Comedian Tim Dillon recently aired a theory so absurd it loops back around to unsettling: Trump is going to get Israel to help him skip the 2026 midterms altogether.
“There’s not going to be any midterms. Israel is going to nuke the midterms,” Dillon told his audience, riffing that by November 2026 we’ll be “in a war with Turkey” and too distracted to notice. He hedges the whole bit — “I hope they happen, by the way” — but buries the real punchline inside the setup: Trump would want the midterms nuked because “the last thing I need is the Democrats to come in and then this guy to get impeached and convicted and removed.”
To the view, of course Tim Dillon is half joking. But is he onto something?
On paper, Dillon’s scenario is impossible. The Constitution gives the president zero authority over federal elections. Congress sets Election Day, and thousands of state and local officials administer the vote. America effectively holds 51 separate elections at once, not one — and the Constitution requires a new Congress to be sworn in on January 3, 2027, with no executive order capable of overriding that. The country held midterms during the Civil War, both World Wars, and COVID. There is simply no legal pathway for a sitting president to cancel or postpone a federal election.
That’s the paper answer. The problem is that Trump has spent his second term testing what happens when paper rules meet a willing administration.
A recent ProPublica investigation reported that Trump has methodically dismantled federal election guardrails — gutting CISA, killing the Foreign Malign Influence Center, and installing election-denial loyalists across federal agencies. The Center for American Progress has flagged a leaked draft executive order that would declare a “national emergency” over alleged foreign election interference as pretext for a federal takeover of the midterms. Trump himself has said Republicans need to “take over” the elections, and publicly mused that “we shouldn’t even have an election.” In a September 2024 meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky, Trump reflected on the fact that Ukraine can’t hold votes during wartime. “Oh, that’s good,” he said.
That Zelensky moment is what makes Dillon’s joke land. Dillon isn’t really predicting a nuke. He’s pointing at a pattern: Trump has repeatedly treated the midterms as an obstacle rather than a constitutional obligation, and he keeps floating war as a convenient reason they might not happen. Dillon’s framing of Israel as “a friend that has chosen to take a keen interest in our activities” — smothering, claustrophobic, willing to do favors — is less a geopolitical theory than a joke about leverage.
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