U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media after disembarking Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., August 11, 2026. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
New Republic senior editor Brian Beutler wrote a column on his "Off Message" Substack arguing that President Donald Trump is banking on the idea that Democrats will wimp out if they gain power.
When former President Joe Biden came into the White House he talked about "moving forward" and "not looking back." That doesn't mean the Justice Department didn't investigate crimes, but it wasn't the administration's focus.
"Let me inject you with a dash of hopium before we spend the next month huffing into a paper bag," wrote Beutler on Monday. "There is a scenario, real but remote, in which the midterm election really does bleed MAGA to death."
He explained that the real nail in the coffin would only come from removing Trump from office. Technically it's possible, but given the 67-vote majority needed to remove a president from office, it would need to take something cataclysmic. It would need to be something larger than Trump leading a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"Erratic people create unpredictable circumstances. But a world where Congress removes Trump from office is probably one where something catastrophic has already happened. It isn’t one where Republicans get routed in an election, and then ~half of the remaining GOP senators are chastened enough to find Trump guilty of high crimes," wrote Beutler.
His scenario isn't very likely, and it would require Democrats to do better than they are in the polls today. It would also mean that a subset of Republicans must "respond to a drubbing like normal politicians, rather than right-wing tribalists. The point isn’t that I think this will happen, just that I think it could."
That begins with Democrats winning 53 to 54 U.S. Senate seats. With that level of "psychic shock," Beutler thinks that the "fever" could break and "House and Senate Republicans would begin behaving more like a faithful opposition."
Even if they win that many seats, Democrats would need at least seven Republicans willing to play ball with them to reach the 60-vote supermajority needed to break a filibuster.
Whether or not Democrats can pull off something that significant the coming two years will bring a desperate Trump. Meanwhile, Republicans will quickly realize that the mid-decade redistricting made them more vulnerable in 2028, not less.
"So there will be many, many Republicans who recognize: if we don’t relent, if we use our power to sustain Trump’s current level of impunity, we will be wiped out again in 2028," said Beutler.
If Republicans don't shift, they risk another set of losses in 2028.
Beutler said he thinks Republicans could very well put Trump on "as short a leash as possible. They would start behaving a bit like the Boll-Weevil Democrats of the 1980s, who defected to vote with Republicans a lot. Except instead of doing so to help a popular president of the other party, they’d be doing so to constrain an unpopular president of their own."
He closed by conceding, "A formation like that wouldn’t fix everything, but it would end many of Trump’s monarchical abuses."