With the November midterm elections approaching, congressional Democrats are already laying the groundwork for a wave of investigations should their party retake control of the House of Representatives. The stakes of that majority are concrete: 218 seats decide which party names committee chairs, sets the hearing calendar, and holds subpoena power — the levers that turn oversight plans into investigations with legal force. The question of how President Donald Trump would respond to a new reality heightened accountability was put to authors Susan Glasser and Peter Baker during an appearance on MS NOW.

Their remarks came as the Washington Post this week published interviews with a dozen Democratic lawmakers outlining what they plan to do if their party takes back the House. One intends to open an investigation into how Trump and his family have managed to profit from the government, how the family's businesses have won lucrative government contracts, and what legitimate solutions could fix corruption in politics.

"There's so much corruption and grift that it's going to take the entire House on the Democratic side to do investigations appropriately," said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.).

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) has his sights on the House Natural Resources Committee, where he wants to examine how Trump's allies secured lucrative mining and energy deals. Also on the Democratic list: Trump's bulldozing of the White House, his threats to tear down the Kennedy Center after bankrupting it, and his "botched" job "fixing" the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) has already requested documents, a standard early tool of congressional oversight that comes before any hearings or subpoenas a committee might later pursue.

Notably, even Republicans have been investigating the Department of Homeland Security over corruption that took place under the direction of Secretary Kristi Noem. Democrats now intend to turn their eyes to what they view as a laundry list of missteps under Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

MS NOW co-host Eugene Daniels noted that Trump has two more years in office, and that there is a high likelihood he will pardon himself along with those in his government. Even so, public investigations can still continue, and lawmakers can use them to ultimately craft legislation that curbs illegal behavior by government officials with tangible consequences — the route by which oversight findings become binding law. Daniels asked what that world would look like — and how Glasser thinks Trump will react when he is backed into a corner.

"You know, lame duck. Trump is not sort of [a] neutered, do nothing, while-away his way his time on the golf course Trump," Glasser cautioned. "It is a man who has a long history of escalating. And you know, his personal motto, which he's been very clear about, including with journalists over the years, is, if somebody punches, you, punch back harder. And I think now that he has such an expansive view of the powers that he believes he has in the Oval Office when he's challenged, if he were to be defeated, that's when I would look for him to do things that perhaps he's been constrained from doing so far."

She said many Americans think Trump has already done so much that he can't possibly escalate, but she warned there is still more.

"Look at what he did after Republicans were defeated in the 2018 midterms. The first thing he did was to fire his attorney general to, you know, make maximal demands on Congress, which led to, at the time, the longest shutdown of the government in history," Glasser continued.

What was different after 2018 is that Democrats held the House majority while Republicans still maintained the Senate. In a scenario where both the House and Senate are Democratic, a budget bill to fully fund the government could pass both chambers through reconciliation — the budget procedure that allows certain fiscal legislation to clear the Senate with a simple majority instead of the 60 votes normally needed to overcome a filibuster — and Trump could veto it, shutting down the government and leaving him the one publicly taking the blame.

Glasser said Trump has been signaling for a while that he won't "sit back and take a defeat in the midterm elections."

"So, even though the polls and everything suggest Republicans are really going to have a tough time, that doesn't mean that Trump will just, you know, come out and meekly declare defeat and that he's, you know, been chided by the electorate as Barack Obama and others did," she said.