LinkedIn on Friday, September 4, 2026
If you watch too much news – and find your head spinning between stories of authoritarian disregard for the Constitution and rule of law, expensive Presidential vanity projects, “grand theft government” as I like to call the grift Trump is running, awful economic and foreign policy, etc. – you may be asking yourself, “What the hell is going on?!” Yeah. Me too.
Let me assure you, it’s not a slow moving coup. And far too sloppy for a takeover to have been instigated by a foreign power or sinister organization led by some corporate interests. No. What it is is a desperate criminal conspiracy, conceived and executed by a poorly coordinated group of “advisors” poking the sensitivities and pulling the strings of a none-too-bright, mentally ill President. For money and power.
Their leader, motivated by an insatiable desire for fame and fortune, managed to lie his way into the Presidency, enabled by a naïve electorate and an intellectually spent Republican party whose elected officials are more interested in keeping their jobs than honoring their commitment to their constituents and our democracy. And then there were the two opposition candidates running against him. Not incidentally, both of those candidates were women, a gender for which, unfortunately, America may not yet be ready to hand over the keys to the oval office.
Certain special people – including Stephen Miller, Todd Blanche and others, including some of the authors of the Project 2025 manifesto and the “unitary executive” concept which is fake academic-speak for a dictatorship that attempts to sound legitimate, but isn’t – are telling Trump what to do, taking advantage of his special needs, leveraging his shortcomings to their benefit. As fate would have it, they are, Trump himself among them, in this way over their heads. Historically speaking, their messy success to date will be viewed as fleeting, a painful and dangerous, but nonetheless essential teaching moment in our nation’s history.
No way did our founding fathers, two hundred fifty years and a world of technology ago, anticipate what’s happened, but we can’t blame them for their having conceived of our democracy in a much simpler, far less complicated, slower moving time. All things considered, they did remarkably well and, to a great extent, deserve credit for our system’s ability to survive.
In fact, we should be thankful that we’ll all come through this experience relatively unscathed and much wiser for the changes we need to improve our government.
So, what’s this all about? This attack on mail-in voting, for example? Why is Trump so desperate to take control of the mid-term and subsequent elections for his phony baloney reasons? Because at least a slim if not overwhelming majority of the people have become wise to his grift and nutball economic and foreign policies. If the Democrats takeover both houses of Congress, Trump is in serious trouble – including the potential for impeachment, financial ruin and even jail time. The reality is that his whole play begins to fall apart if a Democrat majority Congress comes back to life, giddy with smell of revenge and call of history.
For now, Trump and associates’ objective is chaos that supports, in perverted justification of their authority, a national emergency that mandates control over our elections and delays, for as long as possible, a takeover of Congress by the Democrats. The time to declare that emergency – which they will have caused and/or fabricated – will be as soon as possible after the election, well before the Democrats take over in January.
When pundits tell us that everything is on the line in these midterms, we need to take their admonitions seriously. Trump and his gang wouldn’t be trying so very hard to disrupt the coming elections were the threat to their game be any less than existential.
-Les Cohen
