Libs Pounce on Trump's 'No Midterms' Joke, but Forget They Seriously Called to End Midterms Under Obama
During this, his final term, President Donald Trump enraged the left by insisting that his program was so successful that he could win a third term — leading them to question whether the 22nd Amendment, or even American democracy, was under attack.
“I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Trump said in an interview.
Wait, no, I’m sorry. I mixed up my presidents there. That was Barack Obama, speaking in 2016 about being “confident” he could have secured a third term in the White House. There was no hand-wringing, of course. In fact, most of the write-ups were laudatory, as was the one I took the quote from in the U.K. Guardian.
So now we know the rules: It’s OK when Barack Obama does it, but whatever Donald Trump does is a Threat To Democracy™. Nowhere was there a better illustration of this than a freak-out over an offhand, unserious remark by the president about canceling the midterm elections.
The remark came during an interview with Reuters, and even the left-leaning wire service didn’t consider it important enough to include it until the very last paragraph.
“It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said, adding that he’d accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
The joke is obvious, but we still had White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt trotting out to explain the obvious to the oblivious:
Leavitt is such a boss 🤣
“Does Trump really find that funny? Canceling midterm elections? Americans died for democracy”
LEAVITT: “You weren’t in the room. I was. Only someone like YOU would take that so seriously.” pic.twitter.com/KT0GCKHKdY
— Sara Rose 🇺🇸🌹 (@saras76) January 15, 2026
But here you have the official X account of the Democrats, which … well, all I’ll say is that I didn’t know Photoshop had a “hyperventilating wine mom” filter:
wtf pic.twitter.com/PlCfGJ4C9l
— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) January 15, 2026
But they’re right: This is unprecedented. This is serious. It’s never been called for before, even as a joke.
Except when The New York Times did it for real in 2014 when it realized Barack Obama’s “landslide” victory six years earlier, which was supposed to secure an FDR-esque Democratic majority for the foreseeable future, was going to collapse completely in his second midterms, thanks to innumerable debacles and the fact that an administration elected to deal with the 2008 financial crisis had made little substantive headway in dealing with it:
New York Times headline 12 years ago: “Cancel the Midterms because they derail Obama’s agenda and are too White.” https://t.co/CodMJPMb2X pic.twitter.com/8TjRpowfuG
— Christian Heiens 🏛 (@ChristianHeiens) January 15, 2026
From the piece in question, by David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan:
There was a time when midterm elections made sense — at our nation’s founding, the Constitution represented a new form of republican government, and it was important for at least one body of Congress to be closely accountable to the people. But especially at a time when Americans’ confidence in the ability of their government to address pressing concerns is at a record low, two-year House terms no longer make any sense. We should get rid of federal midterm elections entirely. …
But the two-year cycle isn’t just unnecessary; it’s harmful to American politics.
The main impact of the midterm election in the modern era has been to weaken the president, the only government official (other than the powerless vice president) elected by the entire nation. Since the end of World War II, the president’s party has on average lost 25 seats in the House and about 4 in the Senate as a result of the midterms. This is a bipartisan phenomenon — Democratic presidents have lost an average of 31 House seats and between 4 to 5 Senate seats in midterms; Republican presidents have lost 20 and 3 seats, respectively.
So it affected Democrats and Republicans, which is why they wanted to get rid of it. But, uh, a little after that, a different narrative emerged:
Another quirk is that, during midterm elections, the electorate has been whiter, wealthier, older and more educated than during presidential elections. Biennial elections require our representatives to take this into account, appealing to one set of voters for two years, then a very different electorate two years later.
Translation: The wrong people vote in midterms, so we ought to get rid of them.
This was not a joke, and even back then, the New York Times functioned as the official mouthpiece of Democratic policy. It knew that the midterms had been Obama’s kryptonite, in part because we were focused on substantive issues and not the Cool President™. To a certain extent, the same problem has to be acknowledged with Donald Trump: He’s a magnetic personality who draws people to the polls, and if his movement is to survive, he has to figure out how to make Trumpism without Trump stick.
But no one — not even The Donald himself — is really suggesting canceling the midterms. (Funny how someone the Democrats seriously want you to believe is going to do that is also a man they seriously want you to believe is behaving unethically by encouraging redistricting for said midterms; you’d think that someone who wanted to do away with the process entirely would focus on getting that done instead of ensuring a better map for the midterms.)
On CNN, the voice of reason, Scott Jennings, yet again noted that this was a fake scandal of the highest order, comparing it to the “bloodbath” out-of-context quote during the 2024 campaign:
🚨 LMFAO! Scott Jennings obliterates frantic liberals worried Donald Trump is canceling the midterms
“Scott, will there be midterms?!”
JENNINGS: “I’ll bet everybody here a steak dinner we’ll have a midterm election. This is the new ‘bloodbath, right?'” pic.twitter.com/YSfBOdUDKD…
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 16, 2026
The only good news for Scott is that there are probably so many vegans at CNN that, when he pays off this bet, he’ll maybe end up owing $30 to the entire newsroom.
But therein lies the eternal message: It’s perfectly OK when Obama and his surrogates do something, even if it’s not in jest. With Trump, democracy is just two minutes away from dying when he makes a joke. Right.
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