Next year’s midterms will be an “election of lawyers” as the Trump administration desperately fights to prevent Democratic majorities in Congress.
On a new episode of the Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head podcast, Trump biographer Michael Wolff recalled a conversation with a White House insider who expressed alarm about what’s at stake should Tuesday’s Democratic wins foreshadow the outcomes in the House and Senate a year from now.
“The existential point for the people in the Trump White House… [is] if they lose the election, if they lose in 2026, they are finished—finished politically, but so much else,” Wolff, 72, told co-host Joanna Coles.
“And so they have to be thinking—and I know that they are thinking, and this person that I spoke to in the White House said this will be because, again, Donald Trump can’t course correct—this person said [2026] will be an election of lawyers.”
One of the ways the Trump administration will try to hold onto power, Wolff explained, is through gerrymandering. And that process is already underway.
“The program to gerrymander as many congressional seats as they possibly can is essentially looking at this through a lawyer’s lens: ‘Can we do this? How do we do this? How do we create the laws, pass the laws in a variety of states to make this happen?’” Wolff said.
The Trump administration, the author added, could also benefit from a favorable Supreme Court ruling on a challenge to the part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that requires the creation of majority-minority districts. If the court strikes it down, GOP legislators could create a dozen new red seats in the South, according to one estimate.

“That will have a significant impact,” Wolff said. “There’s a whole range of legal maneuvers that cut down on the ability to get to the polls and who gets to the polls—all of this,” Wolff said. “In other words, we’re not talking about politics anymore. We’re talking about how you harness the voting system to your advantage. While that always goes on to some degree, it has probably never gone on as aggressively as it is now, and I think probably even more so as this election year rolls on.”
“This is the only way the Trump people hold the House,” he continued. “It may be the only way they hold the Senate, [and] is the only way they hold their jobs and their livelihoods.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast, but has previously doubted Wolff’s credibility.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s–t and has been proven to be a fraud,” Communications Director Steven Cheung has told the Daily Beast on multiple occasions. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
Tuesday’s wins for Democrats in the gubernatorial races in both New Jersey and Virginia made it “crystal clear” that the White House is “up against it,” Wolff said.
That Trump, 79, is incapable of a “course correction” makes matters worse, he said.
“I think that’s what was on this person’s mind, and what this person represented was on a lot of people’s minds in the White House: that the unraveling may have begun,” Wolff continued. “And the unraveling, and even to the extent of this person talking about a scenario going around the White House in which they lose both [chambers of Congress]… now that becomes existential.”
“Because if that happens, all of the people—not just Trump—the people in the White House, basically their careers, possibly their lives are destroyed,” he said. “You’re suddenly looking at a scenario in which there is an impeachment and finally a conviction if that were to happen. So within the White House, the fact that they have to consider that—and the fact that they are considering that—is a moment.”
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