Lawyer up, bitches! On the November 2026 US Midterm Elections

Contra Trump

招兵買馬、引虎自衛

The following is a multimedia miscellany inspired by the elections held in the United States on 3 November 2026. All 435 seats in the US House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the US Senate were contested in the midterm elections. The results determined the 120th United States Congress.

Four-dimensional Chess

— US President Donald J Trump, on the eve of the 2026 midterm elections

— Americans on Why They Rejected Trump’s Republican Party, The New York Times, 4 November 2026

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Fox News host Sean Hannity, one of Donald Trump’s most prominent supporters in conservative media, has acknowledged that the scale of public “hatred” towards the US president contributed to the Republicans’ heavy midterm election losses.

“Hatred is a hell of a motivator,” he told fellow panellist Harold Ford Jr. He added: “I think the hatred for this man is unprecedented. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

— Live midterm election results, The Guardian, 3 November 2026

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My Flabbers are Gasted

The lede of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is worth quoting in full: “In 1860, an enslaved man named Sheppard Peek was listed among the possessions of William Peek, a white man in Crawfordville. His value was placed at $1,400. On another surviving document, Sheppard signed his name with an X. More than a century and a half later, Sheppard’s great-great-granddaughter, Keisha Lance Bottoms, was elected governor of Georgia.”

Coast to coast, after a period of white supremacy politics by the Trump administration unprecedented in modern politics, the country elected the most diverse set of leaders it has ever seen. …

As one GOP consultant wrote in the middle of the evening, “I had a worst case scenario. A doomsday scenario. I never thought to have a zombie apocalypse meets thermonuclear apocalypse with zombie invasion from the sun scenario.” …

So much for the Thousand-Year Trump Reich.

— Garrett M. Graff, My flabbers are gasted., Doomsday Scenario, 4 November 2026

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Naturally, Trump will blame others for the devastation he has wrought. On Wednesday morning, absurdly enough, he blamed the Republicans’ propaganda channel: “FoxNews bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.” On Tuesday night, he wrote: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Sorry, that dog won’t hunt. Trump had told voters at least 41 times in recent months: “Pretend I’m on the ballot.” And they did. He went into this midterm with the lowest approval rating of any president since—as he might say—“the late, great” Harry S. Truman in 1946. Voters clearly thought Trump was on the ballot, and they delivered a resounding rejection.

— Max Boot, This is the election I’ve been waiting 10 years for, The Long View, 4 November 2026

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There’s no debate. The Trump investigations WILL begin.

Miles Taylor

5 November 2026

Two words have sparked a firestorm in Washington since the election.

“LAWYER UP.” Those words have been viewed millions and millions of times since Tuesday. And they’ve led to a supposed split among Democrats.

On one “side” is Hakeem Jeffries, the likely incoming Speaker, who says the American people don’t want Democrats to “get even” with the Trump administration; they want them to get things done because life is too expensive. On the other “side” is Robert Garcia, the likely incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who posted those two words after the returns came in. Cable news has spent two days treating these men as rival camps.

It’s a fake fight. Jeffries is saying Democrats won’t go hunting — arbitrarily — for enemies to punish in a revenge quest, like Trump has. He’s not saying the U.S. Congress will ignore the largest blitz of alleged criminal conduct in the history of the nation’s capital. Indeed, it seems that the people pushing the “move on” line the hardest are Trump allies who can feel a subpoena coming, including Trump himself who suddenly seemed open to working with Democrats “for the good of the country” — but only if they’re not “destructive,” in which case he’s pledged scorched earth against them.

He’s scared. It’s not hard to see why.

There are literally hundreds of documented episodes of alleged corruption in Trump’s Washington, including scandals involving self-dealing, theft of taxpayer dollars, bribery, extortion, foreign influence over elected officials, the sale of pardons, and far more. The only reason none of it has been investigated is that the president has the Justice Department and FBI firmly under his thumb.

But now we’re supposed to move on? Under what conceivable theory does a change in the sheriff’s office mean all the criminals in town get absolved of their crimes? The new sheriff got the job because of the crime wave.

The past two years have seen literally historic allegations of wrongdoing. You don’t have to take my word for it. Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration in hundreds of cases, finding that they violated the law or the U.S. Constitution itself. In immigration detention cases alone, they’ve ruled against it nearly 20,000 times — 20,000 times — and many of those judges were appointed by Republicans or by Trump himself. They’ve found that he violated the First Amendment by stripping security clearances from his enemies as “political retribution.” They’ve ruled that he violated the Fifth Amendment by deporting people without due process, trying, as one judge wrote, to “read an entire provision out of the Constitution.” They’ve called his blacklisting of law firms that represented his critics a “shocking abuse of power” under the Sixth Amendment, and labeled his order ending birthright citizenship a “blatantly unconstitutional” assault on the Fourteenth Amendment.

And that’s before you get to the money. For our documentary CORRUPTIONLAND, we reviewed 100 episodes of alleged corruption in Trump’s Washington, and together they implicate more than a third of a trillion dollars in federal funds, contracts, and deals. You want me to believe Americans are ready to shrug off a heist of that magnitude? Doing so would be an admission that the rule of law means nothing and that crime is perfectly fine as long as your party holds the White House. No. Never.

To be fair, it would be a mistake for Democrats to pick out Trump henchmen they dislike and go looking for crimes to pin on them. That’s exactly what the president did to James Comey, Letitia James, me, and plenty of others, and it was the idiot’s inversion of how justice works — so nakedly political that even his own chief of staff tried to limit the time Trump spent “score settling,” reportedly giving him a 90-day shot clock on his revenge campaign before he needed to focus on governing. (Apparently, the shot clock still hasn’t expired.)

There’s a world of difference between that and a Democratic Congress opening probes into credible allegations of criminal conduct… and following the facts wherever they lead.

Does anyone object to reopening the Epstein investigation, in which some 1,400 women and girls were abused?
Does anyone object to looking into the suspiciously timed trades placed by people who seem to have known what the president was about to announce?
Does anyone object to Congress asking whether pardons were bought, letting well-connected felons walk free and leaving their victims without roughly $240 million in court-ordered restitution?
Does anyone object to finding out how the president’s family made billions in crypto while his own Justice Department disbanded the task force that polices crypto fraud?

The only people who object to that are the potential co-conspirators.

So the investigations are coming, and nothing in Washington can stop them. When the hearings start, I expect the “move on” people to start singing a different tune. If the January 6 investigation taught us anything, it’s that Trump’s lieutenants won’t stay loyal if they face prison time. To be clear, Congress can’t lock anyone up. But a future Justice Department can — and so can the states that receive criminal referrals from Congress.

While some are so devoted they’d gladly sit in a cell for a man who doesn’t care about them, many others can do math. The moment that prison becomes a real possibility, they’ll start talking. And they’ll talk fast.

Which is why we’re not waiting for January 3. Last night on DEFIANCE Daily, we announced a $10,000 grant to the Rule of Law Project, a group of former federal prosecutors and FBI agents who are collecting evidence of wrongdoing and providing it to Congress and the states. The group is led by 30-year Justice Department veteran Mark Blumberg, who is preparing to send investigators into communities to interview witnesses and pull records, then drafting memos and possible indictments for prosecutors at the federal, state, and local level. Blumberg calls it giving prosecutors “the gift of time.”

I call it karma. The people Trump purged from the Justice Department and the FBI (in an apparent effort to stifle investigations) are reassembling to initiate the criminal probes that should’ve begun the moment the corruption allegations started flooding in.

The debate is over. The investigations are about to start. The only open question is who flips first.

Now we have an army.

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Source:

Miles Taylor, There’s no debate. The Trump investigations WILL begin., 5 November 2026

A Scorecard on Day One of Year Two of T2

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Congress is preparing investigations into the tech overlords who’ve spent the past two years sucking up to the president — and, more important, paying him off. On X, in response to a call for “live televised trials of Big Tech executives,” Senator Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat, wrote, “They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing.

— Michelle Goldberg, Elon Musk’s Very Bad Night, The New York Times, 5 November 2026

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Guess What

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Habibi

— Abdul El-Sayed

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J.D.

If we lose, I’m fucked

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Elon Musk blew $447 million to support Republican candidates in the midterm elections — and almost every single cent of it went to waste.

But if you were about to break out a tiny violin to soundtrack the sorrows of the world’s first — and first former — trillionaire, you should consider acquiring an even tinier one, because those were just the beginning of his losses.

Shares of Musk’s businesses SpaceX and Tesla immediately tanked after Democrats swept the Senate, House, and governorship races — including in Texas, Musk’s base of operations. His automaker fell 3.3 percent, and his rocket-slash-AI company plunged by a full 3.8 , wiping out what Bloomberg reported was over $120 billion.

That did a number on Musk’s personal wealth, which in large part derives from his stakes in those companies. He is now, by the Financial Time’s estimate, some $30 billion poorer.

Despite the excess of egg on his face, Musk still managed to look through his post history on X and start deleting the ones about the election.

Trying to rally his followers, Musk tweeted “Vote red today!” on Tuesday morning. But it was removed after the reality of a blue tsunami came crashing at his doorstep. So was his pinned tweet from last week urging his followers to vote for Republican senators, which according to Forbes was taken down around the time Democratic candidate James Talarico declared victory in the senate race.

To his credit, he did make a few jokes at his own expense.

“Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” he tweeted late Tuesday night.

For the most part, though, Musk seems eager to move on. Besides one post in which he claimed “Voter ID failed in California,” he’s gone back to his usual tweets promoting Grok and his various companies almost as if nothing happened. If we spent half a billion dollars trying to get candidates elect who all lost, and were now staring down the barrel of a Democrat-stacked government looking to get revenge on us, we would probably try to sweep everything under the rug, too.

— Frank Landymore, Elon Musk Deletes Smug Election Posts After They Backfire and His Businesses Tank by $120 Billion, Futurism, 5 November 2026

“The reason poverty exists in the wealthiest country on earth is not because we can’t feed the poor. It’s because we can’t satisfy the rich. But what we can do is tax trillionaires out of existence.”

And,

“Elon Musk wants our land. He wants our water. He wants our tax dollars. He wants his very own personal United States senator.”

— James Talarico

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Elon Musk Flees to Mars

— Andy Borowitz, 4 November 2026

God Screaming at Us

— James Talarico quoted in The children are starving; God is screaming, Baptist News Global, 29 October 2025

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Over the last two years, many of the most powerful people in America — tech oligarchs, college presidents, media tycoons, leaders of big law firms + basically the entire pro-Israel Jewish establishment — capitulated to Trump’s authoritarianism. They abandoned American democracy in its moment of maximum peril. They should never be allowed to forget it. They should wear that shame for the rest of their lives.

— Peter Beinart, 5 November 2026

Profiles in Cowardice — Thanks for Nothing, Bitches

Thom Tillis

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Susan Collins

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And then…

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Big Beautiful Blow-out

How did the greatest country in the world end up with one president who was senile, followed by another who is a lunatic? With two more years to go, let’s not forget this is where we are still. Trump continues to wield the sword of executive power. He’ll still have the law-blocking command of the veto. He’ll still be emboldened by the curse of presidential immunity granted by the Supreme Court. The next shoe drop will likely be thunderous. It’s well documented that chronic narcissists are at their most fragile when confronted with unequivocal evidence of their own failure.

Okay, but Debbie Downers, please shut your cake holes for a bit. Just close your eyes and think of JD Vance’s mean pumpkin face suffused with panic, Stephen Miller’s cue-ball head tossing and turning on his pounded pillow, and Pistol Pete Hegseth burning up Signal to get intel on when he’ll be impeached. And console yourself with the fact that Melania will soon end the war in Ukraine.

— Tina Brown, Fresh Hell, 5 November 2026

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The Interregnum

America is heading towards a succession crisis, not a return to normal …

The United States is not returning to 2015.
That country no longer exists.
There will be a powerful temptation after these midterms to describe the result as America “rejecting Trumpism” and returning to some previous political equilibrium.
Maybe Democrats will conclude that.
Maybe traditional Republicans will hope for it.
History suggests caution.
Trump did not create the conditions that produced Trump.
He exploited them.
The collapse of trust in institutions preceded him.
The destruction of local media preceded him.
Deindustrialisation preceded him.
The Iraq war preceded him.
The financial crisis preceded him.
The geographic sorting of Americans into politically homogeneous communities preceded him.
The transformation of politics into entertainment preceded him.
Social media merely gave all of it cocaine.
And some of the underlying issues Trump exploited remain powerful.
Immigration.
Industrial decline.
China.
Economic inequality.
Elite distrust.
Cultural fragmentation.
University politics.
Regional resentment.
The sense among large numbers of citizens that institutions are run by people who dislike them.
Trump could leave politics tomorrow and none of those things would vanish.
The Democrats therefore have their own problem.
Winning an anti-incumbent election is not the same thing as constructing a governing coalition.
They now control Congress, but Trump still controls the presidency and possesses a veto.
That means Democrats have enough power to obstruct, investigate and negotiate, but not enough to govern independently.
That is an uncomfortable amount of power.
Enough to be blamed.
Not enough to rule.
Meanwhile, their electoral coalition contains its own tensions between progressives, moderates, organised labour, affluent suburban voters, younger left-wing voters and minorities whose political behaviour has become less predictable than Democratic strategists once assumed.
America is therefore entering a strange interregnum.
Trump is still president.
Trumpism is still powerful.
But everyone knows the presidency has to belong to somebody else after January 2029.
That changes political behaviour immediately.
Republicans will begin manoeuvring for succession.
Democrats will begin manoeuvring for 2028.
Congress will investigate the White House.
The White House will attack Congress.
Candidates will differentiate themselves from their own parties.
Foreign governments will begin thinking beyond Trump.
Markets will begin pricing beyond Trump.
And America’s allies will start quietly asking the question Washington hates hearing:
What comes after this?

— Snarky Gherkin, America Has Entered the Post-Trump Era… While Trump Is Still President, 5 November 2026

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