Trump is likely to lose the midterms. But he'll go on a global crime spree.

The conventional wisdom says a weakened president is a contained president. The conventional wisdom is wrong.

Donald Trump is going to lose the midterms. And when he does, the rest of the world is going to pay for it.

In an essay for the i Paper in London this week, I made a prediction a lot of Americans don’t want to hear. Trump will likely lose the midterms, yes, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be contained. It might even mean the opposite.

Let’s start with the good news. Trump appears headed for a bruising midterm election. His seemingly limitless corrupt acts — ballrooms and billion-dollar slush funds — are finally catching up to him and pissing off an electorate that’s struggling to put gas in the car. His approval in some polls has dipped down to 31 percent, which is a stunningly low figure, and his disapproval rating is closing in on two-thirds of the country. The generic ballot has Democrats up by an average of five to seven points, virtually identical to where it sat at this point in 2018, the cycle that produced a forty-one-seat Democratic rout.

As I wrote:

“The odds are now that he loses the US House. He may even lose the Senate. He will almost certainly be impeached and after the elections, Trump will be distracted, embattled and very probably humiliated.”

Most observers, looking at this picture, draw the natural conclusion that a humiliated Trump is a contained Trump. He’ll be a lame duck. A bloodied president boxed in by a hostile Congress, distracted by impeachment, and consumed by oversight fights is less dangerous and less consequential, right?

Well, that’s where I had to deliver the bad news:

“If history is any guide, he will respond angrily and set his sights abroad.”

I lived through it the last time this happened. I was stepping into the role of chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in November 2018 when Democrats took back the House. I sat in the secret White House meetings where Trump’s political team was, briefly, in genuine panic. We were told to deny information requests, delay inquiries, prepare to defy subpoenas. If congressional Democrats wanted documents in their corruption probes, they were going to get the middle finger.

I resigned not long after. But not before it became clear what the man in the Oval Office intended to do once his domestic options narrowed. With his hands tied at home, he put his foot down abroad, buddying up with dictators and berating America’s allies in a burst of activity where he tried, unsuccessfully, to bulldoze the international system. He was only hamstrung in his attempt to lay waste to the world order by the outburst of COVID-19 and the distractions of reelection that followed.

This time, it will be far worse.

I won’t rehash all of my predictions. But the short version is that I expect the post-midterm period to result in Trump once again refocusing on foreign policy with a zeal heretofore unseen. I expect to see more foreign invasions, more efforts to sell out our vulnerable allies, sudden withdrawals from the institutions that have anchored the West since 1945, and a sustained campaign of interference in the elections of our democratic friends. In other words, an aggressive doubling down of what we’ve already seen in Trump’s catastrophic first year back in office.

The conventional wisdom about “lame duck” American presidents in their final two years is a comforting fiction we tell ourselves because the alternative is intolerable. We want to believe the system contains the man. Especially when it comes to Trump, we’re hopeful that a defeated executive is absorbed by Congress and by the courts, humble enough to recognize his lower station and accept it.

Yet that model presumes a president who recognizes democracy’s guardrails as legitimate. We know we don’t have anything close to that. Trump has spent ten years describing the constitutional order as his personal enemy and has a cabinet packed with eager vandals ready to spray-paint the republic as part of Trump’s ongoing corruption spree, vandalizing our institutions at his direction.

Make no mistake, I think Democrats retaking one or both chambers of Congress is urgently necessary. Trump will be checked by the political opposition assuming power on Capitol Hill. However, I know for a fact he won’t take it lightly. And, in part, he’ll redirect that angry energy into foreign policy in ways that will boomerang back against the American people.

For instance, Trump might try to leave or replace NATO… invade Mexico… take over Cuba… seize a portion or all of Greenland… sell out Ukraine to the Russians and Taiwan to the Chinese… or meddle in the elections of our closest friends to get MAGA-like leaders elected. Even if he only does some of these things, it will be extraordinarily damaging to our collective security and prosperity. At the end of a second Trump term, America will find itself poorer, less respected, and far less safe in the world.

While there’s only so much we can individually do to check Trump’s foreign policy follies after the midterms, there’s a whole lot our allies can do. From London, Paris, and Berlin to Kyiv and Taipei, we must send a message to our friends that they need to batten down the hatches. At best, they should prepare to sustain the free world without us. At worst, they must prepare to protect it from us.

America’s democratic friends need to stand up to the bully, especially when Trump tries to coerce them into his self-enrichment machine. They should deepen their relationships with others democracies that still have the courage to defend free minds, free markets, and free people. And they should reassess ways to keep to keep the West’s autocratic adversaries from seizing the initiative while Trump swoons over their ability to carry out societal repression and tries to mimic it.

This won’t be forever. I do believe America will be back and, one day, will clean up the mess made by the most corrupt man to have ever wielded the powers of the presidency. But in the meantime, our closest friends will have to should more of the burden of preserving the Western world — and show us some tough love.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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