Ex-MSNBC Host Joy Reid Issues Dire Warning About 2026 Election

Joy Reid has spoken out about the future of elections in the United States, saying she thinks the 2026 elections will be rigged and that President Donald Trump intends to remain in office until he dies.

The former MSNBC host spoke on Thursday (July 3) with Wajahat Ali on Ali’s substack The Left Hook, where she said she thinks it’s “insane” how people believe future elections will be in any way “fair” or “normal.”

“Whenever Democrats say to me… ‘we have to coalesce for 2026,’ I always add to the end of their sentence… ‘Yeah, assuming we actually have free and fair elections,’” Reid said, per Mediaite. “I think it’s insane, honestly, to just assume we’re going to have normal elections next year.”

Reid’s warnings come after Republican members of Congress passed Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill last week despite many airing concerns in recent weeks.

“To me, the fact that Republicans are still voting for the bill tells me that they’re not actually worried about being reelected,” Reid stated. “The way Trump is behaving, he’s not acting like somebody who worries that his party will lose power or that even if the party, even if somehow we had normal elections and Democrats took control of either House… he’s not acting like somebody who’s worried about the consequences of that.”

Reid, who was let go by MSNBC back in February amid a major network overhaul, went on to say she thinks Trump is “behaving as an autocrat.”

“I don’t think Trump intends to leave office,” she said. “I’m very clear about that. I think he intends to stay in office like Putin till he dies… I think it’s going to take an extraordinary movement to get rid of him.”

Meanwhile, on The Joy Reid Show podcast, which launched in June, Reid spoke about the precedent Trump is setting with his denaturalization efforts. On Thursday’s episode, which touched on the President’s visit to Florida’s new detention center for undocumented immigrants, Reid said Trump’s plans could end up affecting his own family.

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“If you give the president of the United States monarchical-like powers to say, ‘I don’t like your views, I don’t like your take on issues, I don’t like that you’re too liberal, you’re not conservative enough, I’m just gonna take away your naturalized citizenship,’ well… if we ever get a Democratic president, they could say, ‘I don’t like Melania Trump. She wasn’t born here. She was born in Slovenia. She is a naturalized citizen. She’s outta here,'” Reid said, per IrishStar.com.

She even claimed it could impact Trump’s children, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, whom he shares with his former wife, the late Ivana Trump, who was not an American citizen.

“Maybe the next Democratic president says, ‘You know what? I don’t like the Trumps. So we are gonna denaturlaize all of the Trump children, whose mother was a foreigner at the time,'” Reid stated.