Trump actually is ‘canceling’ the 2026 midterms, starting in Texas

The irony was almost unbearable when reporters in the Oval Office asked Donald Trump what he thought about a proposal to use the FBI to round up Texas’ boycotting Democratic state lawmakers, in the escalating war over redrawing congressional maps in the second-largest state to create five more GOP-friendly seats.

Trump, who, along with his MAGA minions, is the one pushing this outlandish gerrymandering scheme, voiced support for rounding up these political refugees, most of whom flew to Illinois, Massachusetts, or New York to deny Republican legislators in Austin a quorum.

“You can’t just sit it out, you have to go back,” Trump insisted. “You have to fight it out. That’s what elections are all about.”

Yes, this second-term president knows exactly what elections are all about. That’s why he’s trying to kill them.

No matter how many times Trump lies about his actually low approval rating on Fox News or Newsmax, his team knows that if the 2026 midterm elections were held today, the Democrats are teed up to recapture the House — even with the Democratic Party brand in the toilet. And if that happens, Trump’s abuses of American democracy surely mean his third impeachment, as well as escalating probes into everything from his family’s crypto corruption to his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Almost from the moment Trump claimed victory in the predawn darkness of Nov. 6, there has been a notion on social media sites like the liberal-leaning Bluesky that — for those reasons — Trump would find some way to ensure that next year’s midterms never take place. Or that — barring a JD Vance-Peter Thiel coup or some other Trumpian calamity — he’ll never leave the White House on Jan. 20, 2029, since that would expose him to criminal prosecution all over again.

I understood the paranoia — Trump and his supporters did attempt a coup, after all — but I also found this scenario dubious. Canceling an election — no matter what the pretense, no matter how docile the American people appear to be at times — would surely send millions into the streets, as happened last year in South Korea when its scandal-scarred president tried to impose martial law and was eventually driven from office.

But Trump 2.0 has worked hard at perfecting the art of what the experts call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which an ostensibly democratic opposition is allowed to exist as long as it’s guaranteed they can never succeed. The CBS Evening News still comes on at 6:30 p.m., and the Washington Post is still sending you push alerts, but pro-Trump billionaires have made them zombie newsrooms. The federal courts still rule against the White House’s accelerating erasure of the Constitution, but the regime just hides its secret police in a Penske rental truck and ignores them.

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But everything is bigger in Texas, including the assaults on democracy. The Trump-driven redistricting scheme is a way to hold the 2026 midterms, yet effectively cancel them by canceling out your vote. As the gerrymandering war goes nuclear and spreads uncontrollably like a Canadian wildfire from state to state, millions of Americans will cast votes on Nov. 3, 2026, that won’t mean a dadgum thing, because the outcome of the election would have basically been predetermined by a computer.

That’s right. This plan will essentially replace the human intelligence of a functioning U.S. democracy with artificial intelligence, or AI.

Let’s walk through this. In June, or around the time Trump’s approval started nose-diving, the White House began lobbying Texas GOP leaders — including Gov. Greg Abbott, a close ally — to redraw the map of the state’s House districts, where Republicans currently hold a 25-13 edge. The new Trump-driven map would put more GOP voters in five current Democratic districts — seats held by notable critics of the regime like Rep. Al Green, who has sought to impeach Trump and caused a commotion during his address to Congress earlier this year.

But the names are arguably less important than the numbers. A gain of five seats in the Lone Star State could help Republicans cling to their narrow House margin in the second half of Trump’s term. Remember, when American democracy was reasonably functioning, states only drew new congressional maps every 10 years, right after a new census — as required under the Constitution.

In a reminder that the GOP war on democracy didn’t begin with Trump coming down his gilded escalator in 2015. This norm was first twisted, also in Texas, in 2003 during the George W. Bush-Karl Rove years. Like today, that mid-decade redistricting was a thinly disguised conservative power grab, and, like today, Democratic legislators sought to stop the gerrymander by fleeing the state. But not only was the opposition worn down by endless political maneuvers, ultimately a conservative U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mid-decade redistricting is OK as long as it complied with the Voting Rights Act (heh … more on that issue in a moment).

What’s happening today is a much more cataclysmic sequel. Armed with a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department that the current map is discriminatory because of the majority Black or Latino districts that elected Green, Progressive Caucus leader Rep. Greg Casar, and others, Republicans created a stacked panel to address redistricting, Abbott called a special session, and Democratic lawmakers started raising money to flee, despite a new GOP-enacted law that potentially makes this a state crime. Aided by billionaire Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, many Dems ultimately did fly to Chicago or elsewhere, and now the plan is in limbo.

The massive erosion of democracy in the 22 years since that first Bush-era Texas ploy is on full display. The serious threat of deploying the FBI to forcibly grab the Democratic refugees and return them to Austin is very much of a moment when masked secret police chase brown people through American cities. Now, Abbott has filed a lawsuit with the (GOP-dominated, of course) Texas Supreme Court seeking to have the Democratic leader, Rep. Gene Wu, removed from office — because once you inject a cancer into the American body politic, it metastasizes quickly.

Think about that when it comes to our thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court, which essentially OK’d the current insanity with its 2006 ruling. In a news dump late Friday, going into an August beach weekend, the high court announced it will take up a race-related House district gerrymandering case out of Louisiana that many experts see as its excuse to gut the remainder of the already weakened 1965 Voting Rights Act. That would be a green light for states across the former Confederacy to join Texas in redrawing their own maps and purging Black and Latino Democrats.

In yet another painful irony, this plot twist was unveiled just before the 60th anniversary of Lyndon B. Johnson signing the VRA, the law that was forged in the racist violence of 1965’s “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala. The Texas redistricting, and the others that may follow it, would erase the greatest of the civil rights victories of the 1960s, the story about a working democracy we tell ourselves in order to live.

But the Texas scenario is even worse than that, because it is triggering a new War Between the States, which could have the impact of rendering Congress into a meaningless vestigial organ. That would destroy the body the founders saw as the cornerstone of a representative democracy. Trump knows he’ll likely need to steal more than just five House seats to ward off his 2027 impeachment, and so this crusade isn’t just confined to Austin. On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance flew to Indianapolis to lobby Indiana Gov. Mike Braun on a pro-GOP remapping there, and other states are on the table.

Unlike 2003, this time the mid-decade gerrymandering war is likely to quickly go nuclear. Governors in the three largest solidly Democratic states — Illinois’ Pritzker, California’s Gavin Newsom, and New York’s Kathy Hochul — have vowed to respond with maps that would eliminate Republican districts, despite various legal hurdles.

In this current climate, a lot of liberals seem more excited by Democratic elites finally showing some backbone than they are horrified at the threat that extreme gerrymandering — especially by both parties, in a plethora of states — poses to retaining even a semblance of American democracy. In both red and blue states, your congressional election will be decided by the cruel numerical efficiency of AI, not by candidates lobbying for your vote with new ideas about high rent or health insurance denials. Because your vote will no longer matter.

And radical remapping isn’t the only Trump-fried scheme for rigging the 2026 midterms. “The Trump administration has launched a concerted drive to undermine American elections,” Jasleen Singh, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote last week in a piece describing an array of measures, including a push for stricter voter ID and new rules on voting machines. What’s more, on Thursday morning, as I was writing this, Trump made a plea for a new mid-decade census, which aims to stop counting the state’s undocumented residents and help reshape the congressional map.

This is how liberty dies, at least in the 21st century. For rising dictators like Trump, the beauty part of competitive authoritarianism is how the illusion of democracy can still exist for all who still believe. It works like a neutron bomb: The Supreme Court, CBS, Columbia University, and now the midterm elections are still standing — but as lifeless shells of what they once were, their humanity irradiated.

The online naysayers were right. Trump just canceled the 2026 election. He’s praying you won’t notice.

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