U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he flies from Florida to Washington, aboard Air Force One, U.S., October 19, 2025. REUTERS Elizabeth Frantz
Conservative commenter William Kristol says things are looking bad for President Donald Trump and his Republican Party in November, but if things go down in November as voting trends suggest it will still leave in charge a desperate and angry president with staff willing to jettison both the law and self-respect to conduct Trump’s agenda.
“If you’re going into a midterm when your party has controlled both the White House and Congress, and that party is joined at the hip to a president who’s losing 29 percent to 49 percent among those who care the most and who are the most likely to vote, your prospects are . . . not good,” said Kristol. “So April’s electoral good news from Hungary could well be followed by good news from the United States in November.”
“But! An increasingly desperate Trump will still be in charge of the executive branch,” Kristol warned. “He’ll have all the levers of presidential power at his disposal, and he has subordinates seemingly as willing as ever to use them as he wishes.”
“Trump administration apparatchiks seem ever ‘more fanatic about making the president happy, either by carrying out his vendettas more aggressively or by aping his worst impulses more doggedly,’” said Kristol, quoting Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio. And vengeful Trumpist fanatics will likely come with consequences.
“To protect their hold on power, he and his menagerie will need to be considerably more ruthless about challenges to it than [Deposed Hungarian leader] Viktor Orbán was,” said Catoggio. “As Trump and his aides become more convinced that a Democratic midterm wipeout is a fait accompli, they may surmise that there’s nothing left to lose by leaning all the way in on unpopular autocratic gambits.”
With Trump’s unpopularity and his desperation both mounting, the next thirty-three months — especially the next eight months before the new Congress is seated — are likely to be ever more dangerous.