MAGA and the 2026 Meteor

An extinction-level event for MAGA is coming.

Republicans know it, and the most urgent indicator on the big board of political intelligence is the rising tide of Congressional retirements by Republicans. Democrats leaving Congress in 2026 have, by and large, been retiring because they’re older than dirt.

Politicians are herd animals, and the MAGA herd has raised its beady, squinting eyes to the heavens, seeing the ghostly flicker in the night sky of the asteroid racing towards them. Republicans are retiring because a political asteroid created by Donald Trump is coming to smash into the political Chicxulub they’ve enjoyed for the last decade.

Every few years, American politics delivers one of those nights where you can almost hear the roar of the tidal wave even in the safest districts.

The meteor hits, the supersonic tidal wave hits, the water rushes out, and suddenly a lot of very secure, very smug politicians are wondering why it’s so dark and cold suddenly. Alignment elections are almost always self-inflicted wounds by the party in power that lead to realignment.

They summoned the asteroid. Called to it, and danced in strange rituals to draw it to them.

And if you look at the numbers, the mood, and the sheer grinding dysfunction, engineered economic chaos, and raging corruption of Trump’s second term, 2026 is starting to look like one of those nights.

Let’s take a quick look at the four wave elections of my career.

1994 was Newt Gingrich’s big moment, the so-called Republican Revolution. Republicans didn’t just win a few seats; they kicked in the Democratic front door for the first time in almost half-century.

They took 54 House seats and the majority for the first time in 40 years. They flipped the Senate. They had a plan (and as much as my liberal readers will roll their eyes, a plan beats no plan every time); the “Contract with America” and villains: Bill Clinton, with his tax hikes, crime bill, and failed health-care reform … and the corrupt congressional leadership with the House Bank and Post Office scandals.

Beneath the marketing was the real story: a national mood that said, “We’ve had it with you people.” The drumbeat under the sense that Clinton overshot in the first two years was that Congress was corrupt as hell, ineffective, and self-dealing...