1) The SCOTUS neutered the Appeals circuit of the American judicial system, by limiting their ability to file injunctions of national scope.
2) The president of University of Virginia, a private, incorporated, institution, was forced to resign, due to DOJ threats of litigation. Let me restate that: Government forced a private corporation to have it’s CEO resign, for no criminal reason, just legal coercion.
3) DJT cut off trade negotiations with Canada. Again.
None of this is normal.
There’s been a fair amount of consternation lately, both in socmed and msm, on how bad the optics are on everything from masked deportations; the lack of due process; the unhinged demeanor of the public servants (looking at you, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller) in the administration; and the lack of respect for the Constitution and the law (I see you, Emil Bové); even Mitch McConnell, doubling down on MAGA by telling colleagues hesitating on the OBBBA’s Medicare/-caid cuts, that voters will “get over it” when passage removes up to 14 million Americans from affordable healthcare.
”Are they that crazy/dumb/arrogant?”, is contained in most every version of commentary on recent events I’ve seen over the past weeks.
What seems to be missing in all of them — varied as they are — is that they all suffer from the same premise: a presumption that it will hurt at the 2026 ballot box, which informs this sense of shared Wonderment and Consternation at the self-harm an extremist GOP appears to be doing to itself.
What I don’t see anyone considering, is the logical conclusion that everything is adding up to, all the performative posturing on camera, the toxic masculinity it represents, the arrogance of Certainty that it expresses, measured against the reality that MAGA is fundamentally a manufactured constituency in both state legislatures and Congress. None of it’s members could win a legislative district that wasn’t designed for them to ‘win’. The extremist Freedom Caucus is only 30% of the Republican caucus in the House, yet it has intimidated a Republican majority into submission, giving free reign to a rogue Executive bent on lawlessness, by preventing any institutional responses to federal overreach by the Executive branch.
And now, using a birthright citizenship case no less, the SCOTUS has effectively endorsed that Executive lawlessness by limiting the ability of the Appeals circuit of the American judiciary from issuing injunctions of national scope (without actually ruling on the merits of birthright citizenship).
Effectively, the SCOTUS has told the American people it will hold Donald Trump’s beer, as he runs roughshod over commonly-accepted notions of civilized behavior by a responsible Government acting in the name of the American people.
Where does that leave us when we’re talking about the 2026 elections?
If we look at the situation in the cold light of day, we need to consider the obvious: these guys don’t think they’re going to lose, because they’re planning to make sure they don’t lose.
According to Mitch McConnell, “[we]’ll get over it”.
And that stands to reason, because their current, official, election strategy, called REDMAP, already attempts to do that, being nothing more than a thinly-veiled, strategic gerrymandering machine, operating since 2010 wherever Republicans control the state legislatures. Currently, that’s 28 states. No wonder it feels like we’ve been observing a slow-motion coup over the past 4 years.
Manufacturing fake constituencies got America the extremist Freedom Caucus, first, to shut down and blackmail Government it didn’t like into enacting policies undemocratically, and now, anesthetizing a (manufactured) Republican majority from preventing the dismantling of that Government, also undemocratically.
We already know about the extensive recruitment efforts the GOP engaged in, between 2022 and 2024, to staff election offices and election observers with partisans. They were prepared to unleash the fireworks if DJT had lost the 2024 election.
An administration that knows it has a SCOTUS majority in its pocket, is not likely to allow a vote in 2026 that will cause any institutional roadblocks from threatening its agenda.
The sooner we act like Election 2026 might be compromised before a single ballot has been cast — beyond how far that’s already the case under REDMAP — the longer we have to prepare to prevent — or sidestep? — that outcome.
But, like any soldier will tell you, recognizing the terrain for what it is, is Assignment 1 in the planning of every engagement. This is it. 2026 will be for all the marbles. We can’t pretend that MAGA will allow mere persuasion, to defeat them. Because, since 2010, they’ve been in the business of manufacturing their political ‘reality’ one gerrymandered state after another. Let us not be naive about what we’re up against in 2026.
