Rick Rosner On, 26: 2026 Midterms, Trump’s Executive Power, and the Courts
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/08/17
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss the 2026 U.S. midterm elections, cost-of-living pressures, Donald Trump’s approval, Republican messaging, redistricting, and Democratic prospects in Congress. They also examine Trump’s efforts to expand executive power, the practical limits of judicial intervention, lower-court resistance, and the Supreme Court’s mixed record. Rosner argues that institutional checks remain functional but uneven, leaving American democracy vulnerable during a volatile election period amid intensifying political and constitutional conflict.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The 2026 midterm elections and cost-of-living concerns. How are those shaping up?
Rick Rosner: It is 79 days until the midterms, and early voting begins in less than five and a half weeks in about five states. So we are almost there.
This is day 105 of the national average gas price being over $4 a gallon during Trump’s second term. He promised us $2-a-gallon gas. He promised that inflation would go away. Inflation was over 4 percent in June and 3.4 percent in July. Job growth is down 88 percent since March or April 2025, when Trump introduced tariffs.
Trump is increasingly unconstrained and has lost the ability to govern with any moderation in what he says. He says he does not care that gas is expensive. He calls affordability a hoax, even though he ran on affordability. His approval rating is the second worst among presidents at the midterm point since they started measuring it with Harry Truman 80 years ago.
We still have two and a half months to go. It could drop another percentage point. He is at 38 percent approval and 58 percent disapproval. He will almost certainly lose control of the House. The Senate is up for grabs.
Republicans just lie. That is worth something in the marketplace of ideas. They go on TV and say the economy is stronger than ever, prices are lower than ever, and Trump has made everything more affordable. This is 100 percent not true, but 38 percent of the population is buying it.
Will his support decay further in the next couple of months? It is hard to say. Ronald Reagan was called the Teflon president because bullshit did not seem to stick to him. His base was largely oblivious to it. That applies even more to Trump.
I think Trump will lose the House. Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, which is the poll aggregator I look at most frequently, predicts that Democrats will gain 18 seats in the House. If this were a normal midterm election, it would be even more, but a number of states have carried out midterm redistricting to protect Republican seats.
The Senate cannot be gerrymandered because everybody in the state votes for the senator, as opposed to people in congressional districts voting for representatives. So it looks pretty bad for Trump, but it does not look great for Democrats either. If we want the leverage to stop the horrible shit Trump is doing, and he is not slowing down or taking any feedback that people hate what is going on, just holding the House does not do that much.
Even in the Senate, he nominated Todd Blanche and got him through by a vote of 50 to 49. Republicans continue to abet wild corruption. One of Todd Blanche’s objectives is to continue covering up Trump’s involvement with Epstein, and Republicans in government just go along with that.
The Democrats will certainly do well in the midterms and will win the House. Trump will do some crazy crap to try to derail the elections between now and 11 and a half weeks from now. He is trying to fuck with vote by mail. He has tried to push the SAVE Act, which is ID-based voter suppression. That is not going to happen. He does not have the votes for it, and there is no time for it now with less than three months to go.
Any changes to ID requirements, which are unconstitutional and would be thrown out by the courts anyway, would also be rejected because there is not enough time to implement them.
There is another perilous period in politics, which is the lame-duck period, the two months between the election and when the new Congress comes in. The election is held in the first week of November, and the new members do not take office until the first week of January. So you have two months for the old House and Senate to try to pass some crazy crap while they still have Republican majorities. Certainly they will.
The rhetoric coming out of Trump and the Republicans right now gets a little crazier every day and will continue to do so until the election. It might get crazier still afterward because Trump will be going crazy denying the results.
I think I have talked about this with you, but based on what I see on social media, one to three percent of Americans have a mental illness.
More than 90 percent of MAGA supporters believe the 2020 election was stolen. More than 25 percent believe vaccines kill millions of people. You can have delusional beliefs, at least according to what AI tells me, without being mentally ill. You can simply be sharing the delusions of your friend group or the group with which you have affiliated yourself.
So you can have delusional beliefs without being clinically demented or delusional. But based on what I see online, I believe maybe as many as 10 percent of MAGA supporters are so delusional that they are actually mentally ill. That is a problem for America. It was a problem for Germany after World War II.
Millions and millions of people continued to be Nazis in their hearts, but there was an occupation. A million Allied soldiers occupied Germany. They made it illegal to espouse Nazi beliefs. So a lot of people continued to believe those things until they died, but they shut up about it because it was illegal to say you were a Nazi.
We have a similar problem in America where, against all evidence that Trump and the Republicans are wrecking the country, MAGA supporters will continue to believe until they are dead.
Of course, you have lunatics on the other side too. We have democratic socialists, some of whom have reasonable beliefs. The Democrats have a big tent. You can believe in Medicare for All, where you pay taxes and the government foots the bill for your healthcare. That is the way your healthcare gets paid for once you hit 65. We could take that system and give it to everybody, getting rid of private health insurance except for people who want deluxe extra coverage.
A lot of people call that socialism. It is among the more reasonable dimensions of socialism. So you have candidates who espouse that, and they are not lunatics. But you have people who go farther than that, who want to get rid of the police altogether.
They end up being invited on Fox to say crazy crap and show Fox viewers that the Democrats are crazy and that you have to vote Republican. So what I am saying is that you have people who are probably actually mentally ill at each extreme end, both the left and the right. But the right, with MAGA, has, I would say, many times more actually mentally ill people than the Democrats do.
Jacobsen: How much can Trump expand his executive authority before federal courts impose constitutional limits?
Rosner: Trump just throws spaghetti at the wall all the time. It is spaghetti all day, every day. He just tries shit constantly, and the courts shoot down, I do not know, two-thirds of it. Some of it gets through. The second thing is that it takes months for things to get to the courts and be shot down.
It happens with big stuff and little stuff. Trump decided to put gold leaf all over a bunch of bronze statues across Washington, D.C. It is expensive. It costs millions of dollars. It makes the statues illegible. When you have a bronze statue, it gets a patina that lets you see the features of the statue. The statues were sculpted by knowledgeable artists who understood the medium they were working with and made their art accordingly.
When you cover them with gold, you turn them into giant mirrors. All the details disappear because you are being blasted with reflected light. They look nice and shiny, which is great if you are a fucking idiot.
Anyway, it is trivial. It is expensive. It is something Trump can apparently do with no recourse to the courts. Is somebody suing over the statues? I do not know. They are already covered with gold leaf, so it is too late.
Trump’s lawyers could also argue that you do not have standing. If you go in saying the fucking statues look bad, Trump can say, “Yeah, but you do not have a compelling interest in it.” The courts could agree with him.
The Kennedy Center, by law, has to be named just the Kennedy Center. This is a center for the performing arts in Washington, D.C., that was established to memorialize John F. Kennedy. Trump stuck his name on it too. He changed the name.
He changed the name to the Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Center because he is a fucking dick. He appointed a 14-member board of all his friends who just say okay to whatever he wants to do.
Former interested parties took it to court, and the court said that, by law, it has to be named just the Kennedy Center and forced him to take his name off the building. He took his name off, but then he put a skirt in front of the building so you cannot see it, to hide his humiliation that his name is off the building.
His handpicked board, which consists of people like Laura Ingraham and Linda McMahon, basically Fox News people and members of his cabinet, voted to say that Trump can etch his name into the marble.
So this time around, instead of drilling holes into the marble and attaching letters that form his name, they are actually going to scrape his name into the marble. I am sure somebody has an injunction moving through the courts to stop him from doing that because it is no less illegal than the first time. But will the injunction beat the guys with the sandblasters, or whatever the fuck they use to etch the marble? I do not know.
That is just one stupid, trivial fucking thing. None of the levers of governance that we have to stop a president from going to war have been exercised in any effective way against Trump going into Iran.
Jacobsen: Are courts functioning as an effective check on executive power?
Rosner: Only to a limited extent. The courts are not as bad as they could be. Often, in the lower courts, you have judges who were appointed by Republicans and Democrats, by Reagan, Clinton, or Obama.
A lot of judges got their jobs for being good judges, for looking at patterns of facts and coming to reasonable conclusions. Even if they were appointed by lunatics, there is a reasonably low percentage of judges who are in the tank for Trump, like Eileen Cannon down in Florida, who will almost always rule in favor of Trump.
There is a fairly small number of these people out of thousands of judges. So the lower courts will often rule against his bullshit.
That is not always effective because Trump can just go ahead and keep doing whatever shit he was doing. The courts do not have cops. A judge cannot send a couple of squad cars out to stop Trump from sandblasting the Kennedy Center.
Then the Supreme Court is pretty bad. It has six conservative justices and three liberal justices, but it is not as bad as it could be because, out of nine justices, only two of them are crazy assholes who will almost always rule in favor of Trump.
Alito and Thomas are horrible fucking justices who will make lots of bad rulings in favor of Trump. They will not always go along with Trump either if the shit is bad enough. They are judges, and they will sometimes do the right thing.
Chief Justice Roberts makes a lot of bad rulings. He gave us Citizens United, and he has helped dismantle the Voting Rights Act, which has really fucked America. But he does not always make rulings that are that bad. He is actually concerned that people hate the Supreme Court now because of bad rulings, so he will sometimes do the right thing.
Amy Coney Barrett was appointed by Trump to help get rid of Roe v. Wade. She is wildly pro-life and anti-abortion. She comes from an extreme form of Christianity. But if you stay away from abortion, she is surprisingly not terrible quite often. She is terrible sometimes, but she takes her job seriously and often rules reasonably.
The Supreme Court often does do the right thing. Gorsuch, another Trump appointee, comes from a terrible family. His mom was appointed by Reagan to head the EPA in order to destroy the EPA, which she tried to do until she was finally kicked out for being so destructive.
He takes after his mom in that he hates the environment. He will rule against the EPA and against environmental regulations all the fucking time. However, on issues that are not about the environment, he often rules reasonably. They often rule kind of reasonably.
We are in trouble, as I said, with Citizens United, which says that money is free speech, that you should be able to throw as much money at an election as you want, and that this is simply exercising your First Amendment right to free speech. Corporations are people when it comes to political activism. It was a terrible ruling and has really fucked up our elections.
Getting rid of the Voting Rights Act is fucking Black voters across America. Terrible. But all hope is not lost.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.
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