Bulwark Takes - Dark Horse Predictions for 2026! Is Kash Patel on Borrowed Time?

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

The Bulwark team makes their predictions for 2026—from MAGA infighting and Trump’s fading grip on power to economic fallout, media chaos, and a midterm backlash.

Hey guys, Tim Miller from the bulwark, here with my 2026 prediction. Last year in 2025, I predicted that Donald Trump would have a health event. Just because that felt like the right thing. It just felt like what we deserved. This old man that, like, survived through the campaign, would have a health event in 2025. He didn't, really. I mean, we've seen his hands looking very Queen Elizabeth-esque. And so I'm sticking with it for 2026.

We're due. Donald Trump's due to have a health event. My new predictions, one would be that I do believe that, I do believe that, that Donald Trump's expansionist vision of the world will come into place, whether that is with troops on the ground of Venezuela or actual action in Greenland or elsewhere, it feels like he's ready to change the narrative by, you know, bringing back the Monroe Doctrine here in this country. So we'll see that.

My sad prediction for the Democrat says it doesn't feel to me like the Democrats are doing the things they need to do to maximize the win in the midterms. I'm feeling like we're going to see a Democratic win. in the midterm, so it won't be the wave needed to take the Senate. I hope to be wrong about that and I hope things change in the coming months, but that's my sense for now. Last year when we did one of these things, I predicted that 2025 was going to be a year of more MAGA infighting than expected. I think that that essentially came true. My prediction for 2026 is is a little bit the same, a little bit different. I think 2026 is the year that MAGA is going to have its big showdown

over what comes next. And this is happening earlier than I. I expected. I think I think my initial guess going into this year would be that we would get this big fight at the end of Donald Trump's second term. But as you look around now, these fights are bursting out into the open, kind of all over the place in a way that Trump himself is not only not really paying attention to, but seems kind of uninterested in. And for the guy who has wielded this amazing personal power over what is and is not acceptable in the Republican Party for all this time, it seemed likely that it would be as he shuffled off the stage, that that would create the power vacuum for these fights to exist. But because he just sort of seems so caught up in all

sorts of other stuff, he's more worried about his ballroom or micromanaging the Kennedy Center or, or, you know, trying to get James Comey and Letitia James arrested. Because the president has taken his eye off of these fights, they're kind of going forward without him. You get guys like J.D. Vance, who are now, or Vivek Ramoswamy, Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, these. are kind of like the Candace Owens, the leading figures of the what comes next after Trump, what does MAGA look like after Trump fight. I think we're going to get it in a major kind of cataclysmic way next year, even though Donald Trump remains as much the sort of figurehead of the party as ever, and even though he has three years left in power. So I'm not 100%

sure what that's going to look like, but I expect it to be messy and very public. So my prediction for 2026 is that in an election year, in a razor thing, in-house majority, they're going to work even less days than they already said they're going to, which is always very short in an election year. This is going to be for a few reasons. One, the majority is going to be very thin. It's going to be hard to get really anything done. And two, they're right now, and there could be more at least 18 House Republicans seeking office elsewhere. You've got like Chip Roy is running for Attorney General in Texas. You've got a bunch of guys and women running for Senate, for governorships.

And so the attendance is going to be really poor. And with a razor-thin majority and really bad attendance, that just means that they're not going to be able to vote on things they want to vote on. They're not going to have the votes when they think they're going to because people are going to be out on the campaign trail. And it's going to create a lot of problems for Mike Johnson. So something I'd anticipate is that they cancel a lot of votes a lot more than they normally have. And if you recall this past summer, or this past fall, they canceled votes for, you know, six weeks. part of that was over the Epstein files, but you're just going to see a lot of not working because they just won't have the numbers to get it done.

My prediction is a Trump session that the economy actually moves into a recession that Donald Trump's promises that the first six months of 2026 are going to be somehow this big boom where the tariff money just starts rolling in. That is an obvious lie. And I think that that is going to be a big contributor to the wipeout that Republicans experience in 2026. So my prediction for 2026 is the return of Liz Cheney. I got a little pony right up here, and that's my pony. You might remember Liz Cheney was the number three Republican in House leadership. She voted to impeach Donald Trump.

She led a renegade movement of some House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. And then after he escaped conviction, she refused to kiss and make up. all the other Republicans did. And she would not shut up in her condemnation of Trump. And the price was that House Republicans voted to oust her from leadership. So she was gone from that role. And then Trump and his goons orchestrated a primary challenge against her and got rid of her from Congress. Okay. But she did not go quietly. In the last two years that she had left, she served as vice chair of the January 6th committee. She produced the best record that we have of the crimes that Trump and all of his henchmen committed during and leading up to January 6th.

So when Trump campaigned in 2024, he threatened revenge. And that is why Joe Biden, you might recall, pardoned Liz Cheney and every member of the committee preemptively so that Trump couldn't go after her. Okay, so where did she go? Well, she's a professor at the University of Virginia. And you might say, well, that's not doing much. She goes around. She gives some speeches, but she could be doing a lot more. And my prediction is she will. So Democrats are going to win back the House. That's prediction number one. Prediction number two, they are going to establish a commission, not a committee, because if they establish a House committee, they need Republicans on it. You can't find any honest Republicans anymore because all the Liz Cheneas are gone, right?

So they're going to set up a commission, which won't have subpoena power, but it will be able to investigate, and it will produce a record of the crimes of the second Trump administration. I'm going to guess if you make me predict specifically, I will say crimes within the Department of Justice, crimes, abuse of power, corruption, all of that. And I believe that Liz Cheney will be the head of that commission. And I'll give you one caveat on this prediction. It might not happen until the beginning of 2027, because the Congress will come in. But the problem is, if I don't make that prediction this year, there's a risk that they'll set up the commission, they'll announce it and they'll announce her before the end of 2026, in which case I'll be too late.

So I'm going to make it my prediction for this year. My prediction for 2026 is a lot more chaos in right-wing media. I think there are a combination of factors that are going to be causing that. We're going to see jockeying for 2028 from some various factions. I think if Democrats win the House or the Senate, there's going to be a lot of recriminations on the right. Donald Trump, I think, is going to continue to be unpopular. So I think people on the right media personalities are going to try to divorce themselves from him or try to kind of stand back from his failing policies. And I think, frankly, I think

Charlie Kirk's assassination is going to continue to reverberate, create this power vacuum where on issues like conspiracy theories, some about his own assassination, support for Israel, anti-Semitism, racism. I think those are really jump balls right now in terms of what the Republican line is on those issues. And so I think we're going to see a lot more chaos, a lot more infighting. And, you know, I think a lot more interesting stories to follow. Hey, guys, it's Lauren Egan. My prediction for 2026 is that I think there's going to be a pretty big backlash to tech and AI. And I think it's going to become a significantly more dominant issue in our politics than we saw in 2025. We're kind of already starting to see the outlines of some of this. There's been some Democrats who are calling it touch grass populism. And that's the idea that basically we should all be spending less time on our screens, less time scrolling on social media and more time investing in, in real life, real people, real relationships. And that's kind of more of a cultural argument that's coming from some Democrats. But I think we're going to start to see even more of an economic

message come from them, especially with more and more focus on AI. We're going to hear a lot from Democrats talking about how AI companies are going to take our jobs if they're not regulated more carefully and really trying to box in the GOP and Trump on this issue, especially since the president has been incredibly accommodating of AI companies. And I think this will become an issue in the midterms. And it's especially going to be something we hear a lot from, from the potential 2028 candidates as they all kind of try and lead on this issue. Relatedly, I think we're going to see a lot of AI attack videos in the midterms.

And this is going to be a big problem as we all try and figure out and navigate this very messy, complicated world and figure out which videos are real. watch our fake and I think it's going to be kind of a problem in 2026. So I'm looking forward to covering all of that with you guys in the new year. All right. So here's my prediction for 26. I will just note before I offer my prediction for 2026 that my prediction for 2025 was pretty spot on. I don't care what Mona Sharon says. I nailed it. I said the government was going to shut down. It seemed pretty obvious. But I did say it was going to be a particularly long shutdown and that would be over some sort of health care medical research type related

matter. Nailed it. Nailed it. Nailed it. I don't think I'm Nostradamus, but I'm pretty close. So pay attention. 2026 future prediction. Again, I'm not going to go out on a crazy limb, but I do think this is going to happen. Trump is going to try to federalize in some way, shape, or form a swing state run by a Democratic governor. They're going to try to federalize. That state election infrastructure. They're going to say, we've got to control the voting booths. We're going to be putting National Guard there to monitor things. We're going to be doing all the counting. They're going to come up with some insane cockamamie legal rationalization for it. It's going to be intense. Everyone's going to flip out, rightfully so. And it's

going to land in the lap of the Supreme Court. And I'm not brave enough to make a prediction for how the Supreme Court will be on that. But that's my prediction. for 2026 is that by this time next year, Pete Hexeth will still be Secretary of Defense. I know. It seems like he would be the obvious one to go because he's been nothing but an embarrassment and a source of scandal for the administration. He was already one of the least qualified people in this administration, and that's saying something. But that's exactly why I think he's going to stay. You hear whispers about maybe he'll run for office somewhere. They'll ship him out to Tennessee, something like that. But no, that would be an admission of weakness and of a mistake.

and they'd have to get someone else who's equally pliable in that office. So, no, I think he's going to stay for the long term, precisely because he's so unqualified. And the administration is never willing to admit that they made a mistake. My prediction for 2026 is that the Supreme Court will strike down Trump's national emergency tariffs. The only reason I think that this is coming in 2026 is that I was expecting it to come in 2025. the Supreme Court heard this tariff case on an expedited basis and was expected to rule maybe sometime by the end of December. So maybe this video will be obsolete by the time you see it.

But yeah, the expectation is that the Supreme Court will strike down those tariffs. These are the tariffs, of course, that the Trump administration has been using to negotiate whatever it is they're trying to negotiate with countries around the world. including many of our allies, and will cause lots of complications if the Supreme Court strikes them down, not only because they can no longer be used as a cudgel against our trading partners, but also because a ton of money is going to be due back to U.S. companies, because it is, in fact, U.S. companies that have been remitting those tariffs. So I look forward to seeing that happen. My prediction for 2026 has to start with a caveat that I am terrible at predictions.

I never get these things right. So you probably should not listen to me. But, you know, I want to be a part of things. So here goes. Here's my prediction for the year. My prediction is that health care will be the number one issue in the 2026 election, a lot like it was in the 2018 election. Democrats are going to be able to use Republican cuts to Medicaid, Republican failures to extend the Obamacare subsidies, probably bring in even some of the stuff that Robert R. Kennedy Jr. is doing at HHS, cuts to medical service, medical research, and use all of that to build support and power. What I suspect will be at least the ability to retake the House and maybe even threaten the Senate. And Democrats will be feeling very flush about that, but here's where things are going to get interesting. Because once that ends, once the election campaign is over, Democrats are going to start to think about what comes next and what they want to stand for.

And here's the thing. In American history, very reliably every 15 to 20 years, we have a big debate about how to reorganize the health care system. I don't mean the kind of stuff we've been doing for the last 10 years where Republicans are trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Democrats are defending it. I mean thinking about going forward. Healthcare is getting more expensive, more and more people can't afford it. Are we going to try some big kind of major, try to do something like Medicare for all, build on the Affordable Care Act, do something totally different.

It's a really important debate to have. And I think Democrats are going to start to have that on the day after the election in November. So watch for it, bang for it. It's going to happen, except again, I'm probably wrong. for 2026. I don't know if I'm going to be judged by Mona for these predictions in her judge robe, but we'll see. We'll see how we do. I think I did pretty well last year. I'm not sure how she's going to end up ruling. Two predictions for this year. Two predictions. Prediction number one, we will not know before the end of the year who Warner Brothers,

eventual owner will be. It may end up being nobody new. Warner Brothers could remain a separate company i i could foresee a situation in which uh the regulators basically say no nobody can buy warner brothers that's too too much consolidation um but either way i do not think we will know before the end of this year uh that uh who who will own warner brothers be at netflix or paramount which is mounting its its own bit um second prediction is a number one movie of the year i'm just going to go out on a limb and say christopher nolan's the odyssey big i'm i can't possibly you cannot possibly create a film that generates more excitement for me personally. I studied

ancient history in college. This was the concentration of my history degree. I love Christopher Nolan, number one filmmaker of the modern era. And so the idea of combining these two things into one is just that you couldn't possibly ask for more. It's going to gross 10 billion

dollars at the i'm just kidding mona judge mona i think one billion is but is is definitely within reach uh and uh it'll it'll win maybe it'll win some Oscars at the the 2027 awards but either way i can't imagine i if if i come out of that movie less than enthused things have gone horribly wrong so you know keep a keep an eye out for my review in july so my prediction last year was totally wrong um and uh therefore a very humble Mona now predicts that at the end of 2026, we will get out our scorecards on the supposed eight wars that Trump has brought peace to, and we will tally it up and look at the results and find that not a single one was actually solved. There were occasional ceasefires that disintegrated. There were temporary

truces, but not a single actual piece deal. Hard to come up with a single dark horse prediction for 2026, because I suspect a lot of stuff that's not really on our map is going to happen. But I think we're going to get a bunch of turnover inside the Trump administration. And I think the guys you can bank on being there till the bitter end are Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio. But I wouldn't be surprised if Dirty Cash Patel, Christy Nele, Christy Nele. and Pam Bondi all get fired before the end of the year, maybe even before the midterm elections.

We'll see. If the Democrats really do put a whooping on during the midterms, then you could see a huge turnover within the administration. But most interesting we want to keep track of is Bondi, because if the midterms are close, I expect the Republicans will try to do some shenanigans. to avoid seating people or contest that there were fraudulent elections and try to hold on to the house. And in order to do that, they would need to have the Attorney General's office probably. And so it is possible that Trump may want somebody more competent than Pam Bondi in there even

before. But of those three, I think cash is the first to go. Shortest tenure for any FBI director in history, mark it down. So there's some predictions of 2026.