Inside Trump’s schemes to corrupt the midterms

With the 2026 midterms a little over four months away and President Donald Trump continuing to suffer from weak approval ratings in poll after poll, Democratic strategists are feeling cautiously optimistic about their ability to recapture the U.S. House of Representatives — and they believe the U.S. Senate is in play for them as well. But according to the New York Times, Trump has a variety of schemes designed to shield Republicans from major losses in November.

Trump, journalists Karen Yourish, Nick Corasaniti and Charlie Smart report in the Times, "is trying to use the levers of the federal government, along with personal influence over state and local lawmakers, to reshape the rules governing the 2026 midterms and future elections in extraordinary ways."

"Many of these efforts have been blocked by courts, stymied by the Constitution or stopped in Congress," the reporters explain. "But the relentless assault by the president on the electoral process — both administratively and rhetorically — is likely to sow doubt and lay groundwork for extensive challenges to election results. Agencies and officials across the federal government have, at the direction of Mr. Trump, undertaken dozens of actions grounded in novel strategies and aimed at insulating Republicans from potential losses in November. Those actions fall into six major categories, and some fall into more than one."

Those six categories, according to Yourish, Corasaniti and Smart, are: (1) "taking steps to nationalize elections," (2) "trying to tighten voting restrictions," (3) "pushing for mid-decade redistricting," (4) "cutting election security," (5) "undermining faith in the electoral system by questioning previous results," and (6) "punishing those who have worked against election denialism."

Trump, the Times reporters note, has "installed" a long list of "election deniers" in the federal government — including Jeanine Pirro, Harmeet K. Dhillon and FBI Director Kash Patel at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Patrick Weaver at the Defense Department, and Heather Honey and Secretary Markwayne Mullin at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

"While Mr. Trump's attempts to use executive orders to change elections have been largely blocked by courts," Yourish, Corasaniti and Smart explain, "the president and his allies have found other avenues to add new restrictions to voting that are designed to help them win at the ballot box. Soon after Mr. Trump took office, the Justice Department dropped or halted all of its open voting rights lawsuits that preceded Mr. Trump's inauguration, easing the path for partisan gerrymanders and voting laws to withstand legal scrutiny. That included dropping a lawsuit against a voting law in Georgia. The number of lawyers working in the voting-rights arm of the Justice Department, one of the government's critical bulwarks against civil rights abuses in voting and elections, has dwindled from about 30 at the end of the Biden administration to the single digits after resignations, cuts and reassignments."