First, some good news: There is a path out of this endless labyrinth of destabilizing crises, both foreign and domestic, being provoked by an executive branch wholly unbothered by international law and even the Constitution. That path runs through rural America. We’ll get to that, I promise.
Things are bad. The checks and balances of the Constitution have largely failed to contain the President of the United States from committing previously unimaginable acts of depravity.
The Supreme Court has granted him broad immunity from prosecution, while the legislative branch has abdicated its responsibility to hold a tyrannical executive to account.
Here are some specific injuries and usurpations Trump has committed, or promised to commit, just this January. In a rambling diatribe before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, January 21, 2026, Donald Trump reminded the world he is not just a threat to security here in the USA.
He reiterated his demand to annex Greenland from our staunch ally, Denmark, and bemoaned the West “mass import[ing] foreign cultures which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own” in a racist rant about Somalians, which at times drew audible gasps from the audience.
On the home front, the extrajudicial killings, first of Renee Good in Minneapolis and most recently of Alex Pretti, both exercising their First (and in the case of Pretti, Second) Amendment rights, have drawn condemnation – or at least a call for reconsidering tactics – from unlikely places, including MAGA Congressman James Comer of Kentucky.
The call is even coming from inside Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s own house, with Fox News reporter Bill Melugin reporting that DHS staff are “increasingly uneasy and frustrated” with the Trump administration’s response, calling it “catastrophic” and worrying it will erode public trust.
2026 is young, but that may be the understatement of the year. Public trust is gone. It left when the administration once again slandered a victim of state violence, insisting he had it coming for the grievous sin of helping a woman pushed down by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents. Even gun rights groups, typically aligned with the American right, have condemned the killing of Pretti for – it bears repeating – exercising his constitutionally protected rights to protest, to film federal agents, and to carry a firearm. The gross abuses of civil rights and liberties by ICE officers in Minnesota are more chilling than a North Woods winter wind. It is enough to curdle the blood of any patriotic American.
Sadly, patriotic Americans seem in short supply in Congress.
On the flip side, rural America is full of patriotic Americans. Though we may not be on the streets of the Twin Cities, or Chicago or Los Angeles before that, we are not helpless in the face of authoritarianism. There is one thing we can do, one thing no Americans are better placed to do, to get us out of this mess.
We must write our congressmen.This isn’t some earnest but naïve Aaron Sorkin fanfiction. There is a straightforward answer to ending this crisis: Give control of Congress to the Democrats. Not in November, but now.
Ballotpedia reports that as of January 20, 2026, of the five Republican senators retiring at the end of this Congress, only one is seeking a different office; the rest are leaving public office entirely. There are eight Republicans in the House of Representatives retiring from public office.
As of this writing, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a MAGA Republican from Louisiana, “is now able to afford just two defections on any party-line vote if all members are present – and in an election year, they seldom are,” reports the New York Times. Meanwhile, Republicans hold the Senate with 53 seats to the Democrats’ 47. Democrats need 51 seats to control the majority, which means they are four shy.
The November elections look promising for Democrats. 18 House races shifted towards Democrats in the latest Cook Political Report analysis, while the entrance of popular former Congresswoman Mary Peltola into the Alaska Senate race gives the party a clear but narrow path to a majority in the upper chamber. That’s good news.
Unfortunately, this is 2026, where good news always comes with bad news. The bad news is we cannot wait until January 2027 for Democrats to take control of Congress. We’re not even a month into the new year, and already Donald Trump has lit the world on fire while his cronies dance around the flames like brimstone imps ready to coronate him king of the ashes.
We can’t go on like this.
Happily, I have more good news. Rural Democrats can and must show how important we are to the broader coalition and cause of preserving democracy. This is where writing your congressman becomes not just a civic exercise, but a patriotic duty. It’s time to convince these retiring Republicans to defect to the Democrats.
It will only take a handful of defectors to caucus with the Democrats, giving them the majority and providing an important check on an out-of-control executive. Four Republican senators – Joni Ernst of Iowa, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Tom Tillis of North Carolina – are retiring from public office.
The four Republicans I mentioned have no re-elections to worry about. (A fifth, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, is leaving to run for governor, so he does.) Two, like Tillis and McConnell, have demonstrated a backbone before. Tillis recently said he is “sick of stupid” coming from the administration, while McConnell has opposed Trump’s pugilistic demands for Greenland.
Lummis and Ernst are true believers in the MAGA cause, but that doesn’t mean Wyomingites and Iowans shouldn’t join with Kentuckians and North Carolinians in demanding their senators defect to the Democrats. If there is an ounce of integrity left in them, they will do right by their oath. If there is a modicum of patriotism left in their bodies – and I have to believe there is some love of country and the Constitution left in combat veteran Ernst – we must find it and apply relentless pressure upon it.
The same goes for the House, where our chances of winning over retiring Republicans are greater. Dan Newhouse, who represents central Washington, voted to impeach Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection. Michael McCaul, who represents exurban communities between Austin and Houston in the Texas 10th congressional district, has expressed deep disapproval of Trump’s position on Greenland. Finally, while Elise Stefanik, who represents much of the North Country in New York, went from principled Never-Trumpism to full-on MAGA stooge, her very public debasement by the President may have left her with an axe to grind. Her constituents should encourage her to grind it by throwing support to the Democrats and making fellow New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries Speaker of the House.
I am under no illusion about this plan’s chances of succeeding. None of these Republicans are profiles in courage. Still, in leaving public office, these elected officials have no re-election campaign to worry about. Perhaps that will allow them to be more clear-eyed about their oath and the duty they have to the country they supposedly love, and which has given them so much.
The cold, hard truth is that Democrats – and by extension urban voters, who represented the party’s base – cannot do much in this moment to rein Trump in. But rural voters can. We can flood the phone lines and inboxes of these representatives, demanding they stand up for democracy and caucus with Democrats. We can appeal to their morality, their patriotism, and to the very real harm being done to the people who sent them to DC in the first place.
We ask not that they change their political positions on issues like abortion, tax cuts or defence spending, only that they provide procedural votes to keep Democrats in the majority and stand as a bulwark against the authoritarian takeover of the United States of America. It’s quite literally the least they can do in the face of an existential threat to the Republic.
Will they? Probably not. Still, we must try. Make a call of your own to a retiring Republican. This is the least we can do.
The post Commentary: Rural Voters Have a Move. It’s Time to Make It. appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
