Conservative Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio says there is little reason to expect President Donald Trump to take a lesson from the smackdown that’s likely coming for him in the November midterms.
“Trump isn’t going to ‘change course’ if Republicans are drubbed at the polls,” Catoggio told the Dispatch. “Almost certainly, he’ll double down on everything Americans hate about him.”
The polls are looking horrible for Trump and his subservient Republican Party, Catoggio said. Democrats may have led by 6.5 points on the generic congressional ballot, but on Friday Catoggio said that margin had risen to 8.6 points. That’s “head for the fallout shelter” stuff, he said — and that’s new.
“Since the day in 2015 that a certain witless ape rode a certain escalator, in other words, the Republican Party has never lost ground in both houses of Congress in the same election. Which makes the surging optimism in every corner of news media right now about an unfolding Republican calamity in November unnerving,” Catoggio said.
Typically, when the president takes a beating at the polls, he’s chastened by the vote of no confidence, Catoggio said — but that would require a certain something that Trump doesn’t have.
“Do I really need to explain why the current president is unlikely to be so conciliatory? We’ve all lived through the last 10 years. We all grasp, surely, that a man who’s incapable of humility will not — because he cannot — be humbled.”
As the Times wrote, Catoggio expects Trump “will return to war after the midterms anyway,” feeling either “vindicated by an unexpected electoral victory” or that he “has nothing more to lose by pursuing his own strategy.” His tariff abuses will also get worse thanks to Congress, which recently passed a bill authorizing new sanctions on Russia — but also granted trade authority to “allow Trump to drop 100 percent tariffs on virtually any country he likes, for as long as he likes, and with pretty much bulletproof legal authority to do so,” according to the Bulwark.
And “postliberals,” said Catoggio, will spend the last two years of Trump’s presidency egging him on with pleas that “now is the time for maximum viciousness.”
“‘We’ve lost Congress, they’ll say, and we’ll probably lose the White House in 2028. This could be the last chance we have for years to accomplish our goals and ‘save America,’” according to Catoggio. “Fascists view every emergency as an invitation to behave more ruthlessly, and they’ll surely treat the great midterm drubbing of 2026 as an emergency.”
And since a new Democratic Congress will be scrutinizing the Trump family’s “sleazy financial conduct,” Trump will likely go all out and choose escalation over conciliation in pursuing his agenda: War, tariffs, mass deportations, wrecking the occasional public monument.
“The voters who put Democrats in charge of the House and Senate hate all of it, so why shouldn’t he seek revenge on them by giving them even more of it?” asked Catoggio. “Why should he care more about public opinion than about his own legacy when the public behaved so ‘disloyally’ at the polls? … This is what happens when you place America’s welfare in the hands of someone who literally can’t fathom putting someone else’s interests above his own,” Catoggio concluded.
“‘Repudiation’ in a political context is really just a fancy word for ‘shame,’: Catoggio concludes. “… Trump neither feels shame nor believes he should answer to anyone. There will be no lesson learned from this [midterm] comet strike.”