Five Paths for America in 2026

This could be the year when the tide turns against Trump . . . or drowns liberal democracy.

Well, we made it! We hope 2026 is off to a good start for everyone. We’ve got a nice, modest hope for the year: that it at least it will be better than the last one. Happy Friday.

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The U.S. Capitol on October 01, 2025. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Happy New Year (Maybe?)

by William Kristol

Happy New Year!

But will 2026 be a happy year for the republic?

It will be a crucial one. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to cite Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 1: In “the crisis at which we are arrived,” a “wrong election of the part we shall act” would “deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”

So what will 2026 be? A year of fortune or misfortune? Well, as the pitcher Joaquín Andújar once said, “You can sum up the game of baseball in one word: ‘You never know.’” What’s true of baseball is true of politics.

The year will be important and its outcome indeterminate. So I thought it might be helpful to very briefly sketch out five possible paths for the year ahead.

1. Very good news: We turn the corner.

Trump’s popularity continues to decline as he loses his grip and his administration becomes more chaotic. Republicans on the Hill increasingly desert him, and so Congress begins to act as a check on his administration. The Supreme Court steps up and mostly supports lower courts trying to sustain guardrails. Accommodating elites begin (finally!) to jump ship.

Abroad, Trump fumbles and bloviates, but we avoid disaster. Europe helps Ukraine, and Putin’s weaknesses are increasingly exposed.

November is a wave election, as in this 250th anniversary year, the public rallies to the principles of the Declaration and against nativism, extremism, and authoritarianism. Democrats win both the House and the Senate. Trump becomes a true lame duck.

This turn of events is unlikely but not impossible. Indeed, if things start to go in the right direction early in the year, we could see a happy snowball effect.

I’m going to (optimistically, but hey, it’s the new year) give this scenario a 20 percent chance of happening.

2. Good news: We see light at the end of the tunnel.

This is a more modestly upbeat scenario. The balance of power moves somewhat against Trump, and the authoritarian hold within and beyond government weakens. Democrats win the House easily and come close in the Senate. All in all, at the end of the year, there is less of a sense than there is now that Trump and Trumpism have a grasp on the future, let alone the mandate of heaven.

The year will be a tough slog in the right direction—but it will be the right direction.

I give this scenario a 20 percent chance as well.

3. So-so news: The status quo holds.

The forces of liberty and democracy hold their own, but only just. Things stand at the end of 2026 about where they were at the beginning. Democrats win the House narrowly but the Senate remains comfortably Republican, the Supreme Court remains an unreliable weathervane, and while elite accommodation may not intensify, it doesn’t reverse. Ukraine and for that matter NATO are able to hang on, but barely. So the fight continues.

Normally, one would think a more-of-the-same scenario the most likely of all, but I’m doubtful. The present balance of power in both the nation and the world seems precarious. I think it more likely than not that things break in one direction or another.

So I give this a 15 percent chance of happening.

4. Bad news: The slide continues.

Things continue to move downhill. Public support for Trump stabilizes and even ticks back up a bit. And so the Republican party and the Court continue to duck, ICE continues to grow and increasingly becomes a Praetorian guard acting without much of a check outside the law, Hegseth moves ahead with reshaping the military, and the Justice Department gets away with an Epstein coverup. The Trumpist movement continues to radicalize even as elites keep on going along, and things like the Trump-Kennedy Center, the “Arch of Triumph,” and other grotesqueries get normalized.

The prospects for a reversal of political momentum in 2027 and 2028 seem daunting. The transformation of U.S. foreign policy from global leadership to self-interested bullying continues. Ukraine’s future is grim.

I give this unhappy prospect a 25 percent chance of taking place.

5. Very bad news: The lights begin to go out.

Trumpism is ever more ascendant, and liberalism flailing and failing. The authoritarian momentum of the first year of Trump’s second term doesn’t merely continue but builds. The takeover at the power ministries—DHS and DOJ and DOD—continues apace. The Insurrection Act is invoked, the Alien Enemies Act is upheld, the administration’s assault on opposition voices becomes more sustained and effective, and support for ignoring the Twenty-Second Amendment grows. It becomes ever clearer that the Trump administration has no intention of handing over power in 2028—and it becomes increasingly unclear whether pro-democracy forces can rally successfully against this.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is forced into a Munich-like deal. Trump launches an unauthorized war against Venezuela, and Congress does nothing. And the administration is increasingly bold in helping authoritarian parties come to power in Europe and elsewhere.

Chance: 20 percent.

So, be alarmed! The odds aren’t terrific. But they’re not terrible. The fight is winnable. And as Thomas Paine reminded our forebears in December 1776, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. . . . Heaven knows how to set a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.”

Tell us which scenario you think is most likely and why—even if it’s not the one we want.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• What ‘Regime Change’ in Venezuela Would Really Mean… MARK HERTLING argues that it’s not clear the administration has settled on a goal, much less considered the consequences.

• How I Failed Escapism 101… The Diplomat and The Black Wolf are too close to reality for comfort, writes JILL LAWRENCE.

• The Marquise de #MeToo… CATHY YOUNG on what works and what doesn’t in The Seduction, HBO’s retelling of Les Liaisons dangereuses.

• When Fox News Starts Saying ‘Trump is Bad’ (and Other Wild Predictions)... On The Next Level, JVL, SARAH, and TIM look ahead to what’s next—and it (mostly) isn’t pretty.

• Mark Cuban Tells Us How He Can Fix America’s Shitty Health Care… JONATHAN COHN interviews MARK CUBAN on why the entrepreneur wants to do what many in his position have tried and failed to accomplish: improve health care.

• Tim’s 2025 Music Year in Review… The concert of a lifetime, and fifteen favorite records—from country to hip-hop to post-punk, as recapped by TIM MILLER.

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Quick Hits

REDISTRICTING REVISITED: This year’s midterm elections are still nearly a year away, but the crucial first act of the story is already complete: Republicans’ attempts to catch Democrats napping with a blitz of off-cycle redistricting in red states, followed by Democrats’ frenzied efforts to claw back their losses with competing measures in blue states. Yesterday, Politico published the essential retrospective on the saga, featuring interviews with many of the operatives on both sides of the fight.

We’d honestly forgotten how many twists and turns the story took. There was Texas Democrats’ flight from their state in protest of its new maps, which helped turn redistricting into a national issue for the Democratic base. There was the horse-trading and maneuvering of Ohio Democrats, who managed to eke out a deal that held Republicans a bit short of the 13–2 map they’d considered drawing. There was California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s willingness to swing big, putting a constitutional amendment before his voters to free state Democrats to explicitly retaliate against Texas’s gerrymander. And there was the stubbornness of Indiana Republicans, who defied massive pressure from the White House and national Republicans and rejected a map that would have scrambled the state to give the GOP two more seats.

Maybe the most striking quote came from Eric Holder, the attorney general under Barack Obama, who began working on Democratic redistricting strategy after leaving the Justice Department. “We can’t do what [Republicans] think we’re going to do,” Holder told Politico. “Which is, I’ll go on MSNBC and CNN and say, ‘that’s a terrible thing.’ Somebody will write an op-ed. You know, we have to do something that really meets this moment, even if it’s a little inconsistent with what we have been trying to do since 2017.”

Hard to argue they didn’t meet the moment. Read the whole thing.

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MAMDANI SWORN IN: New York City is a psycho place for lots of reasons, but here’s a timely one: They swear in their mayors at the stroke of midnight as New Year’s Eve gives way to New Year’s Day. Now ex-hizzoner Eric Adams shuffled off the stage in signature style, pushing the button to start the Times Square ball drop while suggesting his next venture would involve using cryptocurrency to fight antisemitism. It’s Zohran Mamdani’s city now, and the new mayor used his inauguration speech to pledge to govern “expansively and audaciously.”

“Those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me say this,” Mamdani said. “No longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.”

Mamdani has been at the center of a media maelstrom all year, with centrist Democrats wringing their hands, Republicans licking their chops, and leftists doing cartwheels over the emergence of the young socialist firebrand. Mamdani, who has plainly felt the weight of all this controversy, said openly that his tenure would be a test for people who “want to know if the left can govern.”

“So standing together with the wind of purpose at our backs,” he said, “we will do something that New Yorkers do better than anyone else: We will set an example for the world.”

He’s probably right either way, but hopefully it’s a good example.

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BENEATH THE MAKEUP: Another new year is upon us, bringing with it a president one year older than he was a year ago—which was already pretty old! The Wall Street Journal has fascinating new reporting on Trump’s aging and some of the—ah—unusual methods he’s using to cope. Trump told the Journal he takes 325 milligrams of aspirin a day to bolster his heart health, more than four times the usual physician-recommended dose for men his age. “They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart,” Trump said. “I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?”

The larger-than-expected dose helps explain why Trump was so susceptible to bruising last year—and occasionally to worse than bruising. “His skin is so delicate that Pam Bondi, now his attorney general, caused his hand to bleed when she nicked him with her ring while giving him a high-five at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee,” the Journal reports. “The cut alarmed some who witnessed the exchange.”

Trump also discussed the pancake makeup he’s routinely applied to mask those bruises: “I have makeup that’s, you know, easy to put on,” he said. “Takes about 10 seconds.”

There’s plenty more there, including about the president’s nighttime insomnia and bad habit of apparent mid-meeting power naps. Read the whole thing.

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