JANUARY 31, 2026 – I’ve known lots of conservatives ever since I was old enough to parrot my two older sisters as we romped around the house in the fall of 1960 shouting, “Nixon, Nixon, he’s our man . . . Let’s put Kennedy in the garbage can!” I was in first grade and didn’t know any better, except that our Grandpa Holman had been a “Nixon man” at the 1960 Republican convention the previous August. It made perfect sense that our parents would be following the “party line” as well, though I’m certain that the source of “. . . Let’s put Kennedy in the garbage can!” was from outside our family. As conservative as our parents and New Jersey grandparents and uncle were, I never heard them talking trash about liberals. After all, my parents, at least, had many among their friends and acquaintances. In any event, I had no idea why Kennedy should be “put in a garbage can,” except that he was Nixon’s opponent.
As I progressed through school and into adulthood, I gained ample exposure to conservative ideology, led by our parents and mimicked uncritically by my two older sisters. By the time I was theoretically free of their doctrinal influences—i.e. away at school among a bunch of libs—strong familial loyalty prevented me from wandering astray. Only much later, when I expanded my reading and developed greater intellectual courage, did I shift to the left. “Left,” of course, was very much a relative term, given how far to the right my political origins were.
Thanks to my conservative surroundings and influences, deeply instilled in my worldview were conservative “values”—namely, “liberty,” “freedom,” sacrosanctity of the Constitution, low government spending to allow for low taxes, and most often cited, the threat posed by “big government” and therefore, the desirability of “limited government.” These values were the standard operating principles among all the conservatives with whom I was acquainted, starting with members of my own family—and, as it would turn out, members of my wife’s family, though she herself has leaped far to the left, at least as right-wingers would define “far left.”
What confounds me now is how many of those “conservatives” and their ideological sources, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the American Enterprise Institute, and Hillsdale College, have hypocritically rationalized their way to supporting the authoritarianism of the Trump Regime. Yes, there are people such as John Kasich, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Charlie Dent, and members of the Lincoln Project, but what in the world happened to members of today’s Republican Party who “joined up” back in the day of “‘liberty,’ ‘freedom,’ sacrosanctity of the Constitution, [et cetera]”? The only “conservative” thing they’ve seen out of Trump is a big tax cut—mainly for the über-rich—exacerbating the conservatives’ perennial frontline issue: the federal deficit.
What Trump and his sycophantic cabinet members and advisors have unleashed on the country is a full frontal assault on all the principles that “conservatives” harangued about from as far back as I can remember. Now that all the fears and admonitions have materialized, with the aforesaid notable exceptions, long-term committed conservatives have bought into the Trump-branded antithesis of those very principles.
And now comes the most unsettling of all: Trump’s attempt to up-end the 2026 mid-terms, one way or another, if the untampered results appear to be diverting from Republican victory.
The first phase of the disruption unfolded under the false flag of “voter fraud”—another case of “a solution looking for a problem,” given the remarkable and long-standing integrity of election administration across the United States. As well-established by extensive litigation, wherein proffered evidence was held to the highest standards, there were no findings of widespread fraud or irregularities associated with the 2020 election. The one enormous exception, of course, was the ultimate and ironic fraud: Trump’s baseless claim of election fraud itself and his post-election campaign of denialism and his efforts to alter actual results.[1]
Now Team Trump has graduated to an even more sinister attempt to rig the results of this year’s midterms: 1. Either suspend the 2026 election altogether; or 2. Sew enough faux doubt and controversy to undergird plausible denial of an unfavorable outcome for Trump. Last Wednesday’s highly publicized FBI search of the Fulton County (GA) Election Center was a huge first step in this destructive direction. With images of the FBI—a step up from ICE, Trump’s sketchy secret police force—hauling out over 700 boxes (!) of voter records from the center, the Conman in Chief launched the effort to raise questions about election integrity. The ruse has no veil, focused as it is on the 2020 election, which from an evidentiary standpoint has been definitively decided. What it’s really about is stirring the pot of denial ahead of the 2026 elections.
Coupled with this is the extraordinary “enhanced photo op” of Tulsi Gabbard, head of DNI “Department of National Intelligence,” who attended the White House-directed FBI stunt. For what purpose did she appear? To lend irresponsible optic support for some groundless conspiracy theory? To suggest some murky interference by a foreign power? Lost on Team Trump, as well as most of the American electorate, is that by law, the DNI is prohibited from engaging in domestic surveillance.
La pièce de résistance, however, is Pam Bondi’s extortion letter to Governor Walz: “We’ll lower the intensity of ICE if you fork over voter rolls.” As if that weren’t bad enough, she’s now demanding voter information from other states.
In case Trump can’t rig the 2026 elections, his likely parallel plan is to incite enough civil unrest to invoke the Insurrection Act, providing a “legal basis” for suspending the mid-term elections. Judging by recent public rhetoric, it seems that Team Trump members have already been furnished with scripts and directions to cast anti-ICE protests as acts of “insurrection.”
At this juncture, the risk of the 2026 mid-terms being rigged, suspended or canceled altogether is just that—a risk. But so did Trump’s 2024 campaign threat to unleash immigration law enforcement produce the risk, not yet the reality, that a secret police force would terrorize American communities. This latter risk, as it turns out, has materialized in a broad pattern of cruel unlawful and quintessentiall authoritarian actions. Accordingly, there exists the strong likelihood that the risk of Trump’s “alternative election universe” will follow the example of ICE terrorism into an even darker chapter ahead.
What baffles me is how the “conservatives,” as I understood them to be, have capitulated so quickly and thoroughly to the grand antithesis of their central “value”—limited government, including limited interference by the federal government into affairs reserved to the states under the 10th Amendment. A source of equal bafflement is the embrace of the Commander of Crass by most conservative/evangelical Christians. If these Trump constituencies are inexplicably drawn to his crassly charismatic personality because he “tells it like it is,” surely they can see that nearly every direction he takes violates one or several or all central “conservative” operating principles.
It seems that most “conservatives” have either abandoned their values or lost their courage. In any event, they can no longer be relied upon to defend their ideals, once so tenaciously held and so vigorously espoused. Given what’s now at stake and in contention, we who are concerned about the direction of our country have a present duty to reclaim and redeem the U.S.
The “ICE OUT!” demonstrations are only the start of what we need to continue—with increased frequency and participation until Trump is corralled, then dispatched from all power, and his minions, enablers and partners in grift are held to account. If people who call themselves “conservative” won’t support this mission, they are no longer “conservatives” or reliable citizens and should step aside.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
[1] “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because I won the state.” —Trump in his infamous (recorded) telephone conversation with Georgia’s (Republican) Secretary of State; January 2, 2021
