Trump Is Not Some All-Powerful God-King

To subvert the election and get from here to consolidated authoritarian rule, the Trumpists depend on cynicism, acquiescence, and defeatism in the democratic camp

By Thomas Zimmer, October 19, 2026

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This is the second part of a three-part deep dive into the political situation in the United States before the midterm elections – an attempt to answer the most urgent questions about the upcoming election and Trump’s attempts to interfere, think through the dangers that lie ahead, and reflect on where we stand in the struggle between authoritarian escalation and democratic resilience. In Part I (Opens in a new window), I focused on the state of public opinion and whether we could trust the polls as well as the attempts by the Trump regime to manipulate their way to victory by taking control and subverting the process before we even get to election day. This Part II outlines the dangers from election day on November 3 through January 3, when the new Congress will be seated.

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We are getting close now. Merely two weeks remain until election day on November 3. But unfortunately, the threat to the American Republic won’t end there. The key danger now lies in what happens on and especially after election day, from early November through at least January 3, the day the new Congress will come together.

It’s been two weeks since I published Part I (Opens in a new window) of this deep dive into the political situation in the United States before the midterm elections. And the structural conditions have not changed much. The party of a historically unpopular president holds both chambers of Congress and is pursuing a drastically unpopular agenda; most voters describe their top priority as economy / prices, areas where Trump’s approval rating is unprecedentedly disastrous. Under such structural conditions – what political scientists call “the fundamentals” – our default assumption should be a massive defeat for the party in charge.

A massive defeat for the Republican Party is also what all the data, all the indicators we have suggest. Everything points in the same direction. The polls, the prediction models (Opens in a new window), the very high Democratic turnout during the primaries, the early voting that indicates an extremely energized Democratic base, all the historical comparisons to previous times the party that controlled the White House and Congress lost the midterms. 

At this point, it would take a historically unprecedented (Opens in a new window) polling error and a complete break from everything history suggests should happen with such “fundamentals” for Republicans to hold the House. In the Senate, the situation is far more uncertain. Realistic outcomes range from Democrats being stuck in the minority to the opposition getting to 55 seats. The most likely outcome is a Democratic majority here as well.

How does the staunchly authoritarian movement that controls the U.S. government and is firmly in charge of the Republican Party react to this situation?

Because the Trumpists are emphatically opposed to liberal democracy and fully convinced they are the sole proponents of “real America” and therefore the only legitimate rulers of the nation, they are committed to subverting, manipulating, and intimidating their way to victory. Over the past few months, as I have outlined in detail in Part I, they have tried to impose new rules that would either allow Republicans to steal enough seats outright by massively disenfranchising Democratic voters or, at the very least, cause chaos in order to guarantee there would be lots of ammunition for Trump to claim fraud and irregularity and create a pseudo-plausible basis for the federal government to intervene.

However, the MAGA government’s major schemes to subvert the election have so far failed.

Unfortunately, that is not the end of the story. They will keep trying. On election day and in the months thereafter. At least until the new Congress is constituted in early January, and perhaps even beyond.

At this point, this is no longer an exercise in analyzing and interpreting what is already happening. We are entering the territory of weighing different scenarios of varying likelihood for the near future. That is why it is all the more important to establish a framework for how to think about and conceptualize the dangers that lie ahead. The key challenge is to find the balance between, on the one hand, being vigilant and justifiably, inevitably alarmed – and, on the other, drowning in doomsaying and defeatism, which is exactly what the Trumpists rely on to bring the system down.

What happens on election day?