Trump’s Scorched-Earth Playbook: Governance Post Midterms

The 2026 Midterm Meltdown: Mapping Trump’s Narcissistic Wound

By now every punditing talking head on cable news shows and armchair political theorist on the social medias has issued their hot take on the 2026 midterm elections. Yet every single last one of them has failed to take Trump’s malignant narcissism into account. An electoral loss of this magnitude constitutes a major narcissistic wound on par with his loss to Joe Biden.

Not only has the Democratic Party taken control of Congress from him, they have taken the Republican coalition, too. Every single demographic you can measure has shifted left by a significant amount. That level of public repudiation — humiliation really — to Trump’s fragile ego is an existential threat that demands immediate, aggressive retaliation.

How exactly Trump retaliates may not be predictable; that he will, is. When narcissistic mortification on this scale occurs, he must destroy the groups that inflicted it upon him. It is the only way to recover from this existential crisis of self-worth and re-exert his dominance. Stripped of legislative consent, the White House will pivot to absolute rule by executive fiat, weaponized administrative defiance, and raw state power. Let’s take a look at the general areas that he’s likely to lash out in.

Democratic Midterm Win: Too Big for Election Shenanigans

Given that he shenaned with the 2020 election, you know he will shenan again. Even now, he’s scheming about how he can stop the Democratic take over of Congress. However, all of his plans for cheating have failed so spectacularly that the remaining ones are sure to crumble, too.

His plans for voter suppression through gerrymandering, polling hide-and-seek, and voter roll bulimia failed to stop a record-setting turnout. In fact, they backfired. The Democratic margins are wide enough that court challenges to individual precincts and states are useless; even if Republicans won the few races that are close, even if won, which is dubious, given their record in court, wouldn’t change control of Congress. His other options like intimidating voters at polling places, disrupting the chain of custody of the ballots, or directly tampering with the results was so well prepared for by state election officials that they died in the cradle.

The Constitutional Hail Mary: Article I, Section 5, Clause 1

There is only one possibility left: challenging the legitimacy of a member-elect on the House floor BEFORE the new Speaker is elected and the new Congress is sworn in as outlined in Article 1, Section 5, Clause 1 of the Constitution.

Under Article I, Section 5, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution, each House serves as the judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its own members.

Here is how the parliamentary mechanics work:

1. The Clerk of the House compiles the official roll using certified election results from state governors.
2. On swearing-in day, 3 January 2027, the Clerk presides over the election of the Speaker of the House.
3. Before the Speaker swears in members en masse, any member-elect can formally challenge the credentials of another member-elect.
4. If a credential is disputed, the House can require that member-elect to step aside while the remaining body is sworn in, after which the House votes to seat them temporarily or refers the dispute to a committee.

Admittedly, it’s success is doubtful since it will collapse under its own mathematical weight: the Democratic members-elect will just outvote any challenge the Republican members-elect pose.

Theoretically, it is possible that the Clerk of the House would exclude members-elect from the roll, but it would not stand up in court since the Clerk’s role is purely administrative.

With echoes of Mike Pence declining to count electoral votes from swing states, it is possible that the Clerk of the House would refuse to add Democratic representatives to the official roll or so Constitutional scholar, J. Michael Luttig, warns. The current Clerk probably wouldn’t go along with this scheme, so the tip off that they will try this one is for Mike Johnson to replace the Clerk of the House.

Because the Clerk’s role is strictly administrative, the resulting court challenges would end up in the Supreme Court where all bets are off. It would also mean refusing the certifications of over eighty House members, which seems like it would make it unlikely to happen. Even it it did, the House members could simply organize the House, elect a Speaker, and vote to seat their colleagues. There are no guarantees with this scheme, and Mike Johnson seems to have lost his enthusiasm for these kinds of shenans and probably would decline to shenan again.

The only remaining possibility is for the Republican governors to refuse to certify the elections of Democratic Congressional members, which in the past, courts have compelled state officials to do, so again, unlikely.

Given the overwhelming numbers in the election, a Democratic takeover of Congress seems unstoppable, so what other options does El Gran Jefe Estúpido have for defying the will of the people?

Stephen Miller and the Politics of Vengeance

The Orange Oaf can’t do anything without first tipping his hand. While one side of his mouth says he’ll work with the Democratic Congress, his ass says he’s going to channel Nixon on steroids and stonewall Congress. Dis he really think appointing Stephen Miller as Chief of Staff was some mysterious inscrutable elebinty billion dimensional chess move? Really? Stephen Miller?

So Trump has added another shiny injury to his narcissistic charm bracelet, and this one demands massive vengeance. It is the same cabal that he blames for denying him the 2020 election! He really has to get those guys! The voters who crashed the stock market by electing Democrats, Republicans who had the nerve to lose, Democrats who dared to win, and Susie Wiles who didn’t stop it from happening. In short, anyone and everyone, except him. He wasn’t on the ballot and he never suggested that he was.

He literally has to destroy the country. Literally. It is the only way for him to patch the huge puncture wound that has pierced his delusion of perfection. What better way to do that than to appoint Herr Final Solution as his chief of staff? The mastermind of mass deportation, the architect of ICE concentration camps, and the originator of murder on the high seas, the glorifier of ICE assassins shooting American citizens in the streets of Minneapolis and soon on a city block near you!

He’s now the official gatekeeper of all information that Nathalie Harp has access to. While Trump plays with his Lincoln Logs on the South Lawn, Harp is deciding what is cheerful enough to put in front of his face, and Stephen Miller is directing administration policy and congressional relations.

How do you think that’s going to go?

Remember Herr Miller’s description of his version of realpolitik:

“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake [Tapper], that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

How do you think this guy is going to deal with Congress, the defiant blue states, and disappointing red ones? You think North Carolina is going to see any FEMA relief money for Hurricane Helene (2024)? You think any of us are going to get money for rural hospitals, SNAP benefits, any of it? Miller’s doctrine isn’t governance; it’s administrative punishment.

Remember Susan Collins’ prescient claim 2021 that Trump had “learned a hard lesson?” Trump is about to show us wrong she was. He’s channeling his racist hero, Andrew Jackson, daring the Courts, Congress, and the American people to enforce their rulings and laws when he refuses to comply.

Laws and norms only work when we choose to follow them. The Human Caricature and Peewee Goering ain’t following no niceties and laws. No norm is going to constrain their bigotry, hate, and murderous rage.

Trump may not be the Grinch Who Stole Congress, but he will happily be the Emperor Who Ignored Congress. All those Democrats strutting around social media, boasting about subpoenas and oversight committees, had better prepare for the reality of total non-compliance. Miller will put the wall in stonewall. If you thought battling for federal disclosures was tough before, you haven’t seen anything yet.

The Insurrection Act Endgame: The Pretext for Martial Power

When legislative pathways are permanently blocked, when executive orders are tied up in judicial injunctions, and when subpoenas are mounting, an autocratic administration reaches for its final operational tool: raw, physical force.

Enter the statutory nuclear option: The Insurrection Act of 1807.

Stephen Miller’s fixation on invoking the Insurrection Act isn’t a secret. It’s his administrative North Star. During Trump’s first term, Miller repeatedly pushed to use federal troops to bypass state governors, suppress civil unrest, and enforce immigration roundups. Now, elevated to Chief of Staff in a post-midterm pressure cooker, Miller has the keys to the engine room.

For an administration coping with an agonizing narcissistic wound, the Insurrection Act scratches every authoritarian itch:

1. Bypassing Posse Comitatus: Under normal operations, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 strictly forbids using active-duty U.S. military personnel for domestic civilian law enforcement. Invoking the Insurrection Act acts as a legal “skeleton key” to suspend that boundary and allow regular military forces or federalized National Guard units to act as domestic police without a governor’s consent.
2. Manufacturing the Pretext: Miller doesn’t need an actual insurrection; he just needs a spark. High-intensity ICE raids in blue-state strongholds are engineered to provoke public outrage and mass protests. Once street demonstrations turn rowdy, the White House gets the cable-news visual backdrop it needs to declare a “breakdown of law and order” and deploy federalized boots on the ground.
3. Punishing the Electorate: Unable to fire the millions of Americans who handed him a midterm defeat, Trump can use domestic troop deployments to flex authority over Democratic cities, project raw power, and assert dominance over the very voters who rejected him.

The Fatal Flaw: The Pentagon Wall

While Trump and Miller view the U.S. armed forces as the Waffen SS that will follow their every whim because Herr Furor (Thanks Tengrain) be command. But senior military leadership operates under a completely different operational framework.

It’s one thing to order troops to murder civilians on the high seas and school girls in their classrooms, it’s quite another to have them patrol blue cities helping with mass deportation as Miller has advocated. Ordering them to do so would likely trigger the most catastrophic constitutional crisis in modern history since it would violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and their oaths to the Constitution.

The Bottom Line

Trump’s post-midterm trajectory is set. Stripped of legislative power, nursing an agonizing narcissistic wound, and guided by Stephen Miller’s scorched-earth ideology, the White House will attempt to govern through administrative defiance, executive fiat, and domestic intimidation.

He won’t be the Grinch who stole Congress, he’ll be the Emperor who ignored it. But when the dust settles, his grand plan of governing through brute executive force will be stymied by the Courts, the military, and the American people.

Image Attribution

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