Supporters in the audience cheer as US President Donald Trump walks after his address at a rally at Butler High School in Vandalia, Ohio, US, October 3, 2026
President Donald Trump is planning a coup in plain sight as he anticipates devastating losses in the upcoming midterm elections, at least according to a conservative commentator.
"While it might feel to you as though this year’s midterm elections sneaked up on us, a handful of House Democrats have been preparing for this moment for years," reported Joe Petricone of the conservative publication The Bulwark on Tuesday. "One of the upshots of January 6th and the related attempts to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win was that congressional Democrats realized they could no longer count on American elections going smoothly. As a result, there is now significant infrastructure to track and respond to election disputes as they arise. Democrats are just hoping that they’re not missing anything."
After reviewing the efforts taken by Democratic lawmakers to protect the elections against possible efforts by Trump to meddle in the midterms, Perticone detailed one example in which the interference is already occurring.
"While voting is underway in many states, the Trump administration has already started to meddle, filing a lawsuit in the Alaska Senate race arguing that voters might not understand the difference between the two Dan Sullivans," Perticone wrote, referring to a third party candidate in Alaska named Dan Sullivan who happens to share the same name as the incumbent Republican, Sen. Dan Sullivan. "That’s the argument of a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, contending that Alaska should delay the certification of its results in the event that incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses the race to Democratic challenger Mary Peltola by a margin less than or equal to the number of votes received by the other Dan Sullivan."
Perticone continued, "A federal judge fast-tracked the suit, which the DSCC and Peltola campaign supported; it could be dismissed later this week."
He closed with a warning about anti-Trump voters being complacent about the results of the elections.
"While public polling generally indicates Democrats will perform well next week, a blue wave is not a sure thing," Perticone wrote. "Regardless, there are widespread feelings among Dems that major blue victories are imminent, and most Democrats in Congress believe the president and his supporters are reacting to that narrative by preparing to fight to prevent it, however they can, from becoming reality."
Perticone is not alone in fearing that Trump will attempt a coup to avoid losing control of Congress. Speaking to AlterNet earlier in October, Harvard University government professor Dr. Steven Levitsky broke down his concerns.
"I have no doubt that Trump is willing to order some sort of a coup against democracy to try to overturn the elections," Levitsky told AlterNet. "He has shown over and over again that he is not a democrat and is perfectly willing to engage in really old-school authoritarian tactics to overturn elections."
He continued, "We don't know for sure whether he can get away with it. There are some troubling signs. One of them is that we're just completely unprepared for a sort of radical seizure of power in this way. The courts have been pretty good, not great, on Trump's efforts to sort of overstep his bounds on elections, but courts move slowly. And it's just not at all clear, if on election night Trump were to order the seizure of ballot boxes, declare some kind of an emergency, mobilize troops, that courts could move quickly enough to stop it. So at the very least, it would create a massive, massive crisis."
Yet ultimately, Levitsky was reassuring.
"Ultimately, I don't think he's got the power to get away with it," Levitsky told AlterNet. "Unfortunately, we're living in a world where the chances of it happening are well above zero. But looking at, one, Trump's public support and his political power, which is in pretty sharp decline: there's a lot of evidence that the most successful assaults on democracy are carried out by presidents with 70, 80, 85 percent support, whether it's Putin or Chávez or Fujimori or Bukele. All of these guys had 80 percent support. Trump's at 35, 36."
He continued, "And secondly, if you look at the Trump administration's record in planning, orchestrating, carrying out major policy initiatives, from DOGE to the Liberation Day tariffs to the war in Iran, it's just utter, utter incompetence, lack of foresight, lack of coordination, lack of planning. Fraud is hard. Repression is hard. Destroying constitutional rule is hard. If I had to bet a dollar — glad I'm not — I don't think these guys have the capacity to do it."
In June, Pooja Chaudhuri, senior counsel/deputy legal director at Democracy Defenders Fund, told AlterNet that people can be disenfranchised at the local level by being quietly purged and not learning about that fact until it is too late for them to vote.
"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," Chaudhuri told AlterNet.
Dr. Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law professor who worked on voter rights for President Joe Biden, told AlterNet in September "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."
After reviewing statistics which show most Americans trust their local election officials, he contended that "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."