The conventional wisdom in Washington this week is that Senate Republicans are finally finding their footing against Donald Trump. They see the US President as a growing electoral liability, the headlines say, and they’re starting to undermine his vanity projects.
But even the senators themselves don’t really believe this.
Privately, my former colleagues on Capitol Hill acknowledge that they’re no match for this President. What they see, and what they’ll admit to off the record, is that the last embers of resistance within the Republican Party are being snuffed out. GOP leaders won’t stand up to the man who’s got them at political gunpoint, and it’s a harbinger of the next phase of Trumpism.
Trump’s own advisers are saying the quiet part out loud. Axios captured it bluntly this week, when they reported that the President doesn’t much care whether the Republicans lose control of Congress in this autumn’s midterms. He’d prefer a win, but he isn’t planning around it. He’s planning around what comes after the midterms, which is set to be an all-out, two-year “finale” in which he intends to wield power in ways he’s heretofore avoided, or only flirted with.
I put “finale” in quotes because I firmly believe Trump himself isn’t sure if he’ll leave office at the end of the next two years. But I’ll get to that in a moment.
When Trump feels cornered, his impulse is to lash out. In the two-and-a-half years I served under him in his first administration, I saw it again and again. If Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress this November, he’ll be more besieged than at any point in his political life, facing sweeping subpoenas into his family and his fortune. He will simultaneously be unbound, backed by a Republican caucus purged of its last dissenters. Win or lose, the next Congress will be the most Make America Great Again (Maga) in history; his few remaining GOP critics are already gone or going, replaced by members who owe him everything. And they’ll be standing behind a President at his most reckless.
You’d think in a circumstance like this that the legislative branch of the US Government would be the biggest check on a wayward President. Instead, my Capitol Hill friends, including Democratic members of Congress, are bracing for a period of political intensity unlike anything in living memory.
The people I served with in the first Trump administration see the worst as yet to come. What worries them most isn’t just the midterms, which Trump will attempt to steal or discredit, but what condition the US Constitution will be in by the 2028 presidential election.
Their fears are specific. They expect Trump to ignore Congress wholesale, including bypassing the Senate on cabinet appointments, spending money lawmakers never approved and impounding money they did. They expect him to ratchet up his punishment of Democratic-led states with the full weight of the federal government (denying disaster aid and gutting programmes for the sin of voting wrong), while showering loyal cronies with pardons, contracts and regulatory favours.
Trump, pictured with Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and his wife Jennifer, will soon be free of GOP critics and surrounded by people who owe him everything (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP)And they expect him to stop pretending the courts matter, although he’s barely pretending now. In one of every eight cases where federal courts have blocked his actions (about 31), the administration has simply flouted the ruling in a display of executive defiance without precedent in American history.
Trump’s “finale” could flip the math, leading to a refusal to accept rulings in the majority of cases. The default posture will be one of hostility and only instances in which he’ll welcome court proceedings will be to wage war against his enemies.
If you want to know what that lawlessness looks like in practice, you can see it with cases like the ones against James Comey. Court filings last week revealed that government agents apparently used illegal wiretaps to track the former FBI director — at the direction of senior Trump officials — while the President monitored the operation in real time aboard Air Force One. The episode stacked at least three constitutional violations into a single act, including warrantless surveillance, retaliation against protected speech and the vindictive prosecution of a critic. Test cases like this will become textbook if Trump’s top lawyer gets confirmed by a compliant GOP Senate this week.
Here I should declare an interest, because I’ve been in the prediction business before. Ahead of the 2024 election, I published a forecast built on conversations and on-the-record interviews with roughly a hundred Republicans and former Trump administration officials, outlining what he would do with a second term. Trump and his allies called the warnings “preposterous”, “phoney” and “fake news”. A year and a half into his presidency, 90 per cent of those predictions have come true, from the purge of the civil service to troops on American streets to the branding of domestic critics as “terrorists”.
So when I warn about Trump’s “finale,” I’m not doing it to fearmonger. I’m doing it because it’s coming. I expect Trump will do exactly what my Capitol Hill friends and former Trump colleagues fear by sidestepping Congress, breaking laws and ignoring the body’s constitutional functions. I expect him to keep thumbing his nose at the courts and even defying the Supreme Court in a major case that breaks against him. And I expect him to use emergency powers held in reserve – such as the Insurrection Act, or even the suspension of habeas corpus – dressed up as responses to “domestic security” crises (both have already been openly discussed inside the White House). There are many recipes for constitutional crisis; the President may cook up all of them.
Then there’s a question that people talk about as if it’s only a remote possibility, though it may actually be the most likely: whether Trump intends to leave at all. In my opinion, he will muse about an unconstitutional third term until the bitter end, partly to keep would-be successors like Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a permanent crouch, but not merely as theatre. He will genuinely explore it. Though a third term is forbidden under the law, his allies see possible avenues of “reinterpreting” the Constitution. Like the attempted steal of the 2020 election, you can be sure Trump will take the option if he sees a path.
Even if that door stays shut, another stands open. Trump has previously considered becoming Speaker of the House, a post that does not require its holder to be an elected member of Congress. Can you picture it yet — what America starts to look like in these scenarios? A President refusing to leave … or a loyal Republican majority in 2029 installing the former President as Speaker, second in line to a presidency occupied by a hand-picked protégé. Vladimir Putin ran this same play in Russia in 2008, sliding into the prime minister’s office while Dmitry Medvedev kept the Kremlin’s chair warm.
These are all very real outcomes, particularly in a country run by a man who insists the only limitation on his power is his “own morality”. So no, the midterms will not tame Donald Trump. Nothing on the immediate horizon will.
But here’s what my worried former colleagues sometimes forget. Autocracy is labour-intensive. Every illegal wiretap needs agents willing to run it. All the flouted court rulings require officials willing to ignore them. Each act of retribution results in new accomplices, and every accomplice is a witness to wrongdoing. As such, the more aggressively Trump asserts power in his finale, the larger the ledger of accountability grows. I’ve been keeping track of that ledger for almost ten years, and I am certain it will come due in courtrooms, at ballot boxes or in history’s verdict.
That’s the irony of a man with a long enemies list. Repression is meant to cement his power, but it ends up laying the groundwork for an eventual counter force. Every person and community and institution that Trump attacks becomes a natural opponent until, sooner or later, his fears about the gathering of opponents and a conspiracy against him become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Despite the flaccid resistance within the GOP’s ranks, you already see a burgeoning defiance spreading across the United States, from ordinary people willing to run federal agents out of states where they don’t belong or news outlets taking the President to court and winning.
So while America may be entering the darkest act of this drama, I believe it will be the last one. The hard years to come will blow back on Trump. Defiant Americans will make sure of it.
Miles Taylor is the former chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator and democracy reform leader
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