If I Were Stephen Miller

A 2026 Midterms Prediction

Publishing this in the middle of a cross-country road trip: audio coming soon.

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Election predictions were a lot easier when we only had to worry about who would win the election. You collected economic data, public sentiment, and other assorted indicators of general wellbeing, plugged it into a big equation, and published the results. Learning how to do these equations is the only sensible career path for someone majoring in political science, or so I was told repeatedly. I’ve never been particularly sensible or particularly interested in statistics, so while my colleagues were busy learning quantitative models and watching baseball, I was reading about fascism and watching UFC. In 2026, that’s a far better skillset.

The question isn’t whether the Republicans are about to suffer the kind of loss typically reserved for those who attempt land war in Asia, which they are. It’s not even about whether the Republicans will mount a full-scale effort to overturn those catastrophic results, which they will. The real question is this: just how much of the GOP’s brain trust has been devoured by worms? How many of the party’s top strategists literally believe the Democrats are Satan-worshipping Sharia communists who want to trans all your children in an attempt to undermine God and His creation, as opposed to merely pretending for political gain?

Many have pointed out that it’s a lot more difficult to steal multiple midterm election—especially if they’re not close—than a single Presidential one. The Trump administration has control of the American military, federal police, and intelligence apparatus; they have the brute-force tools they’d need for such a maneuver, at least on paper. If they’re so far gone that they see Democratic control of congress as an apocalypse-level threat, they might even do it. But if even a scrap of brain remains within the Republican Party machine, they will not steal this election. It would be an enormous strategic mistake. A historic unforced error.

Americans react very poorly to naked displays of authoritarianism, and brute force midterm election theft would be exactly that. I am old enough to remember how, in July of 2020, Portlanders from all walks of life endured an endless barrage of tear gas and rubber bullets to face down M4-carrying federal agents and take a stand against Trump’s invasion of their city. I am old enough to remember what happened in Minneapolis earlier this year, when ordinary people came together under threat of public execution to save their neighbors and thwart ICE at every turn. Americans meet overt displays of fascism and violence with mass resistance, not acquiescence, and the Trump regime is not fully prepared to quell that resistance at this time. The press is cowed, but not utterly broken. Big tech’s ability and willingness to censor the Internet is growing fast, but not enough to fully crack down on information flow and political organizing online. Hegseth’s military purges are well underway, but two years is not long enough to fully eliminate dissent; pockets of resistance will remain. ICE is dropping $100 million on an intelligence program that would perform widespread surveillance on the American people to detect thoughtcrime and punish political enemies, but that program is far from ready.

The GOP is simply not equipped for a clean-sweep authoritarian takeover at this time. They need a couple more years. They need to buy time until 2028, and they need enough ammunition to steamroll all opposition within their own party. A catastrophic 2026 midterm loss could be that ammunition, if they have the sense to use it.

None of what follows is meant to deter you from voting straight Blue on Tuesday. Please do this. Please send a message to your fellow Americans, the administration, and the world: Trump does not have the popular mandate he continues to baselessly claim, the people are not behind him, we reject the MAGA project as fundamentally un-American. Expectations are such that anything but a route will be interpreted as a win for MAGA, so let’s make this a route and vote the bastards out everywhere we can.

With all that out of the way…

If I Were Stephen Miller, Here’s How I Would Play This

As Laura Jedeed awoke on November 4th from uneasy dreams she found herself transformed in her bed into a gigantic insect…

It seems the American people have not just spoken, they have shouted a slew of invective with one voice. This is a catastrophic defeat. The GOP has lost badly. I, Stephen Miller, was expecting this, and I am already making phone calls.

The teams of lawyers we spent months assembling are getting to work as we speak. They’re not good at being lawyers, but they’re very good at screaming into a microphone and cranking out baseless, unhinged lawsuits, which is all we need them to do. They’re already hard at work flooding the zone with shit.

Every right-wing hack, pundit, and podcaster already has their marching orders. We are filling this ecosystem with a white-out chaos blizzard that makes the aftermath of 2020 look sedate. Trump has already posted 97 times on Truth Social, and even now our physicians and witch doctors are performing their various arcane magicks to ready Trump’s ailing body and mind for a blistering press conference at 11. He will threaten arrests, a national FBI investigation, crackdowns, purges, political assassinations, the Insurrection Act, nuclear war—it will be his most unhinged speech of all time. A high bar, I know, but one we’re going to clear this morning.

Some of these threats we will walk back in the coming days. Others we will carry out. From now until January 20th, 2027, we are pouring 100% of our efforts into two essential goals:

1. Create an overwhelming narrative of election theft for our supporters

2. Drive everyone left of center into screaming insanity through fear and threats of violence

Our actual goal isn’t to steal this election. Our goal is to convince our base that the election was stolen and that we could not, with the current power allotted to the Presidency, Stop the Steal. We also want to give the left every reason to expect everything up to and including a military crackdown. We want them to loudly proclaim this threat as real, valid, and imminent, for reasons I’ll get to in a second.

We’ll take some action to bolster this performance. We will deploy the FBI to seize a few voting machines, sure. We might deploy ICE to quell protests (and here’s hoping there’s property damage so we can get some good clips of the Deranged Communist Dems threatening the fabric of civilization). Maybe, if a result is very close, we’ll concentrate on overturning that election result, but not in a way that would alter the composition of the House and Senate as decided by the American people.

On January 20th, we wail on Newsmax as the Democratic victors are sworn into office. The Liberals will celebrate; social media will erupt into an orgy of snark. People will laugh at all those media predictions of imminent civil war, of the Insurrection act, a full authoritarian takeover. We will watch as orgasmic relief washes over everyone left of center. Major news outlets will declare victory from democracy and rule of law. The opposition will go to brunch. Mimosa reserves will run dry.

I will not be going to brunch. I have a lot of closed-door meetings to attend.

I will spend the next two years telling donors, pundits, and weak-kneed Republicans that the 2026 midterms prove that in order to save America, we must shred the constitution and give Trump¹ dictatorial powers. It is the only way to preserve America from a full communist takeover in 2028. If we don’t take action, these demons are going to burn every bible, confiscate all wealth, and forcibly trans everyone in America.

Meanwhile, we are going to push the agenda that since Congress is illegitimate, Trump doesn’t have to listen to them. The Democrats will mount investigations into the open corruption, graft, and open influence buying, just as they promised, and the Republicans they subpoena will refuse to answer questions and instead shout that Congress is illegitimate—if they show up at all. Our pundits and podcasters and tech platforms and bots to make those clips more viral than COVID. You thought there was gridlock before? You thought we’d thoroughly sidelined those morons? You poor bastards. You’ll yearn for the functional government and level-headed politics of the last two years.

And as the Democrats flail helplessly, the American people will suffer—such delicious suffering; we’ve spent the last two years ensuring it. All our budget cuts will take effect right after the Democrats are sworn in. Congressional dysfunction won’t prevent us from blaming them every bad thing that happens after January 20th (and loads of things that happened before, if we’re all being honest). That’s what we’ll tell the people, and that’s what those suckers will believe. They’ll eat it up and beg for more.

Meanwhile, Hegseth will continue readying the military for 2028. We’ll continue to pump money into ICE and ERO, we’re going to spin up that intel network, and we’re going to use NSPM-7 to the hilt. We’re going to send so many political dissenters to jail, journalists very much included. We’ll see how brave those muckraking bastards are after we crush a few of their precious networks with the FCC and lawfare. We’ll chill public discourse. We’ll consolidate our power within the tech world, we’ll control the Internet. When 2028 comes, we’ll be ready.

And the best part? The Democrats will scream and rage and talk about how everything we’re doing is “illegal” and “immoral” and “fascist,” but because we failed to steal the 2026 election, they’ll finish all of those sentences with “and go vote in November.” When people on the left warn you of our impending authoritarian takeover—the real one, this time—their warnings will be dismissed. “Remember 2026? They said the Republicans would steal that election. They failed then, and they’ll fail in 2028.”

But we won’t fail. By 2028, we’ll be ready.

How Can We Stop This?

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That quote is from an unnamed senior advisor to George W Bush in 2004. I have thought about it every single day since I read it in Sarah Kendzior’s latest book.

By any conventional definition, the national Democratic Party is now conservative. For a decade now, they have operated as an anti-Trump party that seeks to maintain (conserve) the status quo. This strategy is 100% reactive. By definition, it leaves MAGA in the driver’s seat.

The most successful Democratic candidates this cycle have been progressives—again, in the most literal definition of that word. They have presented a vision for progressing beyond our untenable status quo: big, controversial proposals like Medicare for all and raising taxes on billionaires. I was lucky enough to live in NYC during Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, and that man spent almost no time talking about Trump. Instead, he presented a positive vision of what New York could be under his leadership, and that vision took him from polling at less than 1 percent to winning in a landslide within a year.

If we’re to thwart this fell vision of the future, we have to stop merely reacting to MAGA and start forcing MAGA to react to the things we do. We have to take the wheel and start turning, turning, turning, even if the car doesn’t turn for years. The Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare 100 times between 2010 and 2017. They didn’t overturn Obamacare, but they sure did turn the car.

For a decade now, we have been paralyzed by fear. The Democratic leadership has tread carefully so as not to make the authoritarianism worse. Well, it’s worse now, and the time for caution is past. It’s time for big political risks. It’s time to strategically bend the rules that Republicans now break with impunity. We are locked in an existential fight for the future of this country and also the world, and we cannot rest on our laurels if we take the House and Senate. We have to press our advantage—if only to make Stephen Miller sad.

1. “But Trump is old and frail and if he dies it will all be over,” I hear you saying, but that’s where you’re wrong: we need Trump in the beginning, but Vance would be better at executing the late stages of this game plan than Trump ever could be. Also, imagine the conspiracy theories we’ll spin when Trump drops dead. Imagine how many Antifa we can blame. I, Stephen Miller, am fully erect at the thought.