They Counted on You Not Paying Attention

How Three Forces Broke American Politics and Why the 2026 Midterms Are Your One Shot to Fix It

This Isn’t Normal

Something is deeply wrong in this country right now, and you feel it. You feel it when you open your grocery bill and the numbers do not match what you used to pay. You feel it when you watch the news and see American service members dying in a war that nobody voted for. You feel it when a billionaire with zero government experience fires hundreds of thousands of federal workers by email and celebrates it on social media. You feel it when the President of the United States makes billions orchestrating a crypto grift while floating the idea of canceling your right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections, and his press secretary shrugs it all off as a joke.

This is not normal. None of this is normal. And the people responsible for this chaos are counting on one thing above all else. They are counting on you giving up. They are counting on you tuning out, scrolling past, and staying home on Election Day.

I refuse to do that. And I am writing this because I believe you refuse to do that, too.

Here is the truth that no one in the current administration wants you to understand. The mess we are living through right now did not come out of nowhere. It grew from three specific forces that have been building for years, forces that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement did not create from scratch, forces they exploited, amplified, and weaponized. Those three forces are institutional distrust, cultural fear, and economic resentment. And every single crisis you are watching unfold today, from the war with Iran to the tariffs draining your wallet to the gutting of federal agencies that protect your family, traces back to how those forces were turned against you.

I am going to walk you through each one. I am going to show you exactly how they connect to the damage happening right now. And then I am going to tell you the single most powerful thing you can do about it. It does not require a law degree. It does not require money. It requires you showing up on November 3, 2026, and voting like your children’s future depends on it. Because it does.

The Trust They Destroyed

For decades, millions of Americans have felt left behind by the institutions that were supposed to serve them. Washington felt distant. The media felt disconnected. Corporations felt greedy. That frustration was real and legitimate. People had every right to demand accountability from their government.

Donald Trump did not answer that demand. He used it. He ran as the outsider who would drain the swamp, and then he filled it with billionaires, loyalists, and people whose primary qualification was personal devotion to him. He attacked the free press not because it was failing you, but because it was reporting on him. He undermined career public servants not because they were corrupt, but because they followed the law instead of following his orders.

Now look at where that has taken us. In his second term, Trump installed Elon Musk to lead an operation called the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, which promised to save two trillion dollars a year. That promise was revised down to one trillion, then to 150 billion. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that supported the goals of DOGE, concluded that the operation had no noticeable effect on the trajectory of spending. Federal spending in 2025 actually exceeded 2024 levels. What DOGE did accomplish was firing more than 270,000 federal workers, the largest peacetime workforce reduction in American history. Agencies were left broken and understaffed. The General Services Administration had to ask hundreds of fired employees to come back after realizing it could not function without them. The IRS, slashed by roughly 40 percent of its workforce, stands to lose an estimated 323 billion dollars in tax revenue over the next decade because of reduced compliance and fewer audits. You read that right. The cost cutting operation is going to cost you more money.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization, estimated that DOGE’s actions will cost taxpayers 135 billion dollars this fiscal year when you account for paid leave, rehiring, lost productivity, and the cascade of lawsuits that followed. So the people who told you they were going to clean house actually burned it down, and now the rebuilding costs are landing on your shoulders.

The 43 day government shutdown in the fall of 2025, the longest in American history, was another product of this dysfunction. Forty two million Americans nearly lost food assistance when SNAP funding ran dangerously low. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the shutdown cost the economy billions. And just months later, in February 2026, a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security began and has continued for more than three weeks. This is governance by chaos, and it is designed to make you lose faith in the system itself.

That is the play. Break institutions. Point at the rubble. Tell you the whole thing was rotten anyway. And hope you stop believing that government can work for you at all.

The Fear They Manufactured

The second force driving this crisis is cultural fear. For years, MAGA messaging has centered on the idea that something is being taken from you. Your identity. Your traditions. Your way of life. That message resonates with real anxieties about change, about immigration, about the pace of social evolution. Those feelings deserve to be heard and addressed with honesty.

What they do not deserve is to be twisted into a weapon. And that is exactly what this administration has done. Instead of addressing cultural anxiety with policy grounded in facts, Trump has used fear to consolidate power and distract from failure. Look at the war with Iran.

On February 28, 2026, Trump launched major combat operations against Iran alongside Israel, in the middle of the night, without a declaration of war, without authorization from Congress, without a coherent explanation of what the mission was supposed to achieve or how it would end. The Constitution is explicit. Article I gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. Trump ignored that. Six American service members have already been killed. The World Health Organization reported nearly 1,000 deaths in Iran within the first days. Strikes have been reported in Israel, Turkey, Bahrain, the UAE, and other countries. The State Department closed the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. Thousands of Americans overseas scrambled for flights home.

A recent poll found that 59 percent of Americans disapprove of the military action. And when members of Congress, including some Republicans like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul, pushed back with a War Powers Resolution to force a vote on authorization, it was defeated along nearly perfect party lines, 219 to 212 in the House, with Republican leadership refusing to hold the president accountable. House Speaker Mike Johnson called the strikes defensive and said we are not at war. Tell that to the families of the six dead Americans.

This is what happens when fear replaces strategy and loyalty replaces law. Trump promised to end wars. He started one. He promised strength. He delivered chaos. And the cultural identity he claimed to protect, the proud, self-governing, Constitution-respecting American, is being eroded by his own refusal to respect the document that defines us.

---

---

The Economy They Wrecked

The third force is economic resentment, the deep anger felt by communities where manufacturing jobs vanished, where trade deals seemed to benefit everyone except the people doing the work, where globalization felt like a fancy word for getting left behind. Trump spoke directly to that pain. He promised tariffs would bring jobs roaring back. He said foreign nations would pay the costs. He called tariffs the greatest thing ever invented.

Here is what actually happened. The Supreme Court ruled in a 6 to 3 decision on February 20, 2026, that Trump’s sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were illegal. Trump immediately replaced them with a 15 percent global tariff. Multiple studies from institutions including the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the Kiel Institute found that American businesses and consumers have paid roughly 96 percent of the tariff costs. Goldman Sachs estimates consumers absorbed at least 55 percent directly, with businesses picking up another 22 percent. The Tax Foundation calculated that the tariffs amount to an average tax increase of 700 to 1,500 dollars per household in 2026. The Yale Budget Lab projects consumer prices will rise 1.2 percent this year from tariffs alone, with GDP taking a negative 0.4 percentage point hit and unemployment climbing by 0.6 percentage points.

The manufacturing renaissance Trump promised never materialized. The Institute for Supply Management reported that U.S. manufacturing activity contracted for ten consecutive months. In 2025, the economy added an average of just 55,000 jobs per month through November, the lowest figure outside the pandemic since the Great Recession. The S&P 500 has underperformed the global stock market by the widest margin in 30 years. The stock market’s valuation hit levels seen only once before, during the dot com crash. Consumer sentiment recorded its lowest annual average in history in 2025.

The people who were promised protection got price hikes. The communities that were promised jobs got stagnation. And the man who told you foreign countries were going to pay for everything watched quietly as the bill landed on your kitchen table.

The Information Trap

These three forces, distrust, fear, and economic pain, are made worse by a fourth reality that political scientists have studied extensively. The way Americans receive information has fractured into closed ecosystems where misinformation spreads unchecked and existing beliefs get amplified rather than challenged. This is not about intelligence. This is about the architecture of modern media.

When your news feed shows you the same perspective over and over, when algorithms reward outrage over accuracy, when cable networks and social media influencers repeat claims that have been debunked, the result is a population that lives in different factual universes. Research in political psychology shows that people experiencing perceived status threat, the feeling that their group is losing influence, become more susceptible to leaders who promise to restore pride and hierarchy. That is the psychological sweet spot Trump has occupied since 2015.

A January 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that only 21 percent of Americans are extremely or very confident that Trump acts ethically in office, down from 29 percent the year before. Only 25 percent are confident he respects democratic values. Only 25 percent believe he picks good advisers. Fifty percent of Americans say the administration’s actions have been worse than they expected. Only 27 percent support all or most of Trump’s policies, down from 35 percent when he returned to office. Among his own Republican base, approval has dipped from its highs, and the decline has accelerated.

The polls are telling you something important. The country is waking up. The question is whether that awakening translates into action.

The Numbers Do Not Lie

Donald Trump’s overall approval rating sits between 36 and 39 percent across major polls as of early March 2026. The Silver Bulletin average puts his net approval at negative 13, with a second term low of negative 15 in mid February. Several major news outlets recorded just 36 percent approval with 63 percent disapproving. Among independent voters, the group that decides elections, only 26 to 34 percent approve of Trump’s job performance. That is the lowest independent voter approval he has recorded in either term. The Cook Political Report shows his net approval has dropped 14 points in just 12 months.

Meanwhile, a November 2025 Marist poll found that 55 percent of registered voters would support the Democratic candidate in their district, compared to 41 percent for the Republican, a 14 point lead. Among independents, Democrats held a 33 point advantage. Democrats overperformed their polling in every 2025 off year election, winning the New Jersey and Virginia governorships by larger margins than expected. In the March 2026 primaries in Texas and North Carolina, more Democrats showed up to vote in statewide primaries than Republicans, a trend that has political analysts raising alarm bells about Republican prospects in November.

The path is narrow. Democrats need to flip just three seats in the House and four in the Senate. Republicans hold a razor thin 218 to 214 majority in the House with three vacancies. Twenty of the 33 regularly scheduled Senate seats up for election are held by Republicans. The opportunity is real. And history is on the side of the opposition party. In 2018, two years into Trump’s first term, Democrats gained 40 seats in the House. The conditions today are, by many measures, more favorable.

What a Democratic Congress Can Do

Here is where this gets practical. Here is where your vote becomes a tool. The Constitution gave Congress specific powers for moments exactly like this one. And a Democratic majority in either or both chambers would activate those powers immediately.

First, the power of subpoena. A Democratic majority controls committee chairs, and committee chairs control subpoenas. That means investigations with teeth. It means compelling testimony under oath from administration officials about the Iran war, about DOGE’s access to sensitive government databases, about the decision making behind tariffs that courts have already declared illegal, about efforts to manipulate redistricting for partisan gain, about the removal of FBI records, about every executive overreach that has gone unchecked for the past year. It means accountability.

Second, oversight authority. Congressional oversight is not a suggestion. It is a constitutional responsibility. A Democratic Congress would conduct hearings, demand documents, and expose the inner workings of an administration that has operated in secrecy while telling you it was committed to transparency. Remember that DOGE promised to post all actions online for maximum transparency. Investigative journalists had to track down more than 100 DOGE members because the government refused to disclose who they were. At least 23 of those members made cuts at agencies that previously regulated industries where they had worked. That is not efficiency. That is a conflict of interest operating in the dark.

Third, the power of the purse. Congress controls federal spending. A Democratic majority can refuse to fund an unauthorized war. It can restore funding to agencies that protect consumers, enforce tax law, deliver Social Security services, and maintain national parks. It can block the gutting of programs that millions of Americans depend on. It can pass appropriations bills that prioritize your family instead of rewarding ideological demolition projects.

Fourth, the Constitution itself. The separation of powers exists because the founders understood that concentrated power corrupts. Trump has tested that framework at every turn, launching a war without authorization, threatening to cancel elections, directing redistricting from the White House, firing inspectors general, and treating the executive branch as a personal fiefdom. A Democratic Congress reasserts the balance. It puts guardrails back in place. It reminds the president and the country that we are a republic governed by laws, not by the whims of one man.

This Is Not About Party. This Is About the Constitution.

I am a trial lawyer. I have spent my career in courtrooms fighting for people who were told the system was rigged against them. I have won most of my trials because I believe in preparation, in facts, and in the idea that the truth still matters. I have sat as a judge pro tem. I have seen the law work when people demand that it work.

What I am watching right now is the most sustained assault on the American constitutional system in my lifetime. And I am not going to sugarcoat that for you or pretend that both sides are equally responsible. They are not. One party controls the White House, the Senate, and the House right now, and under its watch, the country has experienced the longest government shutdown in history, a war launched without congressional approval that has already cost American lives, tariffs that study after study shows you are paying for, the firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers for ideological purposes, the expiration of health care subsidies that will double premiums for millions, and a president whose approval rating has sunk to levels not seen in nearly seven decades.

This is not about being a Democrat or a Republican. This is about whether the Constitution still means what it says. This is about whether Congress is going to do its job. And right now, Congress is choosing loyalty to one man over its obligation to 330 million Americans.

Your Move

I think about my kids. I think about my future grandkids. I think about what kind of country they are going to grow up in. And I know that the answer to that question is being written right now, in real time, by what you and I choose to do over the next eight months.

November 3, 2026 is your day. Not theirs. Yours. Every seat in the House is on the ballot. Thirty five Senate seats are on the ballot. Governors across the country are on the ballot. Your voice, your vote, your power.

A Democratic majority in Congress means subpoena power. It means oversight with teeth. It means control over the federal budget. It means reasserting the separation of powers that makes America a republic and not an autocracy. It means investigations into every overreach, every abuse, every dollar wasted, every life lost in an unauthorized war.

They are counting on you staying home. They are counting on exhaustion. They are counting on cynicism. They are counting on the idea that you will scroll past this, shake your head, and move on with your day.

Prove them wrong. Register to vote if you have not already. Confirm your registration. Talk to your neighbors. Talk to your kids. Talk to the people in your life who have tuned out because they think nothing will change. Tell them it can change. Tell them it has to change. And tell them that the tool to make it happen is already in their hands.

This is not the end of the story. This is the part where you decide how it ends. Show up. Vote. Take back the power that was always yours.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

---