The hidden architecture: Inside Trump's plan to reshape the midterms

On Thursday, the Trump regime forced out the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission — effectively ending it.

You need to see this as part of Trump’s overall strategy to take over the midterm elections some 90 days from now. The strategy has six parts:

1. Eliminate neutral watchdogs

The small Election Assistance Commission was focused on the unglamorous but important work of election administration — helping states with testing and certification of voting systems, serving as a national clearinghouse for information on how best to administer elections, and maintaining the national mail voter registration form established by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

It had been created by Congress in 2002 after the Florida recount marred the 2000 presidential election and effectively pushed it into the Supreme Court to decide. In 2016, after Russia’s election interference, the commission targeted cybersecurity, supporting states as they reviewed and improved safeguards on their voting machines.

Trump has also overseen major cuts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, also intended to review and improve safeguards on voting machines. The cybersecurity agency has not had a Senate-confirmed director since Trump returned to the White House.

The two major points of nonpartisan help for state and local elections officials — the Election Assistance Commission and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — are now effectively gone.

The Trump regime says it had the right to fire the commissioners, under the Supreme Court’s recent Slaughter decision (the name fits), which gave a president the authority to fire commissioners from what had been independent regulatory agencies. But the high court did not authorize Trump to eliminate an entire agency wholesale.

2. Eliminate all constraints on big money

On June 30, the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court in NRSC v. FEC ruled against any spending limits on coordinated party expenditures. That means political parties can now spend unlimited money in direct coordination with their candidates. A donor who could give a candidate $7,000 directly can now route a million dollars or more through the party to cover that same candidate’s bills, and the candidate can solicit exactly it.

The case was filed in 2022 by JD Vance. Although those spending limits were contained in an act of Congress, the Trump regime’s Justice Department refused to defend it when it reached the court. (I used to argue Supreme Court cases before the Supreme Court, and I’m hard-pressed to think of another case in which an administration has refused to defend an act of Congress before the Supreme Court.)

3. Intimidate voters

Make no mistake: ICE is intended to intimidate potential voters who have every right to vote. ICE is now arresting an average of 2,000 people a day — twice its rate just a year ago — and has three times the resources it had then. Some 70,000 people are now in detention centers.

Some of them are American citizens.

The Justice Department is also prosecuting Americans who have protested against ICE. Eight were convicted on domestic terrorism charges following an incident last year in which a police officer was shot during an anti-ICE protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas. A ninth defendant in that case, Ines Soto, was recently sentenced to 50 years in prison for “providing material support to terrorists” because he had transported political pamphlets in his car.

Fifteen Minnesota protesters pled not guilty last week to conspiracy charges stemming from protests in January. Activist and healthcare worker Isaac Sant, one of the accused, said the trial was “a naked attempt to silence our voices, to squash dissent and to have a chilling effect on organizing here in the Twin Cities,” which, he noted, “is not going to work.”

ICE recently shot dead Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Earlier this year, it murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good. None of these murders is being investigated by the FBI or the Justice Department.

All of this has been dressed up as immigration policy, but it has a much baser motive: to normalize the presence of federal forces deployed against civilians in Democratic cities, in preparation for federal troops monitoring polls in these cities. These will inevitably be followed by fraud investigations if, as expected, these cities nonetheless vote for Democratic candidates.

4. Investigate and arrest alleged leftist “terrorists”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invited senior ministers from more than 60 countries to a meeting next week about what the Trump administration views as a major peril: the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism.”

The administration’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, has had discussions with colleagues about using foreign terrorism labels for antifa to justify going after Americans with links to the movement, a loosely knit association of far-left activists who militantly oppose fascism and right-wing ideologies, three current and former U.S. officials said.

A linkage to foreign terrorist groups “can unlock certain investigative tools,” such as surveillance, one U.S. counterterrorism official told TheWashington Post.

5. Make it harder to vote and control how ballots are counted

Trump’s Justice Department has already demanded voter rolls from secretaries of state. Trump is demanding that Republicans in Congress enact his so-called “SAVE America” act, which would impose strict ID requirements — including showing passports or birth certificates — in order to vote. And his Department of Homeland Security has warned state election officials they can face criminal penalties if non-citizens are permitted to vote.

So far, district courts have struck down Trump’s demands for voter rolls, and Republicans in Congress have resisted his demands for the so-called SAVE Act.

6. Cast doubt on the outcome of the midterms

Trump will use every opportunity over the next 90 days to claim that Democrats are cheating — as he did in early June when claiming on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” that the California primary elections were rigged and that NBC correspondent Kristen Welker and her network were “playing right into their hands” by questioning him about the basis for his claims that elections were “crooked” in Democratic states.

He wants to cast doubt on the outcome of the midterms and impose control over how ballots are counted, so that after Democrats win the House and possibly the Senate, Trump will demand recounts or audits.

What you can do, now:

1. Join with local get-out-the-vote groups to make sure everyone who’s legally entitled to register to vote in your city or county is registered.

2. Before Election Day on November 3, join with local get-out-the-vote groups to literally get out the vote. Give people rides to voting places, if they need them. Make sure they know where to vote. Help them get whatever voting information they need.

3. If you become aware of any irregularities — any attempts to discourage or intimidate people who are entitled to vote from voting — alert the offices of your state attorney general and secretary of state.

4. Make sure your city, county, or state Democratic organization has lawyers ready and willing to litigate illegal efforts to obstruct the vote. Every county election office should know which state officials to call and, if necessary, file an emergency complaint.

5. Finally, let me also quote Rick Wilson, who for many years was a Republican operative:

“For the love of God, stop trying to shame the Republican Party into decency. I watched this party from the inside for thirty years. There is no bottom, there is no invisible line of conscience, and there is no cavalry of Serious Republicans waiting for permission to do the right thing. The ones with even marginally functioning consciences already left.
What remains is an apparatus that responds to exactly two stimuli: power and fear of losing it. Every hour spent crafting the perfect appeal to their better angels is an hour donated to the opposition. They are not going to be shamed. They can only be beaten.
Here’s the strategic core, and it’s the oldest rule in the book: cheating operations work on the margins. They flip close races. They exploit recounts, certification fights, faithless officials, and friendly courts. What they cannot do, what no operation in American history has ever managed to do, is steal a landslide.
A three-point race in Wisconsin can be litigated, delayed, “investigated,” and strangled in a certification meeting. An eight-point race cannot. The math of the steal collapses when the margin exceeds the degree of MAGA -------. …
You have the numbers. You have the law. And you have about ninety days.”

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/