Republicans deploy ground troops in the states to execute 'the plan'

President Donald Trump and the Republican Party are planning on sending troops to polling places during the 2026 midterm elections, according to a recent report by The New Republic.

“The Republican National Committee announced Tuesday that it has deployed poll watchers and election observers in at least 17 states for the midterm elections,” The New Republic’s Hafiz Rashid reported on Tuesday. “In a post on X, RNC Chairman Joe Gruters posted an audio clip where he said, ‘We’ve already deployed field staff and we’ve hired state directors and election integrity directors.’”

Although Gruters did not specify which states he was targeting, he made it clear that this is part of the GOP’s plan to retain control of Congress during the 2026 midterm elections.

“We focus on the big picture,” Gruters said. “We focus on winning. We have a plan. We’re executing the plan.”

As Rsahid reported, Trump himself has said he is considering sending the National Guard and ICE to voting locations in November.

“It’s a disturbing thing for Trump to say, just two days after he called for an ‘Election Integrity Army,’” Rashid wrote. “In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed that Republicans had one in 2024 ‘in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote’ and attacked Democrats for forming their own elections task force led by former Attorney General Eric Holder.” In light of Trump’s rhetoric and the RNC’s actions, Rashid argued that “it appears that the RNC has heard Trump loud and clear, and is taking action. It’s on top of everything else the Republican Party is doing to meddle in the midterms and beyond, from mid-decade redistricting that disenfranchises Democrats and Black Americans to spreading election-denial conspiracies from 2020. It has even installed election denialists in local governments and election boards across the country.”

He concluded, “Deploying ICE agents or National Guard troops at the polls seems to be a ploy to frighten people of color from voting, and is unprecedented. It appears that the midterms are shaping up to be a tense battle in more ways than one.”

As conservative columnist George F. Will wrote in The Washington Post earlier this year, Trump has had multiple chances to litigate the 2020 presidential election, and has had all of his core claims thoroughly debunked.

“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),” Will explained. “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.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”