Setting the Stage (The Opposition Report #16)

The president is increasingly unpopular. The opposition party is leading most polls so a landslide is possible but not guaranteed. It looks like they might take the Senate but the key races are far too close to call. That’s right: 2026 is a midterm year in the 21st century.

Trump’s poll numbers have this summer continued slipping downwards, at the rate of about one percent of the population no longer approving of his presidency every month or so. Now, that is not exactly the rate Liberal Currents readers might hope for, but there also isn’t really any sign that the trend is going to reverse anytime soon. I for one don’t even have any idea what could possibly lead to a major spike for his approval ratings. Polls guru G. Elliott Morris recently concluded that even falling gas prices won’t help Republicans out of the hole they have been building.

The Trump admin also isn’t exactly behaving like an administration worried about getting a Republican majority elected this November, or getting a President Rubio or Vance elected in a couple years’ time. While the admin keeps pressuring Senate Republicans to ditch the filibuster in order to pass the SAVE America Act, which essentially is just a manifestation of Trump’s fixation on “winning” the 2020 election, their other idée fixe at present is…Anthony Fauci. Not to mention Kennedy’s long-running anti-vaccine project, which still threatens to ruin America’s public health program.

So the two primary prongs of the Republican policy debate right now are both just relitigating 2020. Republican senators are either focusing on passing legislation because the 2020 election was “stolen” or investigating Fauci and throwing him in jail because he “killed, or had something to do with killing, 9 million people,” to quote Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville. Sure, man. One of the grossest parts of this particular focus is how Republicans, including Stephen Miller’s wife Katie Miller, heralded the publication of Fauci’s diary entries as proof of horrific crimes. In the diary, Fauci wrote about helping Katie through her pregnancy.

Focusing on attacking Fauci and fighting “election fraud” might be a good tactic for winning over one specific resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but it is evidently less effective at winning over the hundreds of millions of other Americans. It’s not even effective at winning over FBI analysts, who are quitting and getting fired when they refuse to work on manufacturing evidence of a 2020 election fraud conspiracy.

The upcoming midterms, if a few dominos fall the right way, could also set the stage for a far more militantly anti-Trump and more progressive Democratic Party. Primary results, such as the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate primary, will determine what type of referendum on national politics the November general is interpreted as. Democratic socialists appear to be polling well with Democratic voters, but should the party nominate one for the presidency in 2028?

Of course, with years to go until the next presidential election where we could elect a truly transformative national executive able to oversee a true reconstruction of American politics, we still have to keep track of the economic, humanitarian, and international horror shows being put on by the current admin every single day.