He Already Told You the Plan. Here’s What It Looks Like When He Runs It.

Nine moves, three acts, about three weeks. A field guide for the people who’ll be paying attention.

He Already Told You the Plan. Here’s What It Looks Like When He Runs It.

Nine moves, three acts, about three weeks. A field guide for the people who’ll be paying attention.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,057: Friday, October 16th, 2026.

Let me ask you a blunt question.

If a man has spent years telling you, in public, on camera, that he would never accept losing…would you bet your country on him suddenly discovering sportsmanship?

I wouldn’t.

So I did something a little different for this article. I approached it from the perspective of locking a room full of serious people…psychiatrists…behavioral analysts…military historians…people who have studied strongmen for decades…in a conference room for seven straight days, eight hours a day, with one assignment:

Assume a president with a long record of threatening his own citizens, his own courts, and his own press is about to lose a midterm election. What does he do? Not what he says. What does he DO?

Here’s the thing most pundits miss….something most of them have made a habit of for at least the last decade. They keep waiting for the one big dramatic move. The tanks. The cancelled election. The made-for-TV coup.

That’s not how it works. That’s never how it works.

A leader like this doesn’t do one irreversible thing. He does nine reversible things at once, watches which ones stick, and keeps those. Every move has deniability. Every move has a legal-sounding excuse. And by the time you’ve litigated move number four, he’s already on move number seven.

So here’s the playbook, in three acts. Read it now. Then…watch the news and check the boxes.

ACT ONE: Before the Vote–Poison the Well

1. Declare the loss fraudulent before it happens.

This is the one you can bank on, and here’s why. The psychiatrists would tell you something the political reporters would not: for a certain kind of man, a narrative of personal loss isn’t a strategic problem.

It’s a psychological impossibility. He literally cannot hold the thought “I lost fairly” in his head.

Which means he doesn’t choose to call the election rigged. He has no other setting.

Expect escalating claims about mail ballots, machines, dead voters, foreign voters… not aimed at judges…who’ve heard it all…but aimed at his own supporters.

The goal is simple: make sure that when the numbers come in…millions of people have already been told the numbers are lies.

2. Grab every lever of election machinery the law will let him touch. Then test the ones it won’t.

Executive orders on voter rolls. Demands for “proof of citizenship.” Federal agencies “offering assistance” to state election offices that didn’t ask for it. Prosecutors told to open fraud investigations in the opposition’s biggest cities.

Here’s the part that matters: he doesn’t need to win any of this in court.

He needs to generate fog. Enough procedural confusion in three or four decisive counties…that the result becomes “disputed”…and “disputed” is all a loyal legislature or a friendly judge needs to work with.

3. Put badges near the ballot box–just not at it.

Troops at polling places is a bright line. The military historians in my room would be unanimous: the uniformed services are the hardest institution for a strongman to bend. They refuse that order.

So he routes around them. Immigration raids in opposition cities the week before the vote. Federal police “operations” that just happen to be three blocks from a polling station. All of it framed…as having nothing to do with the election.

It doesn’t have to stop anyone from voting. It has to make a few hundred thousand people think twice.

ACT TWO: Election Night and the Count– Manufacture Chaos

4. Declare victory early. Declare it loud. Declare it before the count is done.

Behavioral analysts call this anchoring. You say the number first…and every later number looks like someone changed it.

So on election night, with half the ballots uncounted…he announces he’s won. Then as the mail ballots are tallied…over the following days…and the margin shifts…it doesn’t look like arithmetic. It looks like theft. That’s the whole point.

5. Forget the voters. Target the signatures.

This is the one almost nobody understands…even after the 2020 election…so…please pay attention.

Modern elections aren’t stolen at the ballot box. They’re contested at the certification desk. A handful of county boards…a few secretaries of state…a dozen canvassing officials…ordinary people…with ordinary names…who have to sign a piece of paper for the result to become official.

Expect those people to be named publicly. Expect legal threats. Expect “patriots” showing up at their homes. Expect it concentrated in the two or three states that decide which party controls the legislature.

6. Keep a crisis in your back pocket.

A foreign confrontation. A riot. A “cyber attack” on the vote nobody can verify.

Any of these does two jobs at once: it rallies the base…and it hands the president an excuse for emergency authority.

Military experts would flag this as the scenario to watch most carefully…because it’s the one that turns a political dispute…into a national-security one…and national-security disputes have different rules.

ACT THREE: After the Vote–Make the Win Worthless

Let’s say the worst doesn’t happen. The count holds. The opposition takes a chamber.

Here’s what a man like this does next.

7. Use the lame-duck window like a crowbar.

Between election day and the day the new legislature is sworn in, the old majority still sits. That’s two months. Pass everything. Confirm everyone. Change the procedural rules the incoming majority will need to do anything at all.

8. Govern by decree and dare them to stop you.

If the opposition controls a chamber…legislation is now irrelevant to him. So…he stops pretending it matters. Executive orders. Emergency declarations. Refusing to spend money the legislature appropriated. Ignoring subpoenas…outright.

Every one of these…ends up in court. Courts are slow. Slowness is the strategy.

9. Investigate the investigators.

The opposition opens oversight hearings. He opens counter-inquiries into the people running them. Prosecutors, inspectors general, committee chairs…leaks…security clearance revocations…“ethics” probes.

The psychiatrists would tell you this is the most personal of all nine moves. Oversight, to a man like this, isn’t a constitutional check. It’s an attack. And attacks…must be answered.

Now Here’s the Part They Didn’t Put in the Headline

I’ve just described nine moves. Not one of them is a prediction that he succeeds.

Every single one of them can be stopped. And…in the historical record…most of them usually are; by courts that rule fast…by state officials who sign anyway…by a military that says no…and above all…by members of his own party who decide their careers are worth more than his ego.

That last one is everything, all wrapped into one. Strongmen don’t fall because the opposition fights them. They fall when their own side stops showing up.

So the question isn’t “what will he do?” You already know what he’ll do. He told you.

The question…is what the ten thousand ordinary people…between him and the outcome…the clerks, the judges, the colonels, the backbenchers…decide to do…when he does it.

And…whether the rest of us…are paying close enough attention to notice when they flinch.

Watch the certification desks. Watch the lame duck. Watch for the manufactured crisis.

You’ve got about three weeks.

#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. Save this post. Then, in six weeks…come back and count how many boxes got checked. If the number is zero…I’ll happily eat my words in public. If the number is five or more…you’ll know exactly where we are…and you won’t be able to say nobody told you.

Sources & Further Reading

The leader who cannot process loss (Moves 1, 4, 9)

• Jerrold M. Post, Narcissism and Politics: Dreams of Glory (Cambridge University Press, 2015) — the standard political-psychology text on grandiosity, sensitivity to criticism, and why narcissistic leaders experience checks on their power as personal attacks. cambridge.org

• Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975) — the clinical foundation for “narcissistic injury” and the rage response it triggers. rowman.com

• Jerrold Post, “Current Concepts of Narcissism: Implications for Political Psychology,” Political Psychology 14:1 (1993). jstor.org

Anchoring and the “declare early” effect (Move 4)

• Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185 (1974) — the original anchoring paper. science.org

• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) — the accessible treatment of anchoring and why a first number distorts every later one. macmillan.com

• Axios, “Bloomberg-backed group’s warning of a ‘red mirage’” (Sept. 2020) — where the term entered public use. axios.com

Repetition, motivated reasoning, and why the base believes “rigged” (Move 1)

• Lisa Fazio et al., “Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144:5 (2015) — repeated claims feel true even when you know better. doi.org

• Gordon Pennycook, Tyrone Cannon & David Rand, “Prior Exposure Increases Perceived Accuracy of Fake News,” JEP: General 147:12 (2018). doi.org

• Ziva Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin 108:3 (1990). doi.org

• Christopher Paul & Miriam Matthews, The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model (RAND, 2016) — volume and repetition beat accuracy. rand.org

Loss aversion and why he fights harder losing than winning (Moves 7, 8)

• Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica 47:2 (1979) — losses loom roughly twice as large as equivalent gains, which is why a cornered incumbent takes risks he’d never take ahead. doi.org

Rally-round-the-flag and the manufactured crisis (Move 6)

• John E. Mueller, “Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson,” American Political Science Review 64:1 (1970) — the original rally-effect study. doi.org

Intimidation and the chilling effect (Move 3, Move 5)

• Brennan Center for Justice, “How State and Local Election Certification Works” — why certification officials have become the pressure point. brennancenter.org

• Brennan Center, “Officials Can’t Go Rogue on Election Certification” (2024). brennancenter.org

• Brennan Center / Campaign Legal Center / Protect Democracy, updated 2026 state certification law guides. campaignlegal.org

Executive aggrandizement, “nine reversible moves,” and governing by decree (Moves 2, 7, 8)

• Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy 27:1 (2016) — the paper that named incremental “executive aggrandizement” as the modern path to autocracy. journalofdemocracy.org

• Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2018) — the “gatekeepers” argument and why institutional guardrails are only as strong as the people staffing them. penguinrandomhouse.com

• Juan J. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Johns Hopkins, 1978) — the classic on how legitimacy erodes step by step. press.jhu.edu

Polarization and why the leader’s own party is the real check (closing section)

• Milan Svolik, “Polarization versus Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 30:3 (2019) — polarized voters will forgive their own side’s anti-democratic behavior, which is why co-partisan defection matters so much. journalofdemocracy.org

• Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) — Lesson One, “Do not obey in advance,” is the “watch the clerks” argument in four words. penguinrandomhouse.com