There is a conversation Americans are having with themselves right now that goes approximately like this. The current administration has done a lot of damage. The damage is upsetting. The damage will continue for some time. But in November of 2026, the midterm elections will reset the balance. And in November of 2028, there will be another election, and a new president, and the worst of the damage will be undone, and the country will get back on track.
We just have to wait.
This is the comfortable lie of the moment. The comfortable lie is comfortable because it gives the reader a date to wait for, a milestone past which suffering ends, an electoral process that converts political pain into eventual political relief. The comfortable lie is also wrong.
The comfortable lie is wrong because elections do not undo institutional damage. They never have. They produce changes of personnel and shifts in policy, sometimes large ones. They do not, by themselves, rebuild what has been disassembled. Rebuilding requires people, time, institutional memory, political capital, congressional cooperation, judicial acquiescence, and a public willing to absorb the costs of the restoration. The election does not produce any of those things by itself. It produces a new president and possibly a new congressional majority. What the new president and majority can actually do, given the constraints they will inherit, is the real question.
Let me walk through what cannot be reversed by the next election, or the one after, or the one after that — at least not on the timeline most readers are quietly assuming.
Start with the courts. The Supreme Court has a six-to-three conservative majority. Three of the justices were appointed during President Trump’s first term. The youngest, Justice Barrett, is fifty-three; she is likely to serve into the 2050s. The next Democratic president could change the composition of the Court only if vacancies open at advantageous times, which historical patterns suggest is unlikely to produce a structurally different Court before the late 2030s at the earliest. Court expansion is constitutional but politically explosive and would itself be a norm violation. Even if court expansion happened — and it would require unified government plus willingness to absorb the political cost — the new appointees would face a court already shaped by a generation of opposition jurisprudence.
The lower federal courts have been reshaped less dramatically, but the cumulative effect is structurally meaningful. President Trump made two hundred and thirty-four Article III judicial appointments during his first term and is appointing more now, at a pace slower than the first time but steady. By the end of his current term, Trump appointees will constitute approximately one third of the active federal judiciary — and a third of district and appellate judges effectively determines the outcome of the cases that never reach the Supreme Court, which is most of them. The judicial system that a 2028 successor inherits is one whose center of gravity has been pulled rightward for a generation, and the pull does not reverse by changing the executive.
Move to personnel. Schedule F and related personnel reforms have moved tens of thousands of career civil service positions into political-appointee status. The career attorneys at the Department of Justice who left during the first Trump administration largely did not come back. The career professionals leaving during the second Trump administration are not coming back either. The Antitrust Division has lost its most senior litigators in the past two months — David Dahlquist, the acting director of civil antitrust litigation, resigned with three other senior litigators over a settlement negotiated without the trial team’s input. The State Department has shed hundreds of foreign service officers. USAID does not exist as an institution. The CDC’s international operations are gone. The Department of Education has been reduced. These are not policy decisions that can be reversed by signature. They are institutional capacities that have been removed.
Rebuilding institutional capacity is a decade-long project, not an electoral cycle. A new president in 2029 would inherit a federal workforce that is missing the people who knew how to make the institutions function. The institutional knowledge — how to enforce antitrust law, how to coordinate a pandemic response, how to negotiate a sanctions regime, how to draft regulations that survive judicial review — is held by individuals, not by organizations. Once the individuals leave, the knowledge leaves with them. The new president can hire replacements. The replacements will not, for years, know what the people they replaced knew.
Fiscal architecture. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law July 4, 2025, made permanent the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and extended additional cuts. The Tax Foundation projects that the act will reduce federal revenue by approximately $5 trillion between 2025 and 2034. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates the total cost at three point four trillion in tax cuts alone, with another six hundred billion in interest on the additional debt. A 2028 successor inheriting this architecture finds that the revenue side of the federal budget is locked in by law for the next several years. Changing it requires either a sixty-vote Senate majority — which no realistic projection puts in Democratic hands — or budget reconciliation, which can move tax rates but cannot, for the most part, restore the institutional capacity that has been defunded. The fiscal architecture has been designed to outlast the administration that built it.
The formal patronage policies. The Department of Justice’s one-point-seven-seven-six-billion-dollar “anti-weaponization fund.” The IRS’s “forever barred” provision on the President’s family. The racial criterion in refugee admissions. The federal disaster declaration patterns. These are not informal practices that can be quietly reversed. They are formal acts of policy, written down, published, in some cases signed into law. Reversing them requires legislation, executive order, or court action. Each of these mechanisms has been compromised. Congress is locked in coalition arithmetic. Executive orders by a successor can be challenged in courts that have been politically aligned. Court action depends on judges whose jurisprudence is now structurally consistent with the policies being challenged.
The diplomatic relationships. The European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, Brazil — none of these countries believes anymore that the American institutional system is reliable on the scale of decades. They have updated their priors. They will continue to hedge against American erratic behavior regardless of who is in office in 2029, because they have learned that the same erratic behavior can return four years later. The political signaling of a new administration cannot undo the strategic reassessment that has already occurred. Trust is a stock variable, built over decades and depleted in months. The depletion has happened. The rebuild, if it happens at all, runs in decades.
The DOJ itself, as an institution, has had its independence broken — not abolished, but broken in a way that is now part of the institutional memory. The Acting Attorney General who signed the IRS settlement was the President’s former personal attorney. The DOJ launched a criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve as a political pressure tool. These are not events that can be undone by hiring different people. They are precedents. Once a precedent exists in the institutional memory, every future actor — of any party — knows the move is available. The norms that prevented this kind of capture have been broken because someone tested whether they would hold, and they didn’t. Future presidents of either party will know that the norms can be broken if you have the willingness.
The Federal Reserve’s institutional independence has been similarly broken. The President pressured the Fed, the Department of Justice investigated the Fed, the President’s nominee was confirmed to lead the Fed after the pressure campaign worked. The precedent now exists. A future president of either party who does not like rate policy can replicate the pressure campaign. The institution that was supposed to be insulated from politics has demonstrated that it isn’t. That demonstration cannot be undone. It can only be added to.
The architecture of the apocalypse, which the previous piece in this newsletter discussed, has been built into the financial regulatory framework on a timeline that suggests the next financial crisis arrives between 2029 and 2033 — that is, during the term of whichever administration follows the current one. The crisis will not be the new administration’s fault. It will be a consequence of decisions already made. But the new administration will inherit it, and the absorption capacity of the banking system that would normally cushion it has been deliberately reduced.
Pause and total these up. The Supreme Court reshaped for a generation. The lower federal judiciary substantially shifted. The civil service hollowed out at a depth that requires a decade to rebuild. The fiscal base, locked in by law for years. Formal patronage policies on the books. The diplomatic relationships, structurally reset. The DOJ and Fed independence precedents, broken in ways that cannot be unbroken. A financial crisis approximately scheduled for the successor’s term.
This is not a list of policies to reverse. This is a list of structural conditions to inherit.