President Donald Trump is unlikely to take any lesson from the midterm rebuke that conservative writer Nick Catoggio expects in November, arguing that a poor showing at the polls would only push the president to escalate rather than reflect. The 2026 midterms, set for November 3 at the midpoint of Trump's term, will put every House seat and roughly one-third of the Senate on the ballot.

"Trump isn't going to 'change course' if Republicans are drubbed at the polls," Catoggio said in The Dispatch. "Almost certainly, he'll double down on everything Americans hate about him." The warning comes from inside right-of-center commentary — Boiling Frogs is Catoggio's newsletter at the conservative site The Dispatch — rather than from the president's Democratic opponents.

Recent polling points in that direction. Democrats led by 6.5 points on the generic congressional ballot, the standing survey asking voters which party they intend to back in their own House districts and a common gauge of the national political mood, but on Friday Catoggio said that margin had risen to 8.6 points — a gap he described as "head for the fallout shelter" stuff and, he noted, something new. "Since the day in 2015 that a certain [witless ape rode a certain escalator]( in other words, the Republican Party has never lost ground in both houses of Congress in the same election," Catoggio said. "Which makes the surging optimism in every corner of news media right now about an unfolding Republican calamity in November unnerving."

By custom, he observed, a president who takes a beating at the polls responds as if to a vote of no confidence — but that, he argued, would require a quality Trump does not have. The custom has deep roots: since World War II, the party holding the White House has lost House seats in nearly every midterm election, with only a handful of exceptions. "Do I really need to explain why the current president is unlikely to be so conciliatory? We've all lived through the last 10 years. We all grasp, surely, that a man who's incapable of humility will not — because he cannot — be humbled."

As the Times wrote, Catoggio expects Trump "will return to war after the midterms anyway," feeling either "vindicated by an unexpected electoral victory" or that he "has nothing more to lose by pursuing his own strategy."

Congress, in his view, may make matters worse. A bill it recently passed authorized new sanctions on Russia but also granted trade authority that, according to the Bulwark, would "allow Trump to drop 100 percent tariffs on virtually any country he likes, for as long as he likes, and with pretty much bulletproof legal authority to do so." The stakes of that grant are structural: under the Constitution, the power to impose tariffs rests with Congress, so a broad hand-off of trade authority to the White House is a significant delegation of congressional power.

Catoggio added that "postliberals" will spend the last two years of Trump's presidency egging him on with pleas that "now is the time for maximum viciousness." "'We've lost Congress, they'll say, and we'll probably lose the White House in 2028. This could be the last chance we have for years to accomplish our goals and 'save America,'" he wrote. "Fascists view every emergency as an invitation to behave more ruthlessly, and they'll surely treat the great midterm drubbing of 2026 as an emergency."

And with a new Democratic Congress positioned to scrutinize the Trump family's sleazy financial conduct, Catoggio argued that Trump will likely choose escalation over conciliation in pursuing his agenda: war, tariffs, mass deportations, and the occasional wrecking of public monuments. Between now and November, the size of the Democratic margin and the uses of the newly granted trade authority are among the concrete markers to watch.

"The voters who put Democrats in charge of the House and Senate hate all of it, so why shouldn't he seek revenge on them by giving them even more of it?" Catoggio asked. "Why should he care more about public opinion than about his own legacy when the public behaved so 'disloyally' at the polls? … This is what happens when you place America's welfare in the hands of someone who literally can't fathom putting someone else's interests above his own."

"'Repudiation' in a political context is really just a fancy word for 'shame,'" Catoggio concluded. "… Trump neither feels shame nor believes he should answer to anyone. There will be no lesson learned from this [midterm] comet strike."