"Treat the president the same as the guy screaming by the freeway exit."
When Justin Levitt uttered that sentence in our interview, I felt a mixture of fear and relief. The fear stems from the fact that, unlike the guy screaming by the freeway exit, President Donald Trump has immense power. With that power, Trump has terrorized immigrants, persecuted transgender people, laid off thousands of hard-working federal employees, gutted the nation's once-superior scientific establishment, poisoned our natural environment and destroyed our longstanding international relationships. While doing these things, he has transformed the Republican Party into a political cult of personality, one in which members are literally told to pledge allegiance to him, and enriched himself to the tune of roughly $2 billion.
Yet the "guy screaming by the freeway exit" analogy can also inspire relief. Levitt — a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden as, respectively, Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Senior Policy Advisor for Democracy and Voting Rights — knows what he is talking about when it comes to the law. Despite ongoing fears that Trump will rig the 2026 midterm elections so that Republicans retain control of Congress, and he can continue doing whatever he wants with minimal accountability, Levitt insists that Trump has about as much power to do this as the aforementioned freeway exit rager.
In the following conversation, I broke down five of the most widely discussed possibilities in terms of Trump rigging the 2026 midterm elections, and got Levitt's thoughts on each of them.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity, context and length.
Trump is wizened, not a wizard.
ROZSA: My foremost concern as a journalist who has been covering the 2026 midterms since the beginning is that Trump will do something drastic to try to steal them. Five possibilities come to mind. One, that he will purge people from the rolls. Two, that he will seize ballot boxes before, during or after the election process has played out. Three, that he will use law enforcement to try to intimidate people who are voting. Four, that he will file frivolous lawsuits in order to overturn votes, and use MAGA supporters who are embedded in the system to facilitate that. And five, that if all of those other efforts fail, he will simply have Congress try to reject the results should they empower a Democratic-run legislature. I apologize for being so long-winded, but I wanted to be thorough. What are your thoughts about my concerns?
LEVITT: None of them will work. Those five things, and 18 others, all sort of fall down at the point of possibility. You're absolutely right that he will try something: one, maybe several of those, or other things. But none of those things will succeed. And I can walk you through each and every one of them and point you to why they won't succeed.
ROZSA: Please do.
LEVITT: The short version is he is trying to project power that he does not have. He would love the American public to believe that he actually has operational control of forces able to execute on any of those five things or others, but he doesn't. He's not in charge of the systems that govern the election process. As much as he thinks he is, he's not. And so I have firmly believed for a while that the single biggest risk to the '26 elections is that the American public falls for the marketing stunt and bestows magical wizard powers on a tired old man. That we do it to ourselves. That we get so spun up and freaked out thinking that he's got a magic ring that lets him do whatever he wishes that we decide to stay home, or we decide to trim our own sails, because we imbue him with an aura of invincibility that he has not earned and does not have.
So I'm convinced the biggest risk — and I don't think it's actually going to happen; I think we're smarter than this — but I think the biggest risk is that we do it to ourselves, pretending he's got power he doesn't have because he desperately wants to convince us that he's got this power.
Can Trump seize ballot boxes?
ROZSA: You said you would go through each of those examples one by one. I'm going to repeat them just to jog your memory. The first is seizing ballot boxes before, during or after the election by claiming a national emergency of some kind.
LEVITT: I thought the first was purging, but we can do them in whatever order you want. So, seizing ballot boxes. Anybody who shows up in a windbreaker to seize ballot boxes is going to have to have a piece of paper from a federal judge in that district to give that windbreaker any meaning. Election officials aren't going to open the door to somebody who just shows up and says, "I'm here to take the ballot boxes, please." They're going to have to actually show a warrant. And I think in this respect, the president and his activists did the whole country a huge favor by seizing old materials — not current ones, not active ones, not new ones — in Fulton County, and seizing old materials in Riverside County. I think those warrants actually caught the judges a little bit by surprise.
If you are a federal judge reviewing warrants, or a state-court judge reviewing warrants, you review hundreds of warrants a week. They're sort of standard issue. You look at the thing quickly to see if there's probable cause, and if there is, you sign off and you're done. And most of the time the answer is yes.
I don't think there's a judge in the country who hasn't at least heard of the warrants in Fulton and the warrants in Riverside and the profound controversy they occasioned. And even if you believe there are some judges who would go along with it, you don't have those judges in the districts where seizing the ballot boxes is going to matter. Do you want to go seize a ballot box in the heart of ruby-red Trump country? Go for it. But the tactic you've described only accomplishes the goal in areas that have a lot of Democratic voters. Those are the same areas that tend to have judges who are a little less inclined to automatically do whatever it is the president wants.
ROZSA: I have to interject here, because Peter Ticktin, the attorney who, despite being a hack, is nevertheless influential with Trump, said to The Atlantic recently, "Our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are." He was referring to protesters who might try to stop him from using sheer brute force to seize ballot boxes. What do you say to that?
LEVITT: I'd say two things. One, Peter Ticktin lives in a world of make-believe. Two, now you're not talking about seizing ballot boxes. If you're talking about armed forces, you're talking about rolling out the Army.
ROZSA: To seize ballot boxes.
LEVITT: That's what Peter Ticktin would like to do. He would like to mobilize the 101st Airborne to occupy New York City to seize ballot boxes. That's not going to happen, for a number of different reasons. One, it's wildly illegal. Two, the military knows that. Three, the military does not like being deployed on domestic soil. That is not what soldiers signed up for. Four, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs has already said we're not going anywhere near the polling places, because he knows as well as anybody that it is in his interest to rule out nonsense like Ticktin's immediately.
And five: No, they're not. What you're describing is a military coup, right? Let's not pretend that it's legal in any way. What you're describing is the military occupying America. And he's just wrong about the number of military personnel that would require. There are several million members of the U.S. military, and to effectuate a military coup, they'd need to occupy about 350 million Americans. That ratio, in addition to the geography, in addition to the fact that the members of the military don't want it — even if this is Peter Ticktin's sick fantasy, it's not a fantasy that the military's going to go along with.
ROZSA: I must interject, because Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has purged roughly 80 generals so far and replaced them with loyalists.
LEVITT: Sure. How many sergeants, when you tell them we're occupying Brooklyn or Chicago or Los Angeles, are going to willingly say yes? I live in Los Angeles. We had the benefit of a National Guard deployment — which is a supplemental force, by the way, not the main force — just over a year ago. There was a meme going around at the time conveying the level of civil unrest occasioned by this deployment. At the top of this thermometer scale was the Rodney King uprising. Slightly farther down, as a measure of civil unrest, was the attempt to get a parking spot at the Trader Joe's in Silver Lake. Slightly farther down from that was the attempt to get out of the Hollywood Bowl after a concert. Slightly farther down from that was Christmas shopping at the Glendale Galleria. And significantly farther down from that was the National Guard deployment. When they were here, they occupied two blocks of downtown, and 99.9 percent of Angelenos did not notice they were there. They showed up on TV, sure. But the sheer geography of the country is very, very big, and the sheer number of people it would take for this to work is logistically unfathomable.
If we're not even talking about legality — if you're talking about brute force — I completely understand that this is Ticktin's fantasy, but I've got to point out, it is a fantasy.
Can Trump purge voters?
ROZSA: Now let's talk about purging voters. My concern is that the Supreme Court recently provided the Homeland Security Department with the authorization to purge voters it claims are noncitizens, even though there are many false positives.
LEVITT: Nope, nope, nope. I was with you right up until you said it granted the Homeland Security Department the authority to purge, and it did not. It granted the Homeland Security Department the authority to use a wildly flawed list to identify potential noncitizens. There are only two types of entities with the authority to purge voters from registration rolls: state election officials and local election officials.
ROZSA: So what can the Homeland Security Department do?
LEVITT: They can deliver lists of hot garbage to local election officials and try to convince those people to purge people from the rolls. They can also pursue enforcement, although they're bad at that. They're not getting bad at it; they're bad at it, and it's in no way systematic. I don't believe anyone is using a list like this. So their capacity to convince local officials to use the garbage they're offering is minimal, because nobody believes their lists are worthwhile. And the reason nobody believes their lists are worthwhile is that they're not worthwhile.
In Nevada, they went to state and local officials, and — I've seen the tape — it has the overwhelming vibe of, "We're going to try very hard to be nice to you, but you've got to show us what you're talking about." And with immense patience, the officials in Nevada asked Homeland Security about the list they had found of purportedly 15,903 alleged noncitizens. The officials said, "Okay, well, you say you found a number. Can you give us the data you used to get there, or walk us through your process, or help us understand how you came to this list?"
And Homeland Security basically said, "Well, that's the starting number. We haven't actually figured this out yet." It later turned out they had found 185 potential noncitizens from that list of 15,000 that they were rock-solid sure about. And I think it was just reported last week that 185 out of 185 were citizens. So their list went from 15,903 to 185 to zero — which, frankly, the state and local officials already knew, because the lists DHS is using are hot garbage. So if someone came to you and said, "I have a steaming bag of poop that I'm leaving on your front door. Would you like to bring it inside the house?" Would you say yes?
ROZSA: May I counter that with something I heard from a different expert?
LEVITT: Of course.
ROZSA: Pooja Chaudhuri, senior counsel/deputy legal director at Democracy Defenders Fund. Do you know her?
LEVITT: Yeah.
ROZSA: She told me the following in June, and I'm going to read you the full quote: "I used to staff the Election Protection Coalition when I worked as a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers' Committee, and we actually saw voters going to the polls and being told by the poll worker, ‘You're not registered to vote,’ or ‘You're not in the poll book,’ and it's too late by the time you find out on Election Day to register to vote in many states. Here, a voter may very well be purged and find out too late — and then they will be disenfranchised." What are your thoughts on that?
LEVITT: Sure, that happens. There are mistakes, unfortunately, in the list-cleaning process. There are some times that people are purged. But that's not the federal government doing the purging. That's state and local officials doing the purging.
ROZSA: State and local officials acting at Trump's behest, though.
LEVITT: In which jurisdictions? You think Nevada officials aren't going to go there, but California officials will? That Illinois officials will? That New York officials will? There are some problems in Texas, I grant you that. I don't think the problems are because of the Department of Homeland Security; I think they're different problems.
And there are absolutely measures that voters can and should take to make sure that they're registered, and registered in the right place. List maintenance is a process, and it's never perfect. The best time for voters to check to make sure they're registered correctly is literally right now, in the window after it's no longer legal to do systematic purges, which is 90 days before an election, but before the registration deadline, which by federal law can be no earlier than 30 days before the election. And in many states, it's much shorter than 30 days. So for anybody who's reading: The right time to go check your registration — and the vast majority of states make this available online — is literally right now. Anybody who doesn't want to be taken by surprise, like Pooja said, anybody who doesn't want to have to worry about a provisional ballot: The easiest solution in the world is to go check your registration right now and make sure you're registered in the right place.
But nothing that Pooja said indicates that DHS has any capacity or authority either to do the work themselves or to persuade anybody else. I mean, if local officials want to disenfranchise their own citizens, there are ways. But most of them don't.
Pew has done a survey every two years since at least 2018, and probably before then, where 90 to 92 percent of Americans say they trust that their local elections will be free, fair, and well run — because they will be. Ninety to 92 percent is an enormous amount of trust in institutions. You don't see those kinds of numbers anywhere else. And that's across party lines, and it's very consistent over time.
And that, I think, is worth remembering: Most local election officials are actually serving their constituencies, and their constituents know it. Ninety-two percent, across party lines, across time. That is a stunning level of trust in the process, and a confidence rating that very few institutions enjoy.
Can Trump send law enforcement to the polls?
ROZSA: The next question is about Trump sending law enforcement, such as ICE agents or local police, or his own radicalized supporters, to the polls. The Justice Department says that it's sending monitors to observe. Could that be used to intimidate people or in any other way hinder the voting process?
LEVITT: Not the monitors. A thousand monitors is a drop in the bucket. It's the right force if you want to actually monitor elections for wrongdoing, for federal problems. It'll probably be used in the aftermath of the election when Trump claims there was something going on. It's like an empty manila folder that he can just wave around as a prop. But a thousand people is nowhere near enough to actually disrupt the elections. And those monitors can be thrown out of the polls by locals if they cause any disturbance at all.
ICE is more serious, in part because ICE has been operating relatively lawlessly. The first thing to know is that there have been restrictions since the Civil War on sending armed individuals to the polls, and many states echo those prohibitions. Your local law enforcement can arrest a federal agent who is armed and at the polls.
I actually believe that this one will happen, but on a tiny scale, because again, the logistics are the thing that make it a problem. There just aren't enough guys. There just aren't enough ICE officers. There are tens of thousands of polling places in most states and hundreds of thousands of polling places across the country, and they're spread apart in a way that would make it extremely logistically difficult to even have one person at each for intimidation purposes.
So here's what I think is going to happen. I think they will pick one polling place somewhere, a suburban polling place, send 10 to 20 people, film it, and try to make Americans believe, when that clip goes viral, that it's happening everywhere. Trump got his start in marketing. He's a marketing guy. He's a communications guy. And so if he can sell the notion that this is happening without it actually happening, he's far happier. Sending 20 people to one polling place, that's logistically possible. But that also means that 99.999 percent of Americans won't ever run into this when they actually go to the polls. So I think you're going to be sold the image of chaos, but if you actually step outside your door, you're not going to see it, because it's not going to be there.
Can Trump steal the election through frivolous lawsuits?
ROZSA: My next question is about Trump using frivolous litigation to try to steal elections. For that one, I want to quote George F. Will. When describing the efforts Trump made to commit a coup after the 2020 election, he noted that there were multiple attempts at litigating, and I'm going to read the statistics he quoted: "Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists). They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result. Trump’s batting average? .016."
Now, some would say this is good news because it shows that the courts stopped him. I would say it's ominous because he clearly tried. Would you say that he is likely to try again to pursue this with frivolous litigation?
LEVITT: Sure. Why wouldn't he? It's one of the things he does. I would say it is even more unlikely now that any of it works. The thing about litigation: Filing a lawsuit without provable facts showing a constitutional or statutory violation is just a tweet with a filing fee. If you're going to ask me, is he going to lie on Truth Social about whether he won the elections? My answer is 100 percent yes, of course he will. But that doesn't translate to actual results being different.
I agree with Mr. Will's stats, and for me, the most important one is the one win that didn't matter. I think there are actually two. I think his allies won on whether his observers could stand a foot closer to watch the absentee ballots than they had been allowed to stand before. But the thing about litigation is it's not magic. It doesn't magic away millions of votes. It can't. Law is a dispute-resolution system, and if there's actually no dispute, then there's nothing for law to do.
So I think the courts — particularly trial and appellate courts — have been behaving remarkably well over the last two years, hands down. They've been examining actual law and actual facts. I haven't by any stretch agreed with all of their rulings, but I have actually, at the trial and appellate level, agreed with most of them. And that includes judges appointed by Donald J. Trump, who have not given the light of day to frivolous cases and have taken seriously real claims with real, provable facts.
The Supreme Court has not been that well behaved, but we've just seen three instances in the last two weeks where even they aren't just in the tank for Donald Trump. Even this radically conservative Supreme Court — and I am not a fan of the way they've been behaving — is not willing to simply rule on ridiculousness for Donald Trump's benefit. You saw it with the gerrymander in Missouri. You saw it with the Postal Service. You'll see it again.
So yeah, there is no doubt there will be frivolous litigation. Of course there will. But nobody should change an ounce of their behavior because of that. It's going to keep the lawyers busy, but voters don't have to worry about an election being stolen, because you can't do it that way. It's the equivalent of writing "I hereby steal the election" on a McDonald's Happy Meal placemat. If I did that and held it aloft, nobody would be terrified that the election would be stolen. They'd look at me as if I were crazy, because that would be crazy.
Can Trump convince Congress to not certify the election results?
ROZSA: So now I want to ask about the possibility that on January 3, if Democrats are about to be certified as taking over one or both houses of Congress, Trump will simply convince Speaker Johnson or Leader Thune to reject those results.
LEVITT: The best article I saw on this — and I've been following this one closely, too — is an article on Lawfare that walks through the exact process of what this would take. And it turns out that the key moment isn't anything that Mike Johnson has a part in. The key moment is who's put on the roll of potential House members when, at noon, the House dissolves as a body. At 12:01, there is no House. There is no Speaker Johnson. He's just a dude.
The clerk of the House is the person who controls the roll. The clerk of the House has a nondiscretionary, very clear statutory duty to recognize the potential members who show up with certificates of election from their states, the things that the state officials have certified. And Speaker Johnson doesn't have a thing to say about that roll, because there is no Speaker Johnson at that moment. The House doesn't exist at that moment. And so you bet there are members of the House who are exceedingly aware of the possibility for nonsense.
I'll say, remember, for the mischief to happen — because this would all have to happen before the new House comes in — it's the existing House and the existing Senate that would have to break democracy. And that would be a different kind of coup, not a military coup. There are a number of sitting members of the House and sitting members of the Senate who are not particularly fans of Donald Trump, including Republicans, including Republicans the president campaigned against, who I don't think are inclined to just decide that we don't have a democracy anymore.
They have not been doing their jobs as members of Congress, I think, on affirmative legislation over the last two years, and for some, a whole lot longer. But that's different from saying, "The California secretary of state certified that you won the election, and I'm just going to refuse to acknowledge that certificate." It's important to count noses on this, and there isn't a majority of the House or a majority of the Senate willing to do that. If you doubt me, ask why the SAVE America Act isn't law yet.
Trump will lose his mind with rage if Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress.
ROZSA: I'm going to quote Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist who used to teach at Yale University and who warned me a few days before the 2020 presidential election that if Trump lost, he would never be able to accept it, for psychological reasons. I'm going to read you her deconstruction of his psychology and then ask you, A, whether you agree with it, and B, if you do, whether Americans should be alarmed that a president with this perspective will do anything it takes to not lose the midterms. Here's what she said:
"Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable. Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality — and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him. It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death."
Do you agree with her?
LEVITT: I am not a psychologist, so I cannot agree or disagree with her psychological diagnosis. I can say he sure shows signs of being disturbed, and he sure shows signs of not being trustworthy. I don't think he's fit for office. I don't think he's ever been fit for office. And he is obviously obsessed with the 2020 elections. You don't need to be a psychologist to see that. You just need to actually listen to him for a heartbeat.
ROZSA: So her prediction was borne out, at least in that respect.
LEVITT: He is obsessed with the 2020 elections. Whether that's because of a mental health break or some other feature, I do not know. I'm going to leave that to the psychological experts. But I'm going to tell you that there's not a word we've been discussing today that requires you to like or trust Donald Trump, because everything we've been talking about today has to do with whether he has the power to steal the 2026 elections. Not the desire, not the motivation, not the psychological twist that it would take, but the capacity. And I am firmly convinced that the only way the 2026 elections don't reflect the will of the people is if we do it to ourselves — if we fantasize a world in which this deeply flawed, wildly unpopular individual is somehow magically all-powerful, such that he can make his id manifest in areas he does not control.
He's just not in charge here. Will he rant and rage and claim and say things? Sure, yes. But I've got a guy right by the exit on the freeway where I live who does the same thing, and I'm not terrified that that guy's going to steal the 2026 elections. I'm telling you, as weird as it may seem, treat the president the same as the guy screaming by the freeway exit.
He's got a lot of operational control in a lot of different circumstances, and we're not used to a president making wild claims about operational control that he doesn't have, because in so many other ways, he does have operational control. He's got operational control over tariffs. He's got operational control over deployments overseas. He's got operational control over a lot of different things. And in those categories, the primary question is: Is he using that control lawfully? And the answer, unfortunately, is many, many, many times no. Here, he doesn't have operational control. The people who are actually running the elections are people who don't report to him and don't have to listen to him.
Is Trump America's Hitler?
ROZSA: That's good to know. I'm going to ask one last question, just because of what you said. A few weeks before the 2024 election, I wrote an article in which I interviewed scholars who compared Trump's rhetoric and his philosophy toward democracy to the ideas of Adolf Hitler. And then-campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote a response to me saying, quote, "It's been less than 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life, and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media." Do you think Trump's behavior, or at least his desires, are Hitler-esque, regardless of your optimism about his inability to execute those desires?
LEVITT: I don't know that the comparison is truthful, honestly. He's got some profoundly un-American desires. And in other arenas beyond the election results, he's got some ability to make those come true. In the election arena, he just doesn't have that ability. And that's, I think, all the information I need. I don't understand the value of comparing him to other deeply flawed leaders of peoples.
ROZSA: The value is in raising the alarm.
LEVITT: Yeah, but if you've been listening to anything I've been saying, raising the alarm to make him a supervillain is demotivating.
ROZSA: But not raising the alarm can make one complacent.
LEVITT: I don't know that what we've seen from voters this cycle has anything to do with complacency, right? He doesn't have to be a supervillain for voters to decide that they [hate] what he's doing to the country. And in primary after primary, in special election after special election, voters are deciding that they hate what he's doing to the country. He is, I think this is right, the least popular president at this point in his second term ever. The one exception may be Nixon, and that's only because I can't remember exactly when Nixon resigned.
ROZSA: It was in early August of 1974, so by this point in his second term, Nixon was out of office.
LEVITT: Okay. So second place so far, but dropping like a rock. And Nixon did not enjoy a supportive Congress in the way that this president has. I don't see complacency in a popularity rating that is the second-worst ever [...]. I think it's right for Americans to evaluate who they want to have in charge. It is absolutely right for Americans to understand that their preferences will matter, right? That their votes, whoever they're going to cast them for, are actually going to be counted as they intend in the coming elections. I think turning the president into Voldemort has the effect of scaring people, unnecessarily and unrealistically, into believing that he has the power to affect how the elections translate people's preferences.
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