Right now, Donald Trump and his team are cleaning house and fixing a lot of broken things. There will come a time when they will need to show solid results before the 2026 midterm elections.
One of the challenges of cooking for a lot of guests is timing. You want the food hot and ready as you tell your guests to take their seats. Having the potatoes just right an hour after the last guests have left is a bummer. Timing is everything. The same will be true for Donald Trump and his ambitious program: all of the current chaos and fixing needs to bring tangible results for the American public in the months prior to the 2026 midterm elections. Any later, and he may be staring down a Democratic Congress.
Right now, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the cabinet heads are trying to address a lot of things wrong with America. Whether the subject is a completely open border or enormous budget waste, there is a good deal to correct. The tariffs that Donald Trump has placed on major trading partners are partially in response to the latter’s tariffs and associated trade imbalances. Putting the tariffs in place in the long run may bring the Treasury a lot of money. For the short term, the tariffs have roiled the markets and led to fears of even higher prices. Virtually everything currently being done in Washington to reduce expenses, cut employees, and change the culture needs to be done if the U.S. wants to have a viable future. As Elon Musk has noted, the U.S. spends more on debt service today than it does on the military; the country is heading towards bankruptcy if nothing is done to correct the situation. Workers don’t come to the office and billions of dollars are wasted on worthless grants and inefficient processes. These problems must be addressed, and under Donald Trump, they are finally being fixed.
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While all of the correction work is required, there will come a point where it will either have to produce results or be put on the back burner. Americans vote based on their feelings as to how things are going for them and the country. Pointing to a closed border and hopefully reduced fentanyl deaths would be a win for Donald Trump. But ultimately, people will vote based on the candidates and how they feel the economy is doing. If prices are noticeably down compared to the days of Biden, then people will give credit to the president and his people for pushing the right buttons to make their dollars go farther. If the stock market is up, Americans will have more confidence about their future. Right now, due in part to interest rates not coming down and the threat of tariffs, the post-election “Trump Bump” in the stock market has been completely wiped out. Again, if tariffs eventually lead to a lot of money coming into U.S. coffers and the correction of trade imbalances with other countries, then the current disruptive moves will have paid off. But the ultimate measure of success before the 2026 midterm elections is how people perceive the economy performing for them.
There is no question that Donald Trump needs to preserve or preferably expand on his thin congressional majorities. One could see the meaning of not having 60 votes in the Senate for the bill that would have banned guys from competing with women. Donald Trump will need more allies on Capitol Hill if he wants to codify many of the things he has done to date via executive order. People vote according to their personal conditions and the candidates before them. Sure, the Democrats will run some lunatics, but the more astute of their candidates will point out any economic problems as a reason to elect them. The cost-cutting, market turmoil, tariff wars—these things are okay in March 2025. But when October 2026 comes around, the jobs numbers need to be outstanding, inflation must be tamed, prices must be normal, and the stock market should be heading north again. However many Americans across the spectrum voted for Donald Trump and approved of his recent State of the Union address, their patience is not infinite. They need to see that the annual debt is going down through the actions of DOGE. They need to see that jobs are opening up from all of those countries and companies that have promised to invest trillions in the United States. In short, the American people need to see economic success and stability in the months prior to the 2026 elections. The Republicans have to have bigger majorities to pass major legislation in the last two years of the Trump administration. If the Democrats take the House or the Senate, Donald Trump’s program may well come to a grinding halt.
One of the biggest problems we have in America is a lack of accountability and punishment. Elon Musk related that he spoke to Maine Senator Susan Collins. She said that the Navy asked for $12 billion to build submarines. And while each Virginia class sub costs couple billion, no subs were built with the money given to the admirals. When she asked where the money had gone, they had no answers. And this is typical in our modern America. Anti-American protesters can cover their faces so as to avoid identification and prosecution. Nameless bureaucrats can send billions of dollars to unnecessary programs overseas and no one is fired. They say that the British used to hang their admirals if they failed in battle. Maybe hanging is a bit extreme, but there needs to be clear consequences in both directions. A program manager who reduces expenses and provides results while saving money should be promoted. A Treasury official who cannot explain what happened to money that she signed off on needs to clear out her desk. Accountability has long been missing in Washington. Quick: who got fired for 9/11? Covid response? The Afghan exit fiasco? The answer: nobody. Incompetence and malfeasance must come with a steep personal cost at all levels of government.
Donald Trump, the builder of skyscrapers, has undertaken to tame and reform the mammoth federal government. He has as his partner in this mission Elon Musk, the one person uniquely qualified to help achieve this goal. He also has solid cabinet members who believe in the DOGE mission and are not afraid to get the job done right. The Democrats and their supporters hate the discovery of their waste and fraud and cannot stand to see Donald Trump keeping his campaign promises. How one keeps the cultural changes and improvements in government activity beyond this administration is not clear to me. Nobody has the drive of Donald Trump, and there is no one like Elon Musk who has put up with so much hate and so many threats to keep working on fixing a bloated and wasteful budget. The Democrats are waiting to get back on their gravy train; if Trump and Musk do it right, 2026 will be no better for the Democrats than 2024.
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