The Existentialist Republic

12/17/2025

In November 2026, Americans will vote in a midterm election. The question is whether it will matter. Over the past year, Republicans have assembled a system designed to produce the outcomes they want regardless of how people vote. Here’s what the evidence shows.

Trump was president on January 6, 2020 and he tried everything he could to stay in power. He pressured the Justice Department to help him overturn the election, but officials threatened mass resignation rather than comply. He demanded Pence refuse to certify the results, but Pence wouldn’t do it. He called Georgia’s election officials and told them to find him votes, but they refused. He sent a mob to the Capitol, and they stormed it, but they couldn’t stop the certification. The system didn’t stop him. Specific people inside the system told him no, and that made all the difference.

He lost power and Biden took office. Trump faced no consequences for any of it, and he and his allies spent the next four years identifying everyone who’d told them no.

When states tried to use the 14th Amendment to keep him off ballots, SCOTUS overruled them unanimously.¹ He won in 2024. On his first day back in office, he pardoned the people who’d stormed the Capitol at his direction. Then he spent the year purging everyone who’d valued the country over GOP power. The DOJ is now run by loyalists who won’t threaten resignation when he asks them to break the law. Pence is gone, replaced by a vice president who’d have done what Pence wouldn’t. The state officials who certified against him have been primaried, harassed, or driven from office. The generals who’d made clear they wouldn’t intervene are being replaced.

The lesson Trump learned from January 6 wasn’t that he’d gone too far. It was that he didn’t have the right people in place. Now he does.

Political scientists keep debating whether we’re heading for civil war. Barbara Walter, who served on a CIA task force predicting political instability, warns that America has entered the “anocracy zone” where civil conflicts become more likely.² But civil war as academics define it requires organized armed conflict producing at least a thousand battlefield deaths, and her conclusion is that’s not where this is going.

Now, I have a question for you, the reader. If the election theft was blatant and obvious enough, would your governor do anything besides write a strongly worded letter? More importantly, what would you do if watching an election be cancelled or stolen in real time?

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, has been explicit about what this represents. In July 2024, he declared: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”³

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia for you. The Heritage Foundation partnered with Hungarian government-funded think tanks that helped Viktor Orban dismantle Hungary’s democracy, people who’d already done this once and knew exactly which institutions to capture and in what order.⁴

They’ve told us what they’re building, and they’ve hired the people who know how to build it.

The mechanisms aren’t new. What’s new is that they’re all held by the same hands at the same time, and those hands have already shown they won’t let go when told to.