The United States is approaching what could be a major turning point for President Donald Trump's second term: the 2026 midterm elections, now roughly one and a half months away. Midterm elections, held halfway through a president's term, will determine control of Congress for the final two years of that term. While many GOP insiders have sounded the alarm about widespread voter angst and the president's weak approval ratings, a new column in The Nation argues that Trump and his close MAGA "lackeys" show no signs of moderating — and are instead producing widespread "chaos and destruction."

Sasha Abramsky, in a Friday article for The Nation, a long-running progressive magazine, laments the "consequences of Trump's malicious presidency," which are "on full display in every corner of public life" as the midterms draw closer.

"Despite having no medical training or scientific expertise," Abramsky explains, "the health secretary (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) presents himself as an avatar of truth pitted against the best medical brains on Earth." The column also criticizes Donald Trump Jr. for accepting "hundreds of thousands of dollars from a (Vladimir) Putin-allied Russian oligarch to pay for his wedding celebration," and notes that the president "portrays himself as an AI-generated superhero" while getting his most diehard followers at his midterm "convention" to pledge personal allegiance to him and promise to "cheat like hell" to win the elections.

That "sense of being untethered to basic societal codes of conduct," Abramsky argues, has been on particularly shocking display this week in the debate over artificial intelligence. He writes that AI executives — who, in his view, have not been "ahead of the curve when it comes to protecting the common good" — have finally acknowledged they are creating "potentially civilization-busting products" and have urged the administration to put in place regulations and guardrails. Trump's response, according to the column, was to call the warnings a "HOAX," accuse the naysayers of wanting to kill the American economy's "golden goose," and say the only guardrail needed on AI is his own "high IQ and intuition." Those warnings were issued after a series of incidents in which malicious AI swarms collaborated to escape their containment systems, and after Anthropic identified apparent attempts to use its AI models to manufacture bioweapons.

Abramsky writes that Trump is directing his "violent animus" at figures ranging from "besieged Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook" to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

"Now that the Supreme Court has put the nail in the coffin of Trump's efforts to use the Post Office to sabotage the 2026 elections," Abramsky argues, "expect Trump to focus just as much ire on the Court's justices as he has done on Lisa Cook … After all, hell hath no fury like a narcissistic president scorned by a hard-right SCOTUS majority." He adds that Trump's "venom" is also likely to be aimed at Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh after Warsh and his colleagues voted to raise interest rates on Wednesday, a decision that affects borrowing costs for households and businesses across the economy.

Citing New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, Abramsky describes Trump as living in "a fantasy world — a bubble whose membrane allows in no dissent and no information that runs contrary to the childish superhero narrative that he has created around himself."

"Yes, it's beyond pathetic, and, yes, it makes good fodder for late-night TV," Abramsky concludes. "But it's also increasingly dangerous. Trump is a runaway train and, despite the urgency of the moment, none of his lackey Cabinet members seem even willing to prime the brakes."