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Getting Ahead of Ourselves About the 2028 Elections
Former British Prime Minister Harold McMillan was once asked what the hardest part of being Prime Minister had been. “Events, my dear boy, events,” he replied. It’s two weeks now since the most recent elections, and as I try to wrap my head around reams of fevered commentary about the implications for the 2026 and 2028 elections, I find my thoughts returning over and over again to McMillan’s observation.
The issues that drove the most recent elections could well become irrelevant a few short months from now.
We’re told, repeatedly, that the Democrats have broken the code for winning in 2026. They believe they’ve succeeded in painting Trump’s economic recovery as “disappointing,” they’ve accomplished the mind-bending feat of deflecting their own responsibility for the recent government shutdown, and they’ve seemingly buried the culture war issues under a mountain of BS, typically BS of the “but Trump” variety.
Energy costs are dropping, and, most visibly, gas prices are down, but the knock-on benefits in terms of reduced cost for everything that must be grown or manufactured or shipped have not yet gained sufficient visibility. This, of course, reflects the persistent problem of leftist control of the media. We may be living in a new era of independence from the legacy media, but make no mistake — the legacy media still exerts a huge influence, and it is heavily invested in either minimizing or ignoring altogether the accumulating positive signs for the economy.
Even Trump’s most important domestic policy achievement, his success in virtually shutting off the Biden-era flood of illegal immigration, now works against him. Success at the border means a shift in public attention to the knottier problem of what to do about the illegal immigrants already in the country. Unfortunately, and despite ICE’s focus on arresting the worst violent criminals, drug smugglers, and human traffickers, the narrative has been captured by “#BeKind” rhetoric, propagated insistently by all the usual suspects, including, sadly, the US Council of Catholic Bishops. Even our new American pope seems to be infected by this.
Put it all together, and the message seems clear. As signaled this past November 5th, the Democrats are on a roll, and the Republicans are playing catch-up. Coupled with Donald Trump’s looming “lame duck” status, third term fantasies to the contrary notwithstanding, and the path ahead seems clear, and clearly depressing for those of us of a conservative bent.
Both Democrat- and Republican-leaning commentators seem to be lining up behind the same vision. In 2026 the Democrats will flip the House, and the story of Trump’s presidency will become one of impeachment, impeachment 24/7, and nothing else. If the Republicans hold the Senate and refuse to actually impeach, then the Democrats will simply try again and again, a repetitive process that will consume every ounce of legislative energy and every inch of headline space. If by some chance the Democrats win the Senate as well, they will face the dilemma of arising from a J.D. Vance succession, but one suspects that’s a problem they would like to have.
To further follow the emerging narrative, Democrat success in 2026 will cripple any chance for successful completion of the Trump agenda. With the exception of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” virtually all of Trump’s signature achievements have been the result of executive orders, and even as many of these have reversed the actions of Obama and Biden, so, too, will they be vulnerable to reversal if Democrats capture the White House in 2028. We saw this, after all, when Biden won in 2020. As moribund as the legislative branch has become, permanent change still requires change in law, change not reversible at the stroke of the presidential pen — or, God help us, the auto-pen.
It would be easy, then, for those of us of a conservative bent to give way in the present moment to doom and gloom. Instead, we might be better served by recognizing that “events” matter and are rarely predictable. Things may not turn out the way we’d like between now and 2026 or 2028, but they’re unlikely to follow a linear path to a leftist triumph.
Even the most hastily assembled list of reminders suggests a different outlook. Start with perhaps the most obvious, the emergence of Donald Trump. In 2015, at the beginning of the serious political campaigning season, no one — I repeat, no one — confidently predicted that he’d win the Republican nomination. Even as the usual suspects fell by the wayside, the pundits, even conservative pundits, wondered at the notion that this improbable outsider candidacy might succeed.
And even fewer predicted that, having earned the nomination, he would prevail against Hillary Clinton in the general election. The most delicious moments of that election night, the consternation of the James Carville’s, or watching Hillary slink away from the carefully staged “breaking the glass ceiling” victory party — these became delicious moments precisely because they were so unexpected. Love him or hate him, Republican and Democrat alike, none can deny that, a decade into Trump’s improbable journey, he stands like a colossus on the world stage, something no one predicted in 2015.
Or consider the consequences of the October 7th Hamas atrocities. Few — including the much-vaunted Israeli intelligence services — predicted the attack. But fewer still predicted that from this horror would emerge a level of military resolution that succeeded in breaking Hamas, crippling Hezbollah, and humbling the mullahs of Iran. And after years of U.S. and European appeasement of Teheran’s nuclear ambitions, no one anticipated the moment when Israel would seize direct control of Iranian airspace, enabling American bombers to obliterate Iran’s nuclear facilities.
A scant decade ago, no one predicted that the U.S. government would turn its back on climate change fanaticism to once again pursue both “drill baby drill” and a nuclear power renaissance. Nor did anyone predict that European governments would, however hesitantly and often dishonestly, begin their own quiet retreat from unachievable climate targets. The executives of the world’s major automobile companies, paid handsomely to see market trends five years down the road, now see their costly assumptions about future electric vehicle sales in ruins, no longer driven by left-wing government’s thumbs on the pricing scale.
Even so short a backward glance should counsel humility about the political environment of the next two years. The same might be said of even a hesitant forward glance. The Ukraine war, which the experts predicted would end in weeks with a Russian victory, soon will enter its fourth year. Despite periodic flurries about “peace plans” or the internal collapse of either Ukraine or Russia, there is, frankly, no obvious quick end in sight.
Despite much wishful thinking inside the Beltway and in the various European capitals, the objective conditions that might lead to a stable peace simply do not exist, and no one seems prepared to do the things necessary to bring these conditions about. More likely, the situation dissolves into chaos, with unpredictable consequences. The only likely aspect is that the chaos will reach far beyond the current borders of the conflict.
We should also remind ourselves that, despite the ebb and flow of our own government’s policy toward China, certain things remain constant. We often make the mistake of listening to ourselves talking when it comes to China, because listening to the Chinese themselves, even when they speak in plain English, takes effort and is discomfiting. Notably, Xi Jinping has never deviated from the goal of “resolving” the Taiwan situation no later than 2027. We can tell ourselves that, somehow, we can avoid the consequences of such a “resolution,” but geopolitical and economic verities argue otherwise.
None of the scenarios are comforting, not a Chinese naval blockade, not an all-out invasion, not Putinesque nuclear saber-rattling, not hybrid warfare waged on U.S. soil by Chinese cartel proxies or even Chinese agents themselves. And make no mistake — as I’ve sketched in my new novel, the Chinese would readily engage in manipulating the 2028 elections to serve their strategic purposes. It’s already evident that Chinese money is flowing to disruptive left-wing elements here in the U.S.
These are just a few of the “known, unknowns.” More salient in considering the politics of the next two years are the “unknown, unknowns,” to borrow a phrase made famous by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld garnered contempt for many reasons, most of them justified, but the mockery attached to this phrase reflected the political establishment’s overweening hubris in the face of uncertainty. The so-called “experts” hate uncertainty, so much so that they insistently ignore their failed predictions even as they double down on them — witness Al Gore’s persistent — ludicrously persistent — climate change pessimism.
We would do well, then, to not lose much sleep over the results of the most recent elections, nor to spend too much of our time trying to predict the results of 2026 or 2028. Small shifts can make a big difference in voter perception. Here in Virginia, for example, no one expected that the left’s pompous dismissal of parental rights would propel Glenn Youngkin to a narrow victory four years ago.
And then there are the “Black Swans,” defined as “extremely rare, unpredictable occurrences that have severe, wide-ranging consequences.” The Covid-19 pandemic serves as a near-perfect example of a Black Swan event. Since first popularized by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb nearly two decades ago, the concept has been applied — or misapplied — to virtually any slightly surprising phenomenon, and library shelves have filled with tomes counseling businesses, investors, and government leaders on how to predict and overcome these events.
This, of course, misses the point entirely. What seems predictable with hindsight originated as one of Rumsfeld’s “unknown, unknowns.” Instead of struggling to predict every contingency, we’d be better served to follow Taleb’s prescription, by focusing on “resiliency.” This is not as hard as it may seem, and, contrary to the naysayers, it doesn’t require vast expenditure to cover every conceivable scenario. Instead, we should view it as a thought process, a way of taking existing capabilities and bending them to fresh purposes. The B-2 stealth bomber and the bunker buster bombs weren’t conceived with the Iranian nuclear program in mind, but when the opportunity arose, they offered a “resilient” solution.
Looking ahead to 2026 and 2028, what lessons should we draw? The issues that drove the most recent elections could well become irrelevant a few short months from now. If we want “political resiliency” then we’d best concentrate on solving today’s problems rather than guessing about the future. In an era marked by bloviating politicians whose sole attribute seems to be kicking cans and blaming others, real accomplishment will translate into electability. The real issue of public trust remains not just a lack of authenticity, but a demonstrated incompetence. The party that makes an honest effort to identify and solve problems in the present will be the party voters trust when unexpected “events” arise in the future.
READ MORE from James H. McGee:
Defending Nigeria’s Christians from Islamist Genocide
Simple Decency Is on the Ballot in Virginia
Remembering the True Victims of Injustice: Iryna, Logan, the Oltons
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.
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