(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson. There’s about nine months left into the midterm elections in November. And how should we envision this with the current administration, its chances of retaining control of the House or Senate?
Well, I think the best simile is that there’s a pathway over the mountains, like a pass, but on one side there’s a shear drop, and the other, there’s, on the right side, there is ample room, if you travel close to the mountains and not get near the precipice.
Now, what is the precipice? There is a pathway to save the Republican Congress and thereby to save the Trump counterrevolution. We saw what the alternative was under Joe Biden, but it’ll be much worse in 2028 if a Kamala Harris wins and has a Democratic Congress waiting for her, which she could have, at least at the beginning of it in November.
So, what do we have to look at? What are the perils that you’ll fall over the cliff as you go on the pass to the midterm? The first is these unforced errors. I don’t want to get into who did it or whose fault it is. I’m just suggesting that when you say Rob Reiner after his death, you say something untoward, I’m talking in a strict political sense now, it’s not good.
Why? Because to repeat the Trump success in 2024, you must do three things. You must win black males at 26%. You must win Hispanic males about 55% and get them out to vote. And you must win or come break even with independents. That’s in addition to getting your base out.
But if you make fun of Rob Reiner after he’s dead and not say, you know, not honor the old Latin warning [de mortuis nil nisi bonum], don’t say anything bad, don’t say anything unless it’s good about the dead, then you’re going to offend whom? The independents.
And so, this week we had this strange little meme or video that President Donald Trump was sort of the Lion King, and all of his enemies were various animals that inhabit the jungle. And I think Joe Biden was an ape and all that. But there was the Obamas portrayed as primates.
Now, you could argue two things. Well, Joe Biden was too, so it wasn’t racial or he didn’t care what you thought of it. He didn’t think it was racial. And the Obamas, remember, Barack Obama engineered, tried to engineer his destruction in August, September, October of 2015, before the election, when they called in John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and said, ignore the intelligence, go after Trump. But that doesn’t matter. The matter is there’s a whole history of the United States of racism that equates people who are black with primates.
So, whoever did it in the White House, or whether it was an ad for an upcoming TikTok video, it doesn’t matter, people don’t matter, the independents don’t like that. And you will either lose independent votes or you will lose a week of precious time trying to explain what I just did.
And then finally, as you’re going toward the midterms, there’s a sheer drop, another sheer drop, and that’s called history. Only three times in the last hundred years has an incumbent president in his midterm, first or second—this is Trump’s second midterm—picked up seats. They usually lose seats.
The problem is, in the House, he can’t afford more than four or five seats, depending on these special elections. He could even lose the Senate. I don’t think that’s possible, but it could happen. We saw what happened in 2020 in Georgia when he lost two conservative seats in one of the most conservative states, Georgia, to, not Democrats, but hard leftists. It’s possible.
So, you have to break history’s pattern. George W. Bush did it. He picked up seats. And you can do it. FDR did in his first, I think, 1934 election. You can do it, but you have to do everything right, keep away from the precipice.
So, what’s in his favor? In his favor is he has already enacted the architecture of a radical economic revolution that’s going to pay dividends in March, April, May, and just get better. And that’s based on, not speculation on my part, but fact. The biggest deregulation movement since the Reagan revolution. Tax cuts, and not just tax cuts for affluent people, for waitresses, for people on Social Security, etc. And then there’s energy development. We’re gonna get up to 14 million, 15 million barrels of oil.
So, whatever’s gonna happen in the Middle East, we have a buffer that we’ve never enjoyed before. And then in addition to that, there’s, Trump says, $18 trillion in foreign investment. Just cut it in half and say $9 trillion. That’s nine times larger than Joe Biden’s trillion dollars over four years. So, we’re gonna see massive foreign capital coming in here, creating jobs. The gross domestic product is going to take off with tax cuts and deregulation.
I know Kevin Warsh, he’s a wonderful, professional economist, colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution, he’s absolutely independent, but he will look at this empirically in a way that his predecessor did not. And he will see that there is a lot of growth and there has been a lot—GDP’s up to 5.5, but the inflation rate has gone down. And he will cut interest rates, not radically, but insidiously and continually.
And you put all that together and it’s gonna really make a big difference if the president and his team talk about it daily and compare it to the Biden disaster.
The other thing is Trump’s biggest asset was immigration. He stopped it. He didn’t curtail it. He stopped illegal immigration. They said that was impossible, comprehensive immigration—no, he didn’t need any of that. He just followed the law.
But now he’s getting these bad optics and these blue enclaves where it’s organized, the opposition is organized by left-wing money, Antifa, etc. And they want Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be portrayed as Nazis, they want to dox them. So, ICE wears masks. And you know the whole story.
They’re looking, they want to encourage people, they being elected officials—Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. They want people to go out and confront them, and they actually want people to be hurt or worse, to be martyrs.
Why not just stay in places like we saw last week in West Virginia? Four hundred or 500 criminals rounded up. People who are happy. Law enforcement, both state, county, and local, complied. Not in the news, except the dividends that it’s a safer place and the law was enforced. Doesn’t mean you’re going to neglect the blue states. You’re just going to until the midterms.
Look at places like Arkansas or Wyoming or Montana. Just look at places where you have a receptive population and a compliant and cooperative law enforcement entity. And that will give you great publicity that there’s no violence, there’s no protest, but you’re deporting thousands of criminals.
And if you go into a criminal enclave and there happens to be somebody there and you say, I have, by law, I have to ask you what’s your status, and he is here illegally, then deport them. Doesn’t mean you have to neglect the law.
There’s another advantage that Trump has. They’ve raised, I think, $90 to $100 million. They’ve out-raised the Left by three or four times. And the billionaire class of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, not to mention Marc Andreessen or Elon Musk, they have defected, and it’s really hurting the Democrats.
What they’re looking at in California with this billionaire’s tax, you can be a billionaire and have property and investments, homes, but you might only have, I don’t know, $100 million. They’re gonna take $50 million from you on your aggregate worth. That’s not gonna go over well with the billionaire class.
And there, that’s just a foretaste of what Kamala Harris will do if she has a Democratic Congress. So, they’re gonna be able to raise more money, not just from the rank-and-file MAGA people, but from the donor class, which has been historically Democratic.
And finally, there’s known unknowns. We’re at the precipice of radical things that are going on in Ukraine and the Middle East. They could be very bad, but they could also be very good. Mostly, foreign policy does not change a midterm election unless it is dramatic, fundamental, and a peace in Ukraine where you’re not getting 10,000 or 20,000 people killed and wounded a week, total casualties, not just fatalities, or you see that Iran’s government is overthrown and there’s a popular uprising where the United States is not seen as it was in Iraq as an invading foreign occupier, but as a helper of popular descent, that could be enormous.
Just to review, there’s a lot of pros that could disrupt the historical cycle and see the Republicans hang onto the Congress. But there’s a lot of dangers, and you can go over the cliff if you continue to go into places like Minnesota, where they don’t want you, and you don’t really want to be there, but you feel obligated. I can understand that. But do that after the midterms.
And the same thing is true—ignore what history says. This is a whole new ball game. We’ve never seen politics like this, and you can win the midterms even though you’re an incumbent president. And don’t make errors that don’t need to be made.
Just put a czar on social media and say anything that comes through to the public from social media, from the Cabinet, has to be looked at first. Put Don Jr. in it. Put Eric. Just tell him somebody has to be responsible so this doesn’t get out and lose constituencies that won you the election in 2024.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.