Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. He shows no sign that he would accept a loss in 2026.
Eight years ago, President Donald Trump got generally good reviews for his first speech to a joint session of Congress. Back then, it would have seemed both incredible and churlish to suggest that the man who delivered that relatively conciliatory, relatively presidential speech, might within four years try to overturn an election by violence.
But that’s what happened. And that attempt remains the single most important fact about Trump’s first term as president.
Eight years later, not even Trump’s staunchest partisans would describe his 2025 address as conciliatory. He mocked, he insulted, he called names, he appealed only to a MAGA base that does not add up to even half the electorate. But in 2025, the big question hanging over the nation’s head is not one about oratory, but about democracy. In 2017, Americans did not yet know how far Trump might go. Now they do. They only flinch from believing it.
Second-term Trump has opened his administration with a round of actions likely to prove drastically unpopular: tariffs that raise prices, budget cuts that will reduce services for veterans, at national parks, for anyone who depends on weather services. Prices are rising, measles is spreading, airplanes are falling out of the sky. His effective co-president and chief policymaker, Elon Musk, is widely distrusted and disliked. Trump’s repeated claims of massive fraud within Social Security strongly suggest that he’s got something big and radical in mind for the most popular program in American life.
Trump knows he’s steering into political trouble. He alluded to “disruptions” ahead because of his policies. His party holds the narrowest of margins in the House of Representatives. Yet he’s governing without the slightest concession to majority opinion, even to a majority sense of decency. He talks of the Democrats as remorseless enemies. At the same time, he is making political choices that would normally seem certain to deliver those enemies a big majority in the House after the midterms. Is he delusional? Crazy reckless? Or is this a signal that the man who tried to overturn the election of 2020 has some scheme in mind for the 2026 midterms?
Maybe Trump has turned over a new leaf. There was, however, a tell in this speech that Trump’s attitude to other people’s consent remains as contemptuous as ever.
In his joint-session speech, Trump returned to his fancy of annexing Greenland to the United States. He read aloud from the teleprompter some perfunctory language about respecting Greenlanders’ right to decide their own future. But when he came to the end of the section, he apparently ad-libbed a thought of his own: “We’ll get it one way or another.” That’s not the language of a man who has learned his lesson about respecting democratic choice.
In the second term, unlike the first, Trump has swiftly and methodically installed do-anything loyalists at the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense. Given Trump’s 2021 record, that seems something to worry about now.
Had Trump lost the 2024 election, he would right now be facing sentencing for his criminal convictions in the state of New York. He would be facing criminal and civil trials in other states. He was rescued from legal troubles by political success. Now Trump’s acting in ways that seem certain to throw power away in the next round of elections–if those elections proceed as usual. If they are free and fair. If every legal voter is allowed to participate. If every legal vote is counted, whether cast in person or by mail. Those did not used to be hazardous “if’s.” But they may be hazardous in 2026.
Trump is keenly alert to his legal danger, deeply committed to keeping power by any means necessary. He also seems to be sleep-walking toward a stinging political loss that will expose him to all kinds of personal risk. He’s not trying to expand his coalition, to win any votes he does not already have. So what is his plan to preserve his immunity and his impunity? Trump’s behavior in 2021 showed that there were no limits to what he would do to keep power. What will 2026 show?
