The reason Donald Trump lies all the time is that he can’t handle the truth.
He hates reality. It reveals just how flawed his character is. How bad his ideas are, and what a con artist he has always been.
In fact, from the moment he made the first bad investment with the money he received from his Daddy, Trump’s modus operandi has been to find a new scam to distract from his last one. He lies to cover up past lies.
What is astonishing is not that serial failure has brought him to great heights. (For the very rich, that is a key feature and not a bug in the system.) It is that there is now an entire infrastructure designed to support and amplify his lies and turn them into the shared delusions of millions.
What is more, he has managed through the greatest of all his cons, his election to the presidency, to amass power that allows him to bury the truth and to relentlessly attack and even persecute its advocates.
It has been a heckuva run.
But sooner or later in life, bills come due. And for Donald Trump, the year ahead promises to be one that is going to test all his skills as America’s dissembler-in-chief.
After a first year of his second term in which he has accumulated and exercised more power than any U.S. president in history—implementing a sweeping, radical remake of U.S. economic, immigration, environmental, legal, national security and foreign policy—we are now going from the bombastic claims part of Trump’s standard operating procedure to the always less pleasant consequences phase.
These consequences are ghastly, manifold and highly visible. Tariffs are likely to turn into higher prices for American consumers and businesses. Healthcare costs are also going to rise for tens of millions of Americans. Some may not be able to afford care at all—or to access it, given that rural hospitals will be hard hit and many will close.
Cutbacks at government agencies like the VA will bite millions of Trump supporters. More and more, Americans will come face to face with the brutality of the masked thugs in Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol army.
In the past, Trump has tried to shift the blame for economic downturns to others—like Obama or Biden—or to circumstances beyond his control (such as the COVID-19 pandemic). But the results in Tuesday’s off-year elections—a motivated electorate backing Democratic wins across the board, by big margins, in high-profile races coast to coast—suggest that won’t be so easy this time around. Even Republicans said in exit polls that they felt Trump was doing a lousy job on the economy. His approval ratings are the lowest they have ever been.
That’s bad. But worse still is that starting now the focus turns to the midterm elections. Historically, incumbent presidents endure a backlash two years into their terms. But 2026 could be a historic shellacking given all those factors cited above.
So, consider a shift in control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats and, although it is a long shot, the same in the Senate. Even the loss of one House will be a nightmare for Trump’s remaining two years in office—very little likely to get done and serious, difficult investigations into him and his cabinet, their corruption and their failings.
Yes, the Supreme Court has given Trump immunity, so he has less to worry about in terms of consequences than he might have in the past. But even that court in its hearings on tariffs on Wednesday seemed skeptical of some of Trump’s power grabs. If they clip his wings at all, it could make a bad year even worse for him.
Trump, sensing all this, called on Wednesday for the GOP to institute more steps that he called electoral “reform.” What he means, though, are steps like even more gerrymandering, restrictive voting laws, more stringent voter ID requirements and banning voting by mail. And, of course, if that’s where his head is at now, if headlines and polls turn increasingly against him and MAGA, he might well go further—like sending troops into urban areas to intimidate voters away from the polls.
The problem is that Tuesday’s results also showed that Trump’s opponents are ready to push back. The success of Proposition 50 in California and big wins in places like Virginia make it likely that gerrymandering and other attempts at unfairly manipulating election outcomes will be met with Democratic Party countermeasures.
Among his angry post-election night rants this week, Trump himself suggested one reason the GOP did so badly Tuesday was that he was not on the ballot. But here’s the problem with that analysis: He is never going to be on a ballot again.
Trump is a lame duck. Worse for the GOP, he is a lame duck whose popularity is plummeting and who doesn’t really care about anyone other than himself. This is likely to produce disarray within the GOP. How do we know? Because we are seeing early signs of it.
Former Trump boosters like Marjorie Taylor Greene are becoming bolder as critics. The Epstein case has produced dissent and division among some Republicans. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has bluntly rejected Trump’s calls to get rid of the filibuster.
In fact, the reason Trump keeps talking about running again—even though he also, in unguarded moments, acknowledges that is impossible—is because it is the only way he can beat the curse of becoming increasingly less relevant.
At the core of all of this, the overarching fact is that there is one adversary Trump faces that he can’t out-talk or out-maneuver or bully. That is Father Time. This, for him, means the worst consequence of all… and I don’t mean death, although he does seem to have that on his mind a lot lately. No, for Trump, the worst-case scenario is irrelevance, of not being the big story. And frankly, hard as it is to believe, with each day of the year ahead, not only will Trump face turbulence of his own making, he will be less and less important to the future of the United States—and to the media power players whose attention matters so much to him.
Trump will not disappear. He will be a factor for years to come. But all the prevailing trends suggest that those years will present a series of hard truths that none of his lies can undo, obscure or deflect from. While he will start feeling the consequences of his actions and words well after many of his victims, there is no doubt that he will, at long last and after much f–kery, find out.
The post Opinion: Tuesday Was Bad for Trump—But 2026 Is Likely to Be Much Worse appeared first on The Daily Beast.
