Michael Cohen, who served as President Donald Trump’s attorney from 2016 to 2018, issued a call to action Thursday, along with a dire warning that the 2026 midterms were “the only real chance” at avoiding a “permanent one-party rule” under the GOP.
“If we don’t flip enough seats in the 2026 midterms, we lose our only remaining defense: our tripartite system of government,” Cohen wrote Thursday on the online publishing platform Substack.
“The 2026 midterms aren’t just ‘another election.’ They are the firewall; the only real chance we have to stop the collapse of our checks and balances. Without winning back enough seats to restore balance, the constitutional safeguards that keep this democratic republic alive vanish.”
Cohen’s warning comes on the heels of a potential gerrymandering war, kicked off by Trump after having set into motion his plan to redraw Texas’ congressional districts to give Republicans five more seats in the House of Representatives. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has responded in kind in announcing his own state’s plan to redraw its districts to boost Democrats’ numbers in Congress.
It is this backdrop, Cohen argued, that provides American voters with one last chance at preventing what he warned would be an “autocracy with better branding.”
“You think it’s bad now?” he wrote. “Imagine Trump truly unshackled, with a House, Senate, and state legislatures all fully in his pocket, rewriting the rules to guarantee a permanent one party rule. That’s not democracy; that’s autocracy with better branding.”
Cohen previously served as vice president of the Trump Organization, and the co-president of Trump Entertainment before his falling out with the president in 2018 when he was sentenced to three years in prison for violating campaign finance laws, which he alleged he did at Trump’s direction.
In 2019, he sued the Trump Organization for allegedly failing to reimburse him for legal fees, and has remained a staunch critic of Trump ever since.