rejected the 2020 election results. He condoned, defended, and pardoned the January 6 insurrection. And he has deployed law enforcement agencies in ways that would once have seemed impossible.

It may not be a foregone conclusion that he’ll refuse to accept a GOP defeat in November or take the even more drastic step of canceling the midterm elections, citing a supposed “emergency,” but in light of his record, it’s not outlandish to suggest that he might. He has already said that he’ll abide by the results only if they are “honest” and that “something else has to happen” if they are not. But “honest” as judged by whom? The past suggests that he will be the one to decide what’s a fair election result and what’s not.

Given Trump’s domination of the GOP, we can’t assume that it will resist him. Plus, it’s quite likely that the plutocrats, who loathe progressives, notably their taxation and income redistribution proposals, will stand with him, as several already have, whether out of fear or self-interest. Nor can we be certain he’ll accept a loss and stop short of drastic measures that could threaten American democracy as never before, or that calm will prevail in what is an increasingly politically polarized country if he does. Heading into November, that uncertainty is itself the story.