Looking Past November 2028

The election of 2028 is important, but MAGA is unlikely to fade away.

Over the last few months opponents of Donald Trump have had a bounce in their collective step that was not there during most of 2025. There is an increasing sense that the midterm elections could turn into something of a blue wave. While I certainly hope that is true, we have also seen increasing evidence that the Trump regime is unlikely to allow free and fair elections in 2026. As distressing as that news may be, it should always be kept in mind that for Trump 2026 is only a dress rehearsal for 2028.

The good news, I suppose, is that many in the political class have begun to recognize the likelihood of Trump trying to undermine the elections, and have begun planning a response for that. Ensuring free and fair elections and a peaceful transition will require a broad multi-vectored strategy, but the growing awareness of the problem is a good sign.

There are obviously a great deal of unknowns regarding the 2026 midterms and even more uncertainty regarding the 2028 presidential election. Rather than try to predict something that far off in the future, it is essential to begin to ask some questions about not necessarily what post-Trump America will look like, but about where the country may be in mid-2029.

Typically at this point in the election cycle we would say we may not know who will in 2028, but we could imagine that either a Republican administration, perhaps led by Trump himself, will be carrying on a de facto third Trump term, or a Democrat will be coming in and shaking things up. While those scenarios remain possible, we should also recognize that thinking in such conventional terms and frameworks doesn’t really get to the heart of the political challenges facing the United States and the possible political future for our country.

The scenario for which many might hope is that president pick-your-favorite-Democrat wins the election in 2028 and comes into office in January of 2029 following a relatively smooth transition of power. This might take the form of Trump, regardless of whether he or not he runs, accusing the Democrats of stealing the election, but not being able to rally enough of his supporters to that cause, or perhaps, after a sound drubbing, just crawling back to an angry retirement at Mar-a-Lago.

In this scenario the new Democratic president brings the country together with a progressive legislative program, seeks to hold some Trump officials accountable through trials and investigations, but basically reverts to a kind of pre-Trump business as usual.

That may seem like the best scenario, but at this point it is all but fantasy. Even under that relatively good turn of events the new Democratic president would be faced with the choice of either ignoring the need for some kind of accountability and transitional justice, which would simply allow the MAGA forces to regroup and find new channels and directions for their fascist ambitions, or to aggressively pursue a form of transitional justice which in the long run is what the country needs, but in the short term would cause even more instability and pushback from the MAGA forces.

In other words the task of holding the country together and (re)building democracy will be daunting for a new President even following a resounding victory.

Another possible scenario, for where the country will be in mid-2029 is that Trump, or another Republican nominee, through various forms of voter suppression, illegally pushing people off of voter rolls and mobilizing ICE around polling places on Election Day and the preceeding days, is able to steal the election, but that enough of the kind of media and political class recognizes his victory for the MAGA forces to remain in office.

If that happens the aging president serving his third term, or a new MAGA president, would very likely accelerate efforts to consolidate the fascist regime because it would be clear to the Republican president and the people around him that if they didn’t do that their regime would collapse under the weight of its own corruption and criminality. If the Republicans need to steal the election to stay in office, they will naturally go down a path of consolidating and tightening the authoritarian control because they recognize their unpopularity and vulnerability.

A third scenario is instability resulting from either substantial uncertainty and chaos around the election itself or a Democratic candidate winning an not being able to take office because of Trump disrupting the transition. In either of these scenarios,the country would likely begin to come apart even more quickly. There is very little appetite anywhere for Donald Trump being illegally in office for a third term. Thus, there is the real possibility that if he tries to do that he would plunge the country into a period of intense instability, possibly of a violent nature, from which it would not easily recover.

A fourth scenario is that Trump regains his popularity and wins handily in 2028. If that happens, the fascist buffoonery will continue and regime will have the time and political resources to consolidate and plan its post-Trump future. That would effectively mean that the US as we once knew it would be an uglier, poorer more fascistic and ethnically cleansed version of itself for some time.

I don’t know which or even if any of these scenarios will come to pass, but it is important to begin to recognize that we have to look at the 2028 election not as a typical American election with some unusual characteristics, but more like the kinds of election we have seen in unstable countries, semi-authoritarian regimes and countries where teetering on the edge of collapse because that is a better framework for understanding the United States right now.