There was a time when Americans exported democracy.
Now we are rehearsing how to cancel it.
Donald Trump’s threat to scrap the 2026 midterms is not a joke, not a stunt, not one of his carnival-barker improvisations. It is the logical crescendo of a political culture that hollowed out democracy long before he arrived to flick the switch.
He tried to overturn the 2020 election.
He refused to commit to accepting defeat in 2024.
He muses openly about a third term.
And now he floats the idea that perhaps elections themselves are unnecessary.
“When you think of it,” he told Reuters, “we shouldn’t even have an election.”
Dictators love elections.
As long as they win 99.96 percent of the vote.
The Pageant of Consent
Having covered dictatorships from Latin America to the Balkans, one learns that the spectacle matters more than the ballot.
Saddam Hussein asked Iraqis in 1995 a single question:
“Do you approve of President Saddam Hussein being the President of the Republic?”
He received 99.96 percent approval.
Hafez al-Assad secured 99.9 percent in Syria.
Hosni Mubarak won with a comparatively modest 88.6 percent.
These were not elections. They were coronations with ink-stained fingers.
Trump admires this efficiency. The inconvenience of counting real votes appears tiresome. He regrets not seizing voting machines in 2020. He dreams of abolishing mail-in ballots. He studies the Chicago machine model — stuff the boxes after closing time, declare victory before sunrise.
And when Zelensky explained that wartime Ukraine suspended elections, Trump responded with visible delight:
“So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”
The enthusiasm was telling.
War is the dictator’s solvent. It dissolves constitutions.
Engineering the Illusion
Before abolishing elections, one must first make them meaningless.
Voter registration drives at naturalization centers? Prohibited.
Restrictive voter ID laws? Nationwide.
Reduced time off for federal employees to vote? Of course.
Gerrymandering that surgically disenfranchises Black and Latino voters? Upheld by the Supreme Court.
Redistricting has become an art form — democracy by cartography. The lines are drawn so precisely that voters no longer choose representatives. Representatives choose voters.
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling ensured that even if ballots survive, they are auctioned. Money is speech. Corporations are citizens. Oligarchs are patriots.
The “consent of the governed” now arrives via Super PAC.
We have perfected what Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism.”
Outward fealty to elections.
Inner allegiance to oligarchy.
The rituals remain. The substance evaporates.
Bipartisan Theater
Let us not pretend this was born yesterday.
Democrats and Republicans perfected the art of political burlesque long ago. On the margins — race, identity, cultural skirmishes — they spar theatrically. But on empire, militarized policing, austerity, corporate trade deals, surveillance, and endless war, they march in lockstep.
One party scapegoats immigrants.
The other performs symbolic inclusion.
Meanwhile the Pentagon budget climbs toward $1.5 trillion.
Congress passes a bill allocating $170 billion for border and interior enforcement — $75 billion for ICE alone over four years. More than the yearly budget of all state and local law enforcement combined.
The cage expands.
Militarism is sold as patriotism. The Constitution is conscripted to serve power rather than restrain it.
And citizens — overworked, indebted, exhausted — are invited to identify with empire rather than question it. It makes them feel strong.
It keeps them obedient.
Terror as Policy
The police violence long inflicted on poor urban communities — the militarized raids, the casual executions, the legal immunity — was never an aberration. It was a prototype.
Trump did not invent the machinery.
He inherited it.
The largest prison population on earth.
The normalization of surveillance.
The erosion of due process.
He simply widened the aperture.
Terror is not collateral damage.
Terror is the point.
The Final Exit
Trump understands what authoritarians always understand: elections are dangerous if they are real.
If the midterms threaten impeachment, he cancels them.
If the courts object, he defies them.
If protests erupt, they are crushed.
Minneapolis offers a preview — cities under siege, federalized force, legal residents snatched off streets.
Should elections become theater or vanish altogether, dissenters will face two choices:
Exile.
Or imprisonment.
Resistance, as in all dictatorships, carries a cost.
The Death of the Experiment
We are told this is hyperbole. That institutions will hold. That “norms” will restrain him.
But institutions are paper shields when both parties have spent decades hollowing them out.
Trump is not the disease.
He is the symptom.
He is what happens when a money-soaked political system, stripped of accountability and drenched in militarism, produces a strongman who dispenses with the pretense.
The American experiment will not collapse with a bang.
It will be applauded off the stage.
And if elections are subverted or abolished, there will be no going back through procedural appeals or polite editorials. Only mass mobilization, strikes, and collective refusal will halt the consolidation of a police state.
History teaches this clearly.
We just prefer not to read history when it becomes autobiographical.
Democracy in America now resembles a limited-time promotional offer.
Available while supplies last.
No refunds.
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