There exists, in the mythology of democratic nations, a sacred covenant so deeply embedded in self-governance that it requires no enforcement beyond the conscience of those who hold power. It is the agreement to lose. Not gracefully—history is replete with bitter concessions and clenched-jaw congratulations—but to lose, nonetheless.
To acknowledge that the voice of the electorate carries an authority that supersedes the ambitions of any single individual. Hermann Hesse understood this tension between the ego’s insistence on its own primacy and the demands of something larger. In Demian, he wrote of the bird that must destroy the egg to be born. Donald Trump has spent a decade destroying the egg of American electoral legitimacy—but what is hatching bears no resemblance to liberation.
The pattern is now so established it has the rhythmic inevitability of liturgy. In 2016, candidate Trump declared he would “totally accept” election results—if he won. Pressed at a presidential debate on conceding defeat, he offered a phrase that should have set every democratic alarm ringing: “I will keep you in suspense.” He won that election and still refused to accept its legitimacy, insisting without evidence that millions had voted illegally. He convened a special commission to investigate these phantoms of fraud. It found nothing and was quietly dissolved. The pattern was set: victory is legitimate, defeat is theft, and even victory is insufficient if the numbers do not sufficiently flatter the ego.
By 2020, the liturgy had darkened into scripture. Months before a single ballot was cast, Trump seeded the ground with doubt. Asked whether he would accept the results, he told Fox News, “I have to see. I’m not going to just say yes.” When November confirmed Biden’s victory, the refusal was absolute. Over sixty lawsuits were filed and lost. Courts, including judges Trump himself had appointed, found nothing. State officials, many of them Republicans, certified the results with quiet courage. None of it mattered. Trump telephoned the Georgia Secretary of State and asked him to “find 11,780 votes.” He promoted a fake electors scheme. And when every institutional avenue of subversion was exhausted, there remained January 6th—that hideous afternoon when stolen-election rhetoric became broken glass and blood.
One might have expected—hoped, even prayed—that this would represent the nadir. That the violence, the deaths, and the spectacle of a president’s supporters breaching the Capitol while lawmakers cowered beneath their desks would constitute a reckoning from which there could be no retreat. But Hesse’s Steppenwolf teaches us that the wolf within does not grow tame through consequences but merely learns to bare its teeth more strategically.
In 2024, Trump won the presidency. And even in victory—even holding the very prize he had torn a nation apart to reclaim—he could not accept the integrity of the process that restored him. He claimed there had been cheating in states he did not win. “I believe there was cheating,” he told NBC News. “But it was too big to rig.” Consider the architecture of this claim: even in winning, the system is fraudulent. The only legitimate outcome is unanimous acclamation. Anything less is evidence of conspiracy.
This is no longer the complaint of a sore loser. It is something far more dangerous—the philosophical foundation for permanent electoral control. If no election is ever truly legitimate, then results are merely advisory, subject to the approval of the man who insists he alone can adjudicate their honesty. Hesse’s Glass Bead Game depicted a society so lost in intellectual abstraction it had severed itself from reality. Trump has achieved something analogous: an alternate electoral reality in which the only valid data point is his own assertion of what the results should have been.
And now we approach 2026, and the liturgy has mutated once more. In past elections, Trump attacked the electoral system from the outside—as a candidate, as a private citizen, constrained by institutional guardrails that still, barely, held. Those guardrails are gone. The Department of Justice now functions as what critics have called Trump’s “personal election-denying law firm.” The FBI has conducted a dramatic raid on the Fulton County Elections Center in Georgia, seizing seven hundred boxes of ballots and records from 2020—the very county where Trump was once indicted for election interference and the very state where he asked officials to fabricate votes. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present at the raid, an intelligence official whose mandate extends to foreign threats, not domestic ballot counting. Trump telephoned the agents involved to thank them personally.
The escalation is breathtaking in its audacity and chilling in its implications. Trump has demanded that Republicans “nationalize” elections ahead of the midterms. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over the voting in at least—many—15 places,’” he told Dan Bongino. “I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do elections anyway,” he added from the Oval Office. The Constitution is, in fact, crystal clear on this question: it cannot. Elections are administered by states. Even Republican governors have distanced themselves from this rhetoric. Texas Governor Greg Abbott stated plainly, “Elections for state positions are to be conducted by states, and I don’t think we should deviate from that.”
The Make Elections Great Again Act now moves through Congress, proposing restrictions on mail-in ballots, mandatory photo identification, and monthly voter roll reviews—measures that would disproportionately burden the elderly, the poor, and communities of color. The SAVE database, historically used to track immigrant benefits, has been repurposed as a voter citizenship verification tool capable of processing millions of queries at no cost. State election officials—Republican and Democrat alike—have pushed back with remarkable unity. Utah’s Republican Lieutenant Governor called the administration’s claims “quite appalling.” Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State called the Fulton County raid a “humiliation” visited upon officials whose work has been validated repeatedly.
Should we be vigilant? The question is almost quaint, like asking whether one ought to attend to the smell of smoke while standing in a burning building. The midterm elections of 2026 will represent the most consequential test of American democratic infrastructure since Reconstruction. A president who has never—not once, not in victory, not in defeat—accepted the full legitimacy of an American election now commands the Department of Justice, the FBI, the intelligence apparatus, and a congressional majority willing to reshape voting law at his direction. The historical parallels are not with previous American elections but with the democratic erosions in Hungary under Orbán and in Turkey under Erdoğan—nations where elections continued to be held, but only as theater.
Hesse wrote that the human spirit possesses a miraculous capacity for renewal—but only when honest with itself about the nature of the threat it faces. The threat is not merely that Trump will refuse to accept the 2026 results if Republicans lose seats. He has already told us, with the candor of a man who no longer fears consequence, that he will accept results only “if the elections are honest”—and he alone will determine what honesty means. The deeper threat is that every institutional mechanism designed to check executive overreach has been captured, intimidated, or rendered irrelevant.
Should we be worried? Yes. Should we be vigilant? More than that. We should be awake in the way Hesse’s Siddhartha was awake beside the river—not with the drowsy vigilance of habit, but with the fierce, clear-eyed attention of someone who understands that the current is stronger than it appears, that the riverbed is shifting beneath our feet, and that the peaceful surface conceals forces that, once unleashed, are almost impossible to recall. The bird is breaking through the egg. Whether what emerges is democracy renewed or democracy extinguished depends entirely on whether enough people are watching—and whether watching, this time, will be enough.