Trump warns voters they'll go to hell over the election, then vows to just block the winners.

…(cont) Two weeks before Dallas, on August 27th, per The Hill, he'd already told Fox's Trey Gowdy to "pretend I'm on the ballot," because, in his words, when he's on the ballot they win, and when he's not, people don't bother showing up. So the hand-raising in that stadium wasn't a new idea. It was the same request, dressed up in a pledge and a warning about where you go if you skip it.

Here's the part I had to read twice. One day after that speech — that's the Washington Examiner's own phrase, "one day after casting the 2026 midterm elections as 'one of the most important elections of your lives'" — the president sat down with Laura Ingraham on Fox and was asked whether losing Congress would actually change anything. His answer, per The Hill: "I'll be a block. I'll end up being a blocker. I'll block all of their bad stuff for two years." And when she asked if he could still make deals with the party he'd just sent his own voters to hell about, he said he'd "probably" be able to.

I tried this out at the toll plaza on 9, where I come up a quarter short some mornings and just sit there while the guy in the booth decides how much of a fuss to make about it. Three cars back, usually, is where the honking starts. Three cars is about the going rate for how long anybody actually enforces a stated consequence once the moment for enforcing it has passed. That's not eternity. That's a Tuesday morning with traffic.

Because that's the arithmetic that doesn't sit right with me. Hell is forever, or it's supposed to be. A blocker is a guy standing in a doorway for two years, and then it's 2028 and the doorway belongs to somebody else. If the stakes were what he told that stadium they were, does the plan for losing get to come with a "probably" in it anywhere?

My wife says I'm making too much of a pledge that isn't legally binding in the first place. Maybe I am. I told her I just want the two transcripts, taken forty-eight hours apart, to agree on how long the emergency is supposed to last. She said that's not usually how I put it. I told her I hadn't found the right way yet.

One more thing, and then I'll let you go. If losing the "most important election of your lives" just means he becomes a blocker who'll probably deal with the winners anyway — what, exactly, was supposed to happen to you if you didn't vote?