What happens when MAGA gets everything they've dreamed of?

Wishes granted, good and hard

Feb 05, 2026

When someone quotes that line “when life gives you lemons” and hands me a glass of icy lemonade, I check the yellow snow outside their house for a cup-shaped hole. I’m saying that not all gifts are the ones you want. But let’s, for the sake of argument, say that the current administration gets everything it wants. I know that’s a moving target, given the flea-like attention span of the current president (or his genius at manipulating chaos for gain, your call), but let’s say the larger themes have been granted as wishes by the political genie.

President Trump has always said he won the election in 2020. He says there are enough votes, like 12,000, if I remember correctly, in Fulton County, Georgia, to give him the state’s electors. He believed that so fervently that a number of politicians even met in the State House (secretly) that year to sign an alternate slate of electors proclaiming Trump’s victory. One of those is the currently-serving Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones.

The FBI, presumably at the president’s behest, raided a facility that Fulton County Election Board uses to store ballots from the 2020 election. Then, those agents, through Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had a nice conference call with Trump. What the DNI has to do with the FBI’s law enforcement role, I don’t know, it’s above my pay grade. Now I’ll be the first one to tell you that Fulton County’s Election Board is riddled with incompetence at the top, and that there are plenty of people who would, at the wink of an eye, cheat in an election to keep certain political allies in power in Atlanta. However, the Republican who was and remains Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, says there was no appreciable fraud in the 2020 general election. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation even went so far as to audit every single ballot in Gwinnett County, another bastion of Democratic rule.

But let’s say the political genie, having been rubbed out of his golden lamp, grants the wishes of MAGA. Let’s say that they find (I use the word loosely, minus the air quotes) a bunch of fraudulent ballots. Or at least someone announces this. The political genie was supposed to be there in 2020, to unveil the Kraken and sweep the election into Trump’s hands. It was not to be. Instead, Democrats handed all of us a big refreshing glass of iced lemonade, and ran President Joe Biden in 2024, when he specifically said he was going to be a one-term president, just a placeholder to remove Trump from our midst. Not only did Trump remain in our midst, but he also got more popular. Drink up.

In 2024, there was no question who won the popular vote. It didn’t take a genie to hand the election to Trump. Democrats did that all by themselves. Just like Trump handed both senate seats in Georgia to Democrats in 2020, all by himself. Then he managed to keep it blue by endorsing Herschel Walker to run against Sen. Raphael Warnock in 2022. In 2020, MAGA says, Georgia’s election system was riddled with fraud, and presumably in 2022, but we haven’t gotten to investigating that yet. But in 2024, it worked perfectly, as did all the other states that put Trump into the White House.

The argument seems to be that in years with presidential elections, the states are no longer in charge of their own elections, because they are running the election for the federal government. I say “seems to be” as if that was some ephemeral remark by a random Reddit user, but really, it was directly argued by President Trump on Tuesday.

"If a state can't run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it," Trump said as he held a bill signing in the Oval Office surrounded by Republican lawmakers. "Because, you know, if you think about it, the state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don't know why the federal government doesn't do 'em anyway."

The Constitution says it doesn’t work that way, but let’s say a genie grants Trump’s wish as fact. States can do as they please, including enter into interstate pacts to support the popular vote winner for presidential elector allocation. States do not have to honor the will of individual voters in their own states (see: faithless electors), except in the case of electing U.S. Senators. The 17th Amendment requires states to conduct elections “by the people” for senators. However, it doesn’t specify the manner of those elections, so if a state wanted to opt for ranked choice voting to fill a senate seat, then it can.

Federal and state laws also prohibit federal officers from being at state-run polling places. 18 USC § 592 prohibits “armed men at any place where a general or special election is held,” with a caveat. It continues, “unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” Now I think the circumstances this law foresees is some foreign power or large-scale insurrection trying to prevent us from having a legal and decent election. But the genie grants a wish.

So let’s envision a situation where all of these wishes are granted. A massive number of protesters, of whom the federal government has a database designating them “domestic terrorists,” shows up to video and otherwise harass federal officers in the disposition of their duties, namely picking up anyone not legally in the country eligible to vote. These feds won’t be put at the polling places, but will in essence surround them. That is, until things get violent. The genie says they get violent.

Then the feds, who miraculously request military support and receive it, take over the polling places. And federal overseers ensure the election in those places are held…let’s just say in the way that they believe to be correct. This doesn’t happen in every polling place, just the ones where cheating is most likely, according to the folks in the White House, and the genie wish dust.

There not being a full and complete accounting of those particular elections in 2026, the House of Representatives refuses to seat the new members, especially if they would undo the Republican majority. By the Constitution’s 20th Amendment, everyone in the House of Representatives’ term ends at noon on January 3 after the election, meaning January 3, 2027. Senators whose term ends also have the same deadline. If the House refused to adjourn before then, it wouldn’t matter because it would cease to exist as a legal body after January 3 at noon. There would literally be no Congress.

The Supreme Court and state high courts could force the issue (they nearly certainly would) by issuing writs of mandamus that the clear winners of elections be seated (see Powell v. McCormack). But in elections where the results are not convincing, who would be seated? The states would have to deal with that. So the genie’s wish grant would not have to abolish Congress completely, but only seat those whose elections are clearly settled. Thus composed, whatever party had the majority would rule until the crisis was resolved.

A party like the Republicans could hypothetically hold on to power for some time—months—while the courts, and in some cases, special elections, unwound things. Just look at Georgia in 1946 and the Three Governors Controversy. I won’t glaze your eyes with the details, but one claimed-governor (Herman Talmadge) changed the locks on the office doors to keep another (Ellis Arnall) out. Arnall, being a sane and sensible lawyer, relinquished his claim on the office, paving the way for the third candidate claiming to be governor, Lt. Gov. Melvin E. Thompson, to be seated. It took the Georgia Supreme Court three months—in a five-to-two decision—to decide. But the decision also called for a special election, which Talmadge won in 1948.

This kind of shenanigans won’t be the stuff of history lessons, but will be the result of genie dust if things unfold in November and in 2027 the way they most definitely could unfold. Speaker Johnson, having the keys to his office and control of many of the levers of power in the Capitol, could literally change locks on office doors, remove access to those he deems inauthentic, and keep control of the House, minus those pesky seats the Democrats claim that would hand the House to them. Senate Majority Leader John Thune would have it easier, as his term isn’t up for election this year. But the Senate is a different place. The genie would have to work harder, but no matter, without the House, nothing gets done.

Democrats in California, with their shiny new redistricting map, might have to wait a few months, or hold do-over elections, to claim their prize.

Chaos would reign and the chaos light worker in Washington D.C. would work his stained glass masterpiece.

But beware the genie offering an ice cold glass of lemonade. All these things, once done, cannot be unwound. Democrats, in control of White House and both houses of Congress, one day (even in 2028), would be able to use these same tactics to keep Republicans out. They might even use the might of the legal system to declare the national Republican Party to be a domestic terrorist organization or guilty of attempted insurrection against the Constitution. It’s not like they’d have to raid stuffy warehouses full of paper ballots to get that kind of evidence.

Whatever legal organs and genie dust are deployed by the current administration and its party adherents to get their wishes granted, those same organs and dust are available to the next people running the government. You want states to cede election administration to the federal government? States can do that, but remember what that wish will get you. Genies are notorious for granting wishes, good and hard, against the wishers.

In our prescriptive, ends-justifies-the-means political society, of course the answer is to not rub the lamp in the first place. The answer is to repair the institutions and conventions themselves so the people can elect whom they please without fraud and chicanery. The answer is to unburden the courts from having to decide and untangle all these things. Maybe the next people in charge of our government will do exactly that. But I know their names: Gavin Newsom is the architect of the California retributive redistricting. And he’s the front-bencher the Democrats offer for 2028. Do you think anyone in that party is going to resist rubbing the genie’s lamp?

And the Republicans have grown more addicted to the genie lamp than Aladdin. They rub it like a savant with a passion for scratch off lottery tickets. Our thought experiment is that genie will grant those wishes, but know that the price of getting all your wishes is the dismantling of classical liberties. The government will become better at getting to ends, because they won’t worry about justifying the means. And the means of government always ends at the barrel of a gun.

This is what happens when you make your political opponents your actual enemy. It’s what happens when you make them criminals. You can say that Democrats did it first with Trump, and to some degree, yes, they did, spending four years trying to lock him up. But many Democrats deserved to be locked up too. And both Biden and Trump have traded too many pardons for political (and other) favors. Plus, Trump legitimately did many things worthy of being called felonies, if not being “what New York City real estate developers do.”

Listen, I don’t care what happens to the Kennedy Center. Someone else will get to fix that. I don’t care what happens to the East Wing and what kind of ballroom gets built there. That’s just real estate. I do care what happens to our republic when we can’t hold fair elections, and those who are elected spend all their time prosecuting those who came before them and pardoning those who do their dirty work.

And another thing: Do you really think that in six years, with the 60-plus lawsuits by Trump lawyers thrown out of court for lack of any evidence at all, somehow Georgia, with Republicans in every major leadership position and in charge of both houses of the legislature, has managed to be the one place where massive election fraud is buried? What kind of conspiracy would that have to imply? Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, one of the signers of the faked-up elector documents, would have to be in on it. The 2020 stolen election story is fiction: a fantasy. In 2026, it might be more than a fantasy. Sometimes, the genie does emerge from the lamp, if you rub it enough.

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