One week after the major political realignment of the 2026 midterm elections, it seems the Republican Party is doubling down on what is clearly a losing hand. Rather than changing their party’s strategy in any way, they have apparently chosen to do more of the same, just with more intensity. This is evidenced by the choice of two men for powerful positions for the next two years: Stephen Miller and Jim Jordan. Both are hardliners and Trump loyalists, and both will be responsible for setting the course of the final two years of the Trump presidency.<\/p>\n
This was a conscious choice made by Donald Trump and the House Republicans. They had alternatives which might have sent a signal that the party needed some drastic changes and retooling, but they chose not to go that route. Instead, Republicans will be even more divorced from the political reality of where the American electorate now stands.<\/p>\n
Of the two men, Miller is going to be far more powerful. Jordan will likely get more attention, since he loves going on television and blathering about how evil the opposition party is, but he simply won’t have any control over anything that happens in politics. House minorities are completely powerless, without any influence over the legislative process at all (especially when the opposition party has a huge majority). So Jordan will rant and rave on cable news, but it will all be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. His job, to put it bluntly, is going to be to entertain Trump for the next two years — and that’s a job he excels at.<\/p>\n
Miller, on the other hand, is going to have enormous control over the executive branch’s powers. He already did to a large extent, but now he will be running the show at the White House with no one to restrain his worst impulses. And his worst impulses are pretty bad, as we’ve already seen (Miller has been in charge of the immigration crackdown, just to name one example). Miller appeals to the worst impulses in Trump, and fully believes that the powers of the presidency are kinglike in nature. So we can expect all sorts of laughably unconstitutional executive actions which attempt to wield powers the president simply does not have.<\/p>\n
Democrats, meanwhile, will probably only have a limited amount of success at the two tasks they are eager to tackle. Legislatively, they’ll be able to pass anything they want through the House, but they’ll have to peel off a handful of GOP senators to get anything through the Senate (unless they scrap the filibuster altogether).<\/p>\n
Getting some bipartisan buy-in may not be as hard as it may first seem, though. What 2026 proved is that for Democrats, the sky’s the limit when it comes to competing for Senate seats. There are plenty of Republicans who will be up for re-election in 2028 who must be awfully nervous right now, after watching Democrats take previously-safe states such as Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, and possibly even Mississippi. If Democrats can elect a Black man to the Senate from Mississippi, then no<\/em> GOP Senate seat can be considered safe anymore. So working with Democrats to pass some wildly-popular bills might indeed look like a smart move to many Senate Republicans right now.<\/p>\n Whether Trump will sign any such legislation is an open question, and with Stephen Miller constantly whispering in his ear it has to be seen as rather doubtful. If Trump truly did want to work with Democrats to get some things accomplished in the next two years, he wouldn’t have picked Miller for the top White House job, plain and simple. So Democrats may be able to lay out their agenda to the public, but it’s doubtful how much of it they’ll actually be able to achieve while Trump is still president.<\/p>\n The other big task Democrats are salivating over right now might be even harder than passing good legislation. Democrats will have the power of oversight in the new Congress, and they’re already planning which investigations to launch. But how successful will any of these efforts really be?<\/p>\n To fully investigate executive branch wrongdoing, Democrats will have to interrogate all the people who were at the heart of any of Trump’s wild schemes. But how many of them are going to voluntarily appear before congressional committees? Even if they do appear, will they testify honestly and fully?<\/p>\n I have strong doubts about that, personally. Trump is very likely to take two courses of action when the subpoenas start flying. First, he will instruct his underlings to just ignore them. What can Congress do in the face of such refusals, after all? They can refer contempt of Congress complaints to the Justice Department, where Trump’s lapdog of an attorney general will just laugh at them. Or Trump could go another route and just issue pardons to anyone who gets a subpoena, to allow them to refuse to answer any questions or even bother to appear.<\/p>\n None of this should sound far-fetched. Trump has already showed his naked contempt for the constitutional duty of Congress to provide a check and balance on the executive branch. He’s already instructed his attorney general to investigate bringing criminal charges against Democrats for even daring<\/em> to contemplate oversight investigations. This should be seen as merely Trump’s opening move. With Miller cheering him on, Trump will doubtlessly try anything<\/em> to avoid anyone being held accountable for anything by a Democratic Congress.<\/p>\n In the end, Trump and the Republicans may wind up paying a rather steep political price for doubling down on the insanity. But that’s in no way guaranteed. In two years, voters could indeed express their disappointment with Republicans by voting even more of them out of office — but two years is an absolute eternity in politics. Anything<\/em> could happen in the meantime. The voters could sour on Democratic control just as easily as they soured on Republican control (remember, it was just two years ago when they elected Trump and a Republican Congress into office again).<\/p>\n With Stephen Miller running the White House and Jim Jordan running the House Republican caucus, Republicans have chosen to double down on Trumpism — at least for now. But as more time goes by, Trump himself could be seen by many in the GOP as an albatross around their neck. There will be a race for the GOP presidential nomination where more than one Republican is likely to run on making a clean break from Trump and his agenda. This may embolden other Republicans to distance themselves from the lame duck in the Oval Office — especially if they see this as their only viable route to getting re-elected. For now, Trump is still leading the party, but that will become less and less true the closer we get to the 2028 primaries.<\/p>\n For now, Republicans are doubling down on what the American voters just soundly rejected. They are refusing to even consider making any changes in direction, which doesn’t seem like the smartest course of action right now. They are following the lead of Donald Trump, who is infamously incapable of ever admitting error. How this all plays out will be interesting to watch, that much seems certain.<\/p>\n