Donald Trump, 79, is already fantasizing about scrapping the midterm elections — and his reasoning is equal parts ego and delusion. In a sprawling Oval Office interview with Reuters, Trump admitted that Republicans are likely to take a beating in November. His response? Don’t bother with the vote at all.
“It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump told reporters, adding, “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
That’s right: the sitting president is openly suggesting elections are optional when he feels he might lose. The context is bleak for Republicans. They hold a razor-thin House majority, Trump’s approval ratings are weak, and voters are unhappy with rising costs and economic uncertainty. Yet Trump’s takeaway is personal and absolute: losing midterms is unacceptable, so why let them happen?
Trump also warned House Republicans at a MAGA-style briefing that a GOP midterm loss could trigger political retaliation. “You gotta win the midterms… Because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached,” he said, according to Reuters.
On Fox News, Trump doubled down on historical inevitability as his excuse. “If you go back a long way, the sitting president—whether it’s Democrat or Republican—always loses the midterm, even if they’ve done well. Almost always… I think we’ve done a great job. We’ve done maybe the best job ever in the first year, but they always seem to lose the midterm.” In Trump’s telling, the system is rigged to punish him, and that justifies avoiding elections altogether.
Pressed on real-world issues like rising costs of living, Trump waved them off, insisting voters focus on his thick binder of accomplishments. “I simply need to do a better job of promoting my accomplishments,” he said, as if charts and graphs could replace ballots.
AP News notes that Democrats are already bracing for potential interference or disputes, showing that Trump’s musings aren’t just idle bluster — they’re creating real political tension ahead of November.
Taken together, the interviews read like a preview of authoritarian fantasy. Trump is openly envisioning a country where midterms don’t happen because losing is unacceptable, using historical excuses and his ego as justification, while signaling to the country and his party that democracy is negotiable when he’s at risk.
