Earlier today, barely 33 days before the midterm elections, Donald Trump admitted that there might not be any line he isn’t willing to cross to make sure that he and his party win the elections in November. In a TIME Magazine interview that was published just this morning, Donald Trump said that he is keeping his options open when it comes to ways that he could interfere with the midterm elections, saying he isn’t ready to “rule anything out or in,” before adding something even more concerning: “You mean the Insurrection Act? I’ve never used it. I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it.”
What Donald Trump was hinting at, or threatening to do, was to send ICE to our polls and invoke the Insurrection Act to unleash a complete assault on our laws surrounding free and fair elections. Even though Donald Trump seems to think this could possibly be an approved use of that Act, federal law is clear when it comes to having federal law-enforcement activity near polling locations. Those laws protect our elections from corruption, interference, and intimidation. But that does not matter to our President. He does not care about rules or the law, and he does not actually care about any of the people running for election, even though they are from his own party. His only concern is being able to hold onto the unchecked power he has accumulated during his second term in office.
The interview itself was done this past Monday afternoon, September 28, inside the Oval Office. TIME’s senior political correspondent Eric Cortellessa and editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs spent 75 minutes with Donald Trump, asking him questions on a wide range of subjects. The president fumbled his way through many of them without actually giving any real answers. He would start to respond, wander off into something completely different, and then just say whatever happened to be on his mind. But there was one detail about this interview that he probably didn’t think much about, or maybe was even excited about. This was Donald Trump’s 56th TIME Magazine cover, which makes him the most featured person in the publication’s history. As irony would have it, his feature on this cover broke the record he had shared with another president, Richard Nixon.
I have written about a lot of disturbing things over the past year and a half. There have been the raids in Minneapolis and the people who have been harmed, or worse, by ICE. I have written about the war Donald Trump started. The racist propaganda he has shared. The cruelty he has inflicted. We’ve been through him tearing down the East Wing of the White House and destroying institutions. I could keep going on and on. But hearing him threaten our elections so carelessly gave me a lump in my throat. This isn’t the first time he has done this, and it won’t be the last. But there was something different about what he said throughout this interview that was very unsettling. This was a different side of Donald Trump, one who struggled to answer even basic questions and who appears to believe there is nothing that can stop him from acting on his worst impulses. It made something else painfully clear. We already knew we were entering the most dangerous period of his presidency, but after this interview, that danger is now right in front of us.
The Insurrection Act was created back in 1807 to give the president special powers in emergency situations to do something not normally allowed: deploy active-duty military personnel on American soil to conduct law enforcement. It was never meant to be used for personal gain or as a weapon against the American people so that the president can, in essence, win a war against his own country. It wasn’t created so that a sitting president or his party could interfere in an election to prevent the opposing party from winning.
That wasn’t the only thing he said in that interview that showed how far he plans to go. When he was asked what would happen if Democrats take control of Congress in November, Trump said, “They’ll probably go after me, and I’ll go after them.” The president is already forecasting the hell he intends to put our country through for the next two years if the American people exercise their right to vote and change the balance of power in Congress. He is preemptively declaring war against the very people he was elected to represent. We knew Trump would not back down quietly. But it was still difficult to hear someone who holds the fate of more than 340 million people, and by extension even more throughout the world, speak so callously about what he intends to do if the election does not go his way.
Trump also went after the Supreme Court, and more specifically the three justices that he appointed, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. He was upset with them because they ruled against him on tariffs, mail-in ballots, and birthright citizenship. “Yeah,” he said when asked if he regrets nominating them. “What can I do? I put them in. They voted against me too often. I was very, I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often.” He then twisted the actions of justices who follow the law and who don’t bow down to the president’s whims and wishes, describing their actions in terms of loyalty instead of their oath of office. “The Democrats stick like glue, those three, they virtually never vary,” he said. “And while I don’t like it, there’s something I admire about it: there’s loyalty. So they have loyalty to Barack Hussein Obama.” Donald Trump forgets that the Supreme Court is not Barack Obama’s, a president who has been out of office nearly 10 years now, and it is not his. It was never supposed to belong to the president or any other man or woman. It belongs to the people and to our Constitution.
Thinking about the record that Donald Trump officially broke today, being on the cover of TIME Magazine and passing Richard Nixon, who TIME itself noted “repeatedly broke his own record as the Watergate scandal progressed,” may have been the best message ever delivered without saying a single word. Because much like Trump, Nixon did not earn those covers through proud accomplishments. He earned them because the country was consumed by the crisis he brought to his presidency. As the scandal deepened and his administration crumbled, the magazine kept documenting the fall. And now Donald Trump just passed him.
That is the real story from this interview. The parallels between the two just keep growing, and they go far beyond similar cover counts. Nixon began his second term in January of 1973 with a 68 percent approval rating, riding a landslide reelection, much like what Donald Trump likes to brag about. By August of that year, as Watergate unraveled and inflation gripped the country, his approval had fallen to 31 percent. Trump’s approval, according to the Associated Press and NORC poll conducted this week, now sits at 31 percent, with 69 percent of the country disapproving. Nixon’s collapse was driven by scandal and a failing economy. Trump’s presidency is following the same path. Between the Epstein files, a war he started without congressional authorization, and an affordability crisis, Donald Trump and Nixon share more similarities than differences.
When the TIME reporters told Trump that his own polling shows historic lows, he said what he always says: “They’re fake numbers,” and added, “I would beat anybody running today by 20 points.” Donald Trump lives in denial. His entire life, he has spun facts or outright lied about them, and he has faced very little pushback. But what he is doing is eerily familiar to Nixon’s final weeks in office, when the people around him described how he stopped being able to distinguish between the version of reality he created and wanted others to accept as truth and the real version closing in on him. We are watching that general disconnection play out once again.
Nixon’s resignation wasn’t that far in the past from when I learned about Watergate in school in the late eighties and early nineties. Many of the adults in my life vividly remembered that tumultuous time in the history of our country. I remember my teachers presenting it like a once-in-a-lifetime event that had a clear beginning, middle, and end. We were taught that the system, that the checks and balances, had worked. The president broke the law, he was caught, and he resigned before he had to become the first president actually impeached and removed from office. Democracy survived.
I remember one teacher in particular who loved watching WWII movies and playing presidential trivia games. He described how they had been shocked but not entirely surprised while it was actually happening. He was always careful to explain that Watergate wasn’t a single moment in time. It was a new chapter in American politics and a reminder that we always have to keep our eyes on politicians because power can corrupt even good people, but power given to somebody evil is something else entirely. That kind of power can bring down an entire government. I thought I understood what he meant when he gave that warning to our class, but it wasn’t until Donald Trump’s first term that I fully understood what he seemed to understand, and what so many had forgotten. We are constantly walking a line to keep power checked, even with the best administrations, because the threat doesn’t always come from the president. It can come from anyone in close proximity to them. A cognitively deteriorating president could be manipulated into believing and doing anything with the right people by their side.
TIME journalists also asked Trump a very specific question that showed exactly who he is in many ways. He was asked, why should his White House renovation projects matter to Americans who are struggling to pay their bills? It was a straightforward question that he should have had an answer rehearsed and ready to give. Instead, he talked about the building itself as if it would somehow help families make sense of their own financial reality. “The White House was a dump,” he said. “It hadn’t been painted in, it was just a disgraceful dump. The doors were falling off. The locks were broken.” He tried to make it sound like he was somehow using his own money to litter the White House with gold plasterwork, gilded frames, and tchotchkes scattered around the Oval Office. He talked about wanting to make the Oval Office a federal landmark so that no future president could remove the gold he put on the walls. He called the White House “a symbol of our greatness.” But he never once addressed what it feels like to be a family choosing between groceries and gas. He never answered the question because he mentally couldn’t. He was lost in his own talking points and his deep desire to talk about the things that matter to him, and his fellow Americans simply weren’t among them.
Near the end of the interview, he appeared visibly frustrated as he turned on the reporters. “You haven’t asked me one f--king positive question,” he said. “All of this. What about this? What about that? All negative.” He then added, “Well, I hope I get a decent story. I don’t think, you know, it’s hard to get a good story. Every question’s a hit. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong.”
It was the final moment of the interview that said the most. Eric Cortellessa asked Trump what he will miss most when his presidency is over. He answered immediately: “This beautiful room.”
Nixon, for all his crimes, at least understood in the end that the office did not belong to him. When he lost the support of the country and then Congress, he knew what was coming, and he left. That is not an option for Donald Trump and never would be. He isn’t the President to serve his country. He is the President because he thinks this is his country and everything in it belongs to him.
In 1974, Nixon’s approval hit the floor. That November, Democrats gained 49 seats in the House and four in the Senate. They called them the Watergate Babies, a wave of young, reform-minded representatives who came to Washington to hold their government accountable. Voter turnout in that midterm was driven by people who had watched their government lie to them and decided they had seen enough. We are once again in that moment. 33 days from now, we have the chance to do what those voters did all those years ago. Not just to send a message, but to take back the House, and maybe even the Senate, and to also show the president and the next man like him that this is our country and that we are done being fed lies. We will be demanding the truth and reclaiming our power. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: Thought I’d share a kitten update. I’m always looking for the good things to counterbalance the weight of living through this authoritarian takeover. One such thing follows me around all day and night: this girl right here. Would you believe that this is the same furry family member that had a stroke-like event not too many months ago? She still has a slight limp if you look closely, but other than that, she is back! Here she is asking for a treat. We were not sure if she would even walk again, and now she harasses us for toys, food, and fresh water 10,000 times a day.
Links to sources used in writing this article:
https://time.com/article/2026/10/01/donald-trump-2026-interview-transcript/
https://time.com/article/2026/10/01/donald-trump-2026-interview/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/01/politics/donald-trump-iran-interview
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-record-low-midterm-elections-12512645
https://www.npr.org/2026/09/14/nx-s1-5962190/supreme-court-mail-in-voting-trum
"You mean the Insurrection Act? I’ve never used it. I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it.”
If ANYBODY has really told him that he should use it, it's time to find out who is that despicable enabler.
"I've never used it. I could use it." !!!??????
He really thinks he can use it simply because he feels like it..! Just like signing any other EO!! ! He is getting so dangerously crazy and delusional, it's effin scary!
Heather, while illegal, I wish we could accumulate reprints of this post and slip them under doors and into voting booths.
Although we have been burdened with Trump since his escalator ride into a presidency, your collection is so clear and damning, I believe it could persuade any on the fence to vote against his party.
I appreciate your trying to alleviate some of our terror by noting “federal law is clear when it comes to having federal law-enforcement activity near polling locations.” But when has that stopped our mad-man-in-chief before?
And while I appreciate this sentence in your post, “His only concern is being able to hold onto the unchecked power he has accumulated during his second term in office," I don’t believe Trump has “concern.” Previous rotten behavior has not raised the eyebrows of anyone in his party. “So what else is new?” they would question.
I am angry at the Times cover. Trump will turn the image into a win, “See how I’m king of the world,” he would say. How has the cover done anything to shame him for the atrocities he has let loose on our country, and every human desiring to find sanctuary here?
You write that Trump has passed Nixon in scandals. Alas, our demented president will not find that offensive. He would stop at “passed” and care not for what followed.