Reliable projections point to a blue wave on the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November, 2026, perhaps a tsunami, but ….
Seriously ….
What are the chances that the current Trump administration will accept electoral defeat in an existential election, existential because if it loses it will have to face a hostile Congress with subpoena power and the power of the purse and, theoretically (albeit not practically) conviction power following impeachment? What are the chances when it does not abide by any law, international, constitutional, federal, state or local? After all, the only moral that counts is Donald Trump’s opinion[1].
Obviously, no matter the results next Tuesday, the presidential pardon power will shield the members of Mr. Trump’s administration and his family (or most of them, some may be thrown to the wolves) from federal criminal liability no matter what (as did the Biden administration), but that does not shield them from prosecution, incarceration or fines at the state and local level. Then again, a compliant and subservient Supreme Court may well find a way to extend the scope of the pardon power or restrict the power of states and localities to work around it. But “facts” in the hands of a real press can be dangerous things. Of course, that assumes a “real press” rather than a subservient outlet for propaganda which hides even more than it distorts. Still it’s a bit harder to muzzle a hostile Congress with its fingers holding tight to the federal purse. Better to avoid the problem, but how?
Well, until the unstoppable force hit the unmovable wall in Brazil last week, the United States and Israel had conducted numerous successful experiments in electoral manipulation through the use of “bot” controlled social media spewing false information, algorithmic manipulation, control of electoral software and oodles of cash, indeed, manipulation of public transport seemed that it would be a great tool to assure proper results, at least until a pesky judicial system and idiots in the pro United States/Israeli camp screwed up and the elections were extended. Still, all but one recent election was steered in the “right” direction, regardless of how voters actually voted and the methods designed and perfected by the “deep state”, now controlled by Trump & Company, can be very effective. How effective in the United States, where it obviously seems they have been used by both branches of the uniparty since at least the 206 election, remains to be seen. But it seems a pretty good bet that with an utterly ruthless administration in charge of the system, the polls and projections will once again prove to, amazingly, have been completely mistaken.
So what if that constitutes a defacto coup d’état.
The sick thing is that such a likely defacto coup against the electorate is only possible (some would say likely), because the other branch of the AIPAC owned uniparty (i.e., the Democrats), when it was last in office, created precedents that their purported opponents can now use, not against them, but against us all. So, we really should at least ask ourselves: “Just how stupid have we been and how negligent in our duty as citizens that the foregoing is not only a possibility but a probability?”
As instructed by both branches of the uniparty as well as the unipress, we’ve voted in favor of purported “lesser evils” for so long that all we have is evil, plutocratic evil in a system where the purportedly sacred constitution is less useful than toilet paper (not to denigrate the immense value of toilet paper). And we, the stupid, naïve, manipulable voters are to blame, not the army of straw people the uniparty shoves in our faces, i.e., the communists and socialists and Muslims and liberals and progressives and conservatives and libertarians and academics and blacks and Hispanics and racists, etc.
On the other hand, what choices have we had, each seemingly worse that the other in an endless cycle: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump!!! Of course, there were other candidates but our purportedly free unipress kept them safely hidden while urging us not to “waste our votes”. “Move on, nothing here to see: Ross Perot, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, etc., who the ‘Hell’ were they?”
And who de we have sitting in the wings, according to the latest “polls (assuming Mr. Trump ever relinquishes the presidency, after all, he and his billionaire friends are avidly paying for research into immortality, of the immoral variant): Well, amazingly, Kamala Harris (if Hillary does not decide to run again); yuck!!!!; and J.D. Vance, or perhaps Marco Rubio, (yuck!!!).
So …. ¿Now what?
Somewhere an immense flock of happy chickens are coming home to roost, their feckless, errr, I mean fearless leader, cackling, suggesting we just lie back and enjoy it. After all, civic obligations are pretty much of a drag. Or, to put it another way, a bit more artfully, as recently departed Patrick Stewart once declaimed in his role as Locutos of Borg (perhaps paraphrasing Elliot Brandt): “Resistance is futile. Your life, as it has been, is over. From this time forward, you will service us.”
Actually, it’s been that way for a while.
Which is not to discourage the reader (hopefully more than one) from following president Trump’s advice to “vote early and vote often”!
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television in both Colombia and abroad; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
[1] Kanno-Youngs, Z., Pager, T., Rogers, K., & Sanger, D. E. (2026, January 8): “Trump lays out a vision of power restrained only by my own morality”. The New York Times. nytimes.com
