President Donald Trump openly mused about canceling the 2026 midterm elections while addressing Republican lawmakers at the Kennedy Center on January 6—exactly five years after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election he still refuses to admit he lost.
“I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election because the fake news will say ‘he wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator,'” Trump said with a smile. “They always call me a dictator.”
WHAT’S GOING ON: The 79-year-old president complained about even having to run against Democrats, arguing that “nobody’s worse than Obama and the people that surrounded Biden.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has floated the idea of scrapping American elections—but doing so on the fifth anniversary of January 6th carries a particularly dark irony.
Trump lamented the historical pattern of the party in power losing seats in midterms. “But even if it’s successful, they don’t win. I don’t know what it is. There’s something psychological, like you vote against,” he told the room of GOP lawmakers.
He asked Republicans to explain “what the hell is going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy.”
THE DETAILS: During his hour-plus rambling speech, Trump issued a warning to Republicans about the stakes if they lose: “You gotta win the midterms. Because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be, I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”
He claimed to have given Republicans a “roadmap to victory” and urged them to focus on favored nations, the border, and healthcare. On that last issue, Trump told lawmakers they could “own health care” by “giving the money to the people rather than insurance companies”—though, of course, he provided exactly zero specifics on an actual plan.
“You could own health care. Figure it out!” Trump declared, apparently delegating his healthcare policy to a room full of confused congresspeople.
BUT BUT BUT: Trump’s comments about “flexibility” on the Hyde Amendment—which bans federal funding for abortion—are already drawing pushback from conservatives. So even his own base isn’t buying everything he’s selling.
WHY IT MATTERS: When a sitting president repeatedly “jokes” about canceling elections, those jokes start to look a lot like trial balloons.
Trump knows exactly what he’s doing by raising the specter of canceled elections while smiling and pre-emptively deflecting criticism. The pattern is textbook authoritarian: float the outrageous idea, call critics hysterical, normalize the previously unthinkable.
And he did it on January 6th. The man who sent a mob to the Capitol to stop the certification of an election he lost is now, five years later, casually suggesting maybe we shouldn’t bother with elections at all—if Democrats are going to be on the ballot anyway.