For a while, Lee Anne and I were the sort of people who slapped the doorframe on our way out of the house shouting, “Clear eyes. Full hearts. Can’t lose!” We had watched 60-some episodes of the Texas football drama “Friday Night Lights” and were conducting ourselves accordingly. Coach Taylor’s problems were our problems. The Dillon Panthers needed us. Neither of us particularly likes football, a sport that seems engineered to produce traumatic brain injuries and sell beer, but we lived and died with that team.
Until we didn’t. A handful of episodes before the end of the series, we stopped watching. I can’t tell you why. After all that time spent worrying about these people—their fumbles both literal and metaphoric—we left their affairs unresolved. Presumably someone won the remaining football games. We went on with our lives.
I think about this capacity for withdrawal with some wonder. We had lived with and loved those people. We had incorporated their motivational practices into our departures for the grocery store. Yet we were able to leave them behind with less deliberation than we give to throwing out a sponge.
Meanwhile, we are in the run-up to the midterm elections, and I remain exhaustively informed about a man whose every utterance I would prefer never to hear again. (A man, it must be noted, who is not even on the ballot.) I know when he’s angry, which is frequently, and when he believes he’s been treated unfairly, which appears to be the balance of the time. My relationship with Coach Taylor was considerably less demanding.
The American presidency has been working toward this level of audience engagement for decades. Nixon’s helicopter farewell had the gestures of a triumphant season finale attached to a plot that did not support them. Ford’s clumsiness became a recurring comedy sketch, his principal antagonist not Squeaky Fromme but gravity. Reagan had the advantage of previous work in the industry, reassuring us that we were in capable hands while those hands were busy running guns in the Iran-Contra affair.
But for me, the show found its addictive serial form with Clinton. Tapes, betrayals, lawyers, a supporting cast whose names we learned against our will. Each revelation promised resolution and generated another week of programming. The presidency came with homework about a stranger’s penis.
Then, in 2016, we elected a reality television host and have spent much of the intervening decade expressing surprise at his methods: manufacture a feud, humiliate a supporting cast member, promise a revelation after the break. Occasionally replace his press secretary to freshen things up.
In the January issue, I predicted a Blue Tsunami in the midterms, followed by a progressive takeover so thorough that residents would be required to attend municipal meetings. Absences would require a doctor’s note. Republicans would retreat to the Leatherstocking Region, establishing a breakaway republic founded on the principle that public comment should have a time limit.
I stand by the municipal-meeting threat. But I may have misunderstood the coming transition. What looks like a political reckoning could also be a casting announcement.
If Democrats take Congress, expect the coming season’s promotional campaign to write itself: New villains! New confrontations! Same unresolved storylines!
James Carville offered a more seductive possibility in June. The Democratic strategist predicts that a sufficiently crushing midterm defeat will cause Trump to resign by Easter of next year. He believes Trump is bored and unprepared for the rejection awaiting him. Carville has even supplied a holiday deadline, allowing us to celebrate the resurrection of Christ and the departure of someone with a considerably higher opinion of himself.
Carville imagines that rejection will make Trump surrender the one thing he most craves: our undivided attention. He treats the presidency as a job Trump might tire of, whereas Trump experiences it as a show that can never be canceled.
A Democratic Congress gives him new antagonists, investigations, confrontations. People to insult. Subpoenas to denounce. Hearings to interrupt from a golf cart. Carville sees an exit ramp. Trump sees a plot renewal.
Elsewhere in the forecasting business, the coming attractions are less soothing.
Steve Bannon has warned conservatives that losing the midterms and the 2028 presidential election could land some of them in prison, himself included. It is an unusual get-out-the-vote message, somewhere between a campaign appeal and a request that someone feed the cat.
Bannon has also promoted a third Trump term, promising details after the midterms. Asked by the Times of London whether Trump was on board, he replied, “Does he have to be?” Apparently, the star’s participation is one of the smaller administrative matters still to be resolved.
Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and Trump confidante who makes ordinary paranoia look like a failure of imagination, has warned that a Republican defeat would empower what she calls the Democrats’ “Islamo-Communist” wing. Those of us hoping for less expensive health insurance should apparently prepare for a considerably more ambitious orientation session: a brief introduction to dialectical materialism and a fitting for a government-issued prayer rug.
The opposition has its own programming needs. In April, Rick Wilson, the Republican strategist turned professional Trump antagonist, dropped a podcast episode titled “Trump Is F*cked: It’s the Final Countdown.” I understand the appeal. I, too, would like to subscribe to the final countdown. My concern is the number of seasons.
For years, we have watched witnesses testify and documents accumulate, then turned to the experts to explain why this time there will be consequences. Every episode ends with someone explaining that the walls are closing in, yet the building appears to have extraordinary structural flexibility.
I say “we” because I watch this stuff. I click. I read the analysis of the analysis. (And then write about it myself.) I experience a small, embarrassing lift when a headline suggests that consequences have located the correct address.
Some of this attention is necessary. Presidential decisions reach into people’s bodies, bank accounts, workplaces, and families. Looking away is easier when you can afford whatever happens while your head is turned.
But some of my attention is an appetite for a satisfying ending. I want the exposure, the reckoning, the moment when everyone sees what I see and the credits roll. I would like democracy to deliver the emotional impact of a well-written limited series. Six episodes, a reckoning, and the knowledge that the British have already made a better version.”
A Democratic victory could impose meaningful checks on Trump while supplying him with two years of excellent television. We should be able to hold both possibilities in our heads, although I realize there are already quite a few things in there.
I could leave Dillon with the outcome unresolved because nobody there required anything of me. Coach Taylor never needed my help. I hope he and his wife Tami are happy somewhere, enjoying their privacy.
Here, the outcome makes demands on us. We have a say in who holds power and what they can do with it. The consequences continue after the coverage ends.
The show has enough viewers. The country needs voters. Please vote on November 3.
This article appears in November 2026.
