President Donald Trump has declared that he doesn't care about the midterm election, but a pair of analysts agreed that his second term will likely grow even darker once that benchmark has passed.
The 79-year-old president has been even more unbound by the law and political convention in his second term in the White House, and The New Republic's Greg Sargent discussed with writer Molly Jong-Fast what the remaining two years of his term might look like after his Republican congressional majorities have faced voters in the midterms.
"If you look at the polls, if the polls end up being right, he could lose the Senate too, by a lot, and he could — the point is, you need a certain number of senators to remove," Jong-Fast said. "I mean, it’s unlikely, but it’s not impossible, and when you’re talking about places like Alaska and Texas being in play — I mean, right now it’s 53–47, but there are like seven, eight seats that are in play. So there’s a world where Trump loses the House, loses the Senate, gets impeached, maybe gets removed. People are mad and the polls are bad."
Trump's leadership of the GOP caucus will be tested before the midterms by Republican senators who are retiring or who lost their seats to primary challengers endorsed by the president, and Jong-Fast said that dynamic could offer a preview of the second half of his term as presidential contenders begin jockeying for position.
"As we cruise into a midterm where Trumpism becomes less and less tenable as he gets underwater in more and more states, you see a world where two or three months into the 2028 cycle, people decide that they could impeach and remove him because they want to get re-elected," Jong-Fast said. "And it comes back to this theory that really all these people care about is keeping their jobs."
Another issue looming over the political landscape is the inescapable truth that Trump turns 80 years old this month, and the analysts agreed that signs of his age-related decline are becoming increasingly apparent and seem to be driving his increasingly erratic behavior.
"You illustrated very well that not only is he unfit for the job, there’s very good reason — actual reason — to think his deterioration will accelerate, and you talked about the unknowns ahead, and this was unnerving, right?" Sargent said. "There’s ICE still getting enormously scaled up, new prison camps coming into existence, FBI Director Kash Patel promising new arrests, Trump wants to invade Cuba and Greenland — and that’s just a partial list. You don’t paint a very reassuring picture of what’s in store for us, Molly."
Jong-Fast predicted the president could send federal agents into even more states once the midterms have passed and he no longer fears the wrath of voters.
"I really do believe, and I think it’s important when we cover this to realize that the reason that every state is not Minnesota at this moment is not because Donald Trump has had an about-face on immigration," she said. "It’s because Donald Trump sees the midterms coming down the pike and he knows it’s not popular. I think he’s got certainly an inability to steady himself, to prevent himself from doing things, to prevent himself from saying things."
She argued that he's losing even more of his inhibitions as his health deteriorates.
"So the question is, what does a Donald Trump that is not hemmed in by the midterms look like?" Jong-Fast said. "And I think it looks a lot more like a country of Minnesotas. [Kristi] Noem lost her job [leading the Department of Homeland Security]because it was loud and it looked very corrupt and it was bad for business. But that doesn’t mean that that kind of corruption couldn’t come back after the midterms. He just doesn’t want to lose the House because he doesn’t want to get impeached."
