Apologies, but no real post today. I know I warn about going short and then it’s twice as long, but tonight I’m fairly certain I will be asleep before I write the final sentence of this post. I am le tired, I will take a nap, then I will fire ze missiles.1
Typing about a thesis that matters either to me or to the actual world while exhausted is… dumb. So I am not going to do that and will save bigger fish (ICE) for another night.
But there’s one thing so simple I can talk about even while nodding off at my laptop and waking up worried the drool on my keyboard is going to short it out.
And it is a thesis, a statement, a…. deep belief that keeps going around. And it goes like this:
Trump is going to cancel the midterms.
I hear it come up both as a prediction of how bad things will get, and as a comeback to anyone who says the midterm elections will help thwart some of Trump’s power. It just hovers out there in any conversation about the year: “Well, if we HAVE elections // If Trump doesn’t cancel the elections // If the elections even happen.”
And I want to acknowledge the good-faith part of this. People who don’t want to be caught off guard by Trump destroying more of democracy and who understand he is capable of anything.
But… to do it he has to be able to do it. Like, “you can just do things” is a philosophy capped by “the things you can do.”
Yes! There are 3 concurrent truths and at most people are grasping 2. 1. Trump WILL try to rig or cancel the midterms. 2. Rigging or canceling midterms is unfathomably difficult to pull off. 3. Trump does not have the competence or strategic discipline to pull off 50 bank heists at once.
— Greg Iwinski (@garyjackson.bsky.social) 2026-01-15T17:03:15.699Z
I wrote this earlier today and I want to flesh it out a little here. (Side note: Jamelle Bouie would absolutely be a panelist on my version of The McLaughlin Group.)
Yes, Trump will try to stop the midterm elections from happening. IF they go how polling is going they will be a giant mallet labeled “Lame Duck” coming down on the toes of the Presidency. But Trump only knows one move: the leverage play. And he doesn’t actually have overt leverage here, so he has to threaten or coerce or intimidate people into cancelling elections, and that doesn’t seem super likely.
There are 50 elections at once, all on the same night. Even if you were just using an incredibly talented Danny Ocean crew to pull it off, that’s still five-hundred and fifty people. And canceling them doesn’t really work because everyone needs to vote for county clerk or dog catcher or whatever — are you using your Don Cheadle / James Caan team to shut those down too?
Trump knows how to smash. He is not smart and has increasingly less impulse control. To pull off the most sophisticated and coordinated night of election rigging in our nation’s history is something he can not do. He CAN try. He probably WILL try. But it is not going to work.
This should go down as another Thesis Of This Place, but when you predict things you need to be able to predict how they’ll tangibly happen. Trump will cancel elecitons? HOW. Centrists will get us to talk to each other and find common sense solutions? WHAT’S THE FIRST ISSUE THEY’LL WORK ON?
I mean, all this stress about the midterms2 and zzzzz you haven’t even considered that by then, JD Vance would have had to pick his own vice president!
Zzzzzzzz
-Greg
1 (this is an elder millennial reference check, if you don’t get it you probably also don’t know who The Cheat is or Tom Green’s Bum Bum Song. You. Missed. Out.
2 it was at this point that Greg fell asleep, but kept typing because he’s committed
