'All bets are off': Abysmal vision shows what happens if Dems squander midterms

Intelligencer writer Ed Kilgore says Friday thaat four years under President Donald Trump felt "like 40” during his first administration — but that was nothing "compared to his second."

In just a year, Kilgore wrote, the nation saw the appointment “of some of the most controversial appointees in living memory, a blizzard of executive orders, and then the passage of the most sweeping single package of legislation in the history of Congress. Toss in the occasional military strike or domestic National Guard deployment, regular raids by masked ICE and border-control agents, and serial disfigurement of the White House, and you’ve got the show that never ends.

"Three more years could indeed feel like an eternity.”

Kilgore wrote that Trump is determined to tip the balance of power, but the midterms could potentially upset that.

If history and current polling are an indication, Democrats are very likely to gain control of the U.S. House and "bust up the partisan trifecta that has made so much of Trump 2.0’s accomplishments possible," he wrote.

With a Democratic House, there will be no more 'Big Beautiful Bills' whipping through Congress on party-line votes, nor any more reconfiguring of the federal budget and tax code and remaking the shape of the federal government, he wrote. A hostile House would also befuddle the administration with constant investigations of its "loosey-goosey attitude" toward obeying legal limits, and its "self-dealing, cronyism, and apparent corruption."

But Kilgore warned, “if Republicans hold onto both congressional chambers, then all bets are off. Trump 2.0 would roll through its final two years with the president’s more audacious legislative goals very much in sight and limited only by how much risk Republicans want to take in 2028.”

The nation could see more “Big Beautiful Bill” packages replacing income taxes with "tariffs or consumption taxes," wrote Kilgore. "It could also mean a complete return to fossil fuels in a world that is wholly embracing clean energy. Additionally, it could mean the "total repeal and replacement of Obamacare and the decimation of Medicaid" and a "fundamental restructuring of immigration laws" and "radical limits on voting rights."

America could also get a full “MAGA makeover,” said Kilgore. This could mean a country of millions fewer immigrants, with immigrant-sensitive industries like agriculture, health care, and other services struggling, a “fully shredded social-safety net feeding steadily increasing disparities in income and wealth between rich and poor,” and cities "where armed military presence has become routine."

You can also expect Trump and the GOP to limit elections to Election Day, and in-person voting, with strict ID requirements and armed election monitors on the scene during vote counts. There will also be a new “deep state” of MAGA-vetted federal employees devoted to carrying out the 47th president’s policies even after he’s long gone,” Kilgore warned.

It will also be a world where accelerated violent weather and widespread natural disasters have "no national infrastructure" to prevent or mitigate damage, Kilgore wrote. And "scientific and health-care research will be driven by conspiracy theories and cultural fads," and the public-education system "hollowed out by private-school subsidies and ideological curriculum mandates."

“And if Trump bequeaths the presidency to a successor (either a political heir like JD Vance or a biological heir like Don Jr.), then what America could look like by 2032 or 2036 is beyond my powers of imagination,” Kilgore said.

Read the Intelligencer report at this link.