MAGA has tipped their hand about how they'll try to steal the midterms

President Donald Trump reacts on stage at the Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas, September 9, 2026; REUTERS/Callaghan O'Hare

Conservative columnist David French has a warning for Americans who oppose President Donald Trump: The party's recent actions in Missouri foreshadow how they plan on undermining democracy in the upcoming midterm elections.

"It’s only September, and America just barely averted the first constitutional crisis of this year’s midterm elections," The New York Times columnist David French wrote on Sunday. "Hang with me here because this gets a bit complicated. Last September, the Missouri Legislature passed a redistricting bill called H.B. 1. This bill was part of the wave of mid-decade census redistricting initiated after President Trump essentially ordered the state of Texas in July to redistrict to create more Republican-majority congressional districts and diminish Democratic voting power in the state."

French then described how Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, despite being repeatedly ordered by both the US Supreme Court and the Missouri Supreme Court to implement a non-gerrymandered congressional map, was "brazen" in defying those court orders in order to push through a map that would benefit Trump's Republican Party.

"The secretary of state wrote an email directing that the new maps should still be used in November, directly defying the Missouri Supreme Court," French reported. "The court was not amused and immediately scheduled a hearing for Sept. 10 to determine whether to hold Hoskins in contempt of court."

After ultimately and begrudgingly complying with the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling, which the US Supreme Court reinforced, French wrote that Hoskins was found to have "engaged in 'contumacious conduct' (strong words in legalese that mean willfully disobedient or rebellious) — but that he’d 'purged' himself of his contempt through his belated compliance. A fraudulent election was averted, for now."

He concluded, "I wanted to walk through this situation in detail because it’s indicative of exactly how MAGA attempts to fix elections. It uses the complexity of the law (and public ignorance of the law) to obscure the utter brazenness of its defiance."

The Missouri incident is just one of many that indicate Trump is planning on stealing the 2026 midterm elections. Earlier in September, The Washington Post's Patrick Marley and Laura Meckler reported on how Trump is contemplating declaring a national emergency so he can meddle with the results.

"Since Trump returned to office last year, his backers — including Bannon and a lawyer close to Trump — have pressed the president to declare a national emergency that they say would unlock powers for him to rewrite election rules," The Post reported. "The idea resurfaced last month, when Trump appeared on a Real America’s Voice program hosted by Wayne Allyn Root. With election legislation stalled in the Senate, Root pressed Trump to declare an emergency that he said would allow him to limit mail ballots and require people to prove their citizenship to register to vote."

Trump then told Root, "Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.”

"What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet in June. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”

“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña concluded. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”

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