The United States has often acted forcefully abroad. It has overthrown governments, imposed economic sanctions, supported coups and treated the sovereignty of smaller nations as an inconvenience. We should not romanticize our history.
But even by those standards, something different is happening now.
President Trump has claimed American rights to Venezuelan oil after using military power to decapitate its government. He has spoken casually about taking over Cuba while imposing an economic blockade that has contributed to desperate shortages. He has repeatedly suggested that Canada—an independent country and one of our closest allies—should become an American state, while his administration attempted to use trade negotiations to challenge Canadian protections for the French language. And he declared that the United States “needed” Greenland, refusing for months to rule out force to obtain territory belonging to Denmark, a NATO ally.
This is not merely the familiar exercise of American power against distant and vulnerable countries. Canada and Denmark are allies. Their soldiers have fought beside ours. Their security has been tied to ours for generations. Yet Trump has spoken of their sovereignty as though it were provisional—something the United States may respect when convenient and disregard when it wants something.
The common thread is not foreign policy. It is Trump’s conception of power.
In that conception, laws, treaties, alliances and elections are legitimate only when they produce the result he desires. Other nations possess sovereignty until he decides that their land or resources should belong to us. Courts deserve respect until they rule against him. Elections are honest when he wins and corrupt when he loses. Restraints are not principles. They are obstacles.
As the midterm elections approach, we should therefore ask a direct question: If a president speaks this casually about overruling the sovereignty of other nations—including our own allies—why should we assume that he will show greater reverence for the verdict of American voters?
We do not have to imagine how Trump might react to defeat. We have already seen it.
In 2020, he lost the presidential election decisively. His campaign and its allies failed in dozens of lawsuits challenging the result. Republican governors certified elections he had lost. Judges appointed by Republicans—including judges appointed by Trump himself—rejected his claims. His own attorney general found no fraud remotely sufficient to change the outcome.
Trump nevertheless refused to accept the result. He pressured state officials to alter vote totals. He pressured the Justice Department to support claims it knew were false. He pressured his vice president to exceed his constitutional authority. And on January 6, after telling his supporters that they had to “fight like hell,” he sent them toward the Capitol as Congress met to certify his defeat.
What followed was one of the most frightening days in modern American politics. Police officers were attacked. Members of Congress fled. The peaceful transfer of power—so familiar that Americans had come to regard it almost as a law of nature—was interrupted by force.
Trump has not repented. He has rewritten that day as a “Day of Love.” Upon returning to office, he granted clemency to nearly everyone charged in connection with the attack, including people convicted of assaulting police officers and leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy. He has entertained the idea that some deserve compensation. The message could hardly be clearer: Those who used force in his name were not offenders against the constitutional order. In his telling, they were its victims.
So why should we assume that 2026 will proceed normally if voters reject Republican control of Congress?
A midterm defeat would not remove Trump from office. But it could cost him control of the House or Senate, restore meaningful congressional oversight and place limits on his ability to govern without challenge. Would his administration accept that judgment? Or would it pressure election officials, manufacture allegations of fraud, use federal authority to interfere with counting and certification, challenge the eligibility of disfavored voters or attempt to prevent duly elected members of Congress from being seated?
These possibilities should not be dismissed as alarmism. Alarmism is fearing something for which there is no evidence. Here, the evidence has already occurred.
Nor is this an accusation against every Republican. In 2020, some Republican officials upheld the law under extraordinary pressure. But many others supported Trump’s effort, excused it afterward or learned that their future in the party depended upon never opposing him again. The institutional guardrails that held—barely—were weakened precisely because those who tested them discovered that there would be little political cost and, in many cases, considerable reward.
Americans are naturally optimistic about their institutions. We believe elections will be held, votes will be counted and power will pass according to the result because that is what usually happens. But democratic government does not survive through habit alone. It survives because people in power accept limits even when those limits injure their interests.
Trump has shown little evidence that he recognizes such limits. Abroad, he increasingly speaks as though American power creates American rights. At home, he has already acted as though presidential desire can supersede votes, courts and the Constitution.
The United States has long exercised power aggressively overseas while preserving peaceful transfers of power at home. That distinction is real, and it matters. But it offers considerably less reassurance when the president is a man who has already attempted to overturn an American election.
Power reveals its nature most clearly when someone says no.
Venezuela has said no. Cuba has said no. Canada has said no. Denmark and Greenland have said no. In 2020, American voters said no.
Trump’s response, in every case, has been to search for a way around the refusal.
As the midterms approach, it would be dangerously naive to assume that this time will be different.