(Daily Signal)—Americans will soon learn what the Democrat agenda is really about, and it certainly isn’t about working with President Donald Trump to reduce the cost of living.
The blue tsunami came to be Tuesday night as a wave of Democrats took seats in the House and the Senate that seemed impossible not long ago. They will now have sizable majorities in both houses of Congress.
The big question is, what will they do with those majorities?
While Democrats may have ridden their message about “affordability” to a massive victory on Tuesday night, they don’t intend to limit their agenda to getting grocery bills down. Not that they were ever particularly good at that.
No, they fully intend to use their victory Tuesday night to dial up lawfare to 11.
The likely incoming House Oversight chairman, Robert Garcia, didn’t even wait for the night to be through before shouting his party’s intentions on X.
“Lawyer up,” he wrote.
And of course, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., already announced before the election that she intends to target and prosecute members of the Trump administration to send a “deterrence message” to any future young Republican staffers that working for Democrat opponents could lead to jail time.
This is largely what their base wants. They want to wipe Trump, his supporters, and everything they stand for out of existence. They remain furious that what they thought would be a permanent political revolution was upended in 2024.
So, they aren’t looking to merely deliver left-wing ideas like single-payer health care or the end of fossil fuels or a slew of new taxes on the “rich.” Mere sideshows. No, what they want most is reprisals. They will work feverishly to ensure that when they take the executive branch in 2028, as they assume they will—maybe with a Democratic Socialists of America member leading the charge—they’ll have the chance to finally secure permanent power this time.
Just remember the words of Democrat political strategist James Carville back in April when he said Democrats should run the old bait-and-switch strategy.
“If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on Day One, they should make Puerto Rico [and] D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F— it. Eat our dust,” he said.
That’s what’s coming. And it isn’t even strictly the far-left side of the Democratic Party that wants it. Reprisals and power are what bring the wings of their coalition together in loving kumbaya.
But make no mistake, the next iteration of the Democrat coalition will have a more robust hard-Left edge to it. Socialists now see their clearest path to dominance in Congress and the ultimate prize of the executive branch. They surely hope that the larger success of the Democratic Party will bring forward their larger agenda, as it has begun to in many of America’s largest cities.
What New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is doing in the Big Apple will seem tame compared to what they do if they seize national power. And we are arguably much closer to that possibility today than at any time in our history.
But that’s not a cause to simply despair.
Regardless of what no doubt many pundits will say in the coming days, the Trump administration has racked up some enormous victories in the last few years, even if those successes are a lot quieter than they should have been.
Don’t think that the Left’s political and activist classes don’t know about this and aren’t livid about it. Trump’s counterrevolution profoundly changed the trajectory of the federal government and our country.
Even with empowered majorities in Congress, the Left can’t reverse that. At least not yet.
The challenge will be for conservatives in the next few years to convince the American people that “woke 2” will be every bit as bad, or worse, than “woke 1.” It may not look exactly as it did under President Joe Biden, but you can bet they will again cook up horrors beyond your imagination. But this time, younger, more ruthless socialists will be leading the charge instead of just managing a feeble figurehead regime.
Still, a bigger disaster can be averted if we show Americans another way. We must demonstrate that the answers to the many problems we face today, both existential and mundane, can be solved without foolishly sliding into socialism, or worse.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
