President Donald Trump insisted for months that the only way Republicans could lose in the 2026 midterm elections was if Democrats stole those contests. Now that California's ballots are being counted and Democrats continue to win in that state, Trump is threatening to weaponize the Justice Department against Golden State officials.
"Trump’s posts followed White House Counsel Will Scharf warning Democratic lawmakers — including Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), the likely next chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — that they could face criminal prosecution if they launch the kind of sweeping investigations into Trump and his family that they’ve promised," reported the Los Angeles Times' Kevin Rector on Sunday.
Rector continued, "They also followed recent Justice Department warnings to state and local elections officials across California that they could face criminal prosecution for not setting aside ballots from individuals the administration alleges are noncitizens, and criminal subpoenas demanding some of those same officials appear before a federal grand jury to discuss their handling of the ballot demands."
He went on, "Experts said Trump’s latest flurry of accusations and threats is clearly a reaction to his current political situation — after a monumental reckoning from voters concerned with corruption and ahead of his first real investigative oversight from an adversarial Congress in years. It is a moment of unique vulnerability, they said — the sort that causes strongmen to cast aspersions on opponents and rivals."
Speaking with AlterNet in October, clinical and forensic psychologist Dr. Alan D. Blotcky elaborated on the mental games that Trump plays when he engages in this kind of behavior.
"It ultimately comes back to money and fear, you know," Blotcky explained. "The rich people, the billionaires, the controlling people in these entities have succumbed to him out of fear, and they wanna maintain their financial status, and so they're not gonna buck him because he'll take them to court. He'll file lawsuits against them. He'll stop federal payments. He'll do whatever he can do to damage them, and they're not willing to take the high ground and the morally right ground to deal with him. And so that's part of the capitulation that has gone on in this country."
Dr. Allan Lichtman, a political scientist at American University, talked to AlterNet earlier in November about why Trump's tactics have proved less effective recently.
"People have awakened to the fact that Trump is an authoritarian-inclined president who poses a clear and present danger to the survival of our democracy," Lichtman said. "This is a president who has said, 'I can do anything I want as president,' totally smashing the foundations of our republic, which is a balance of power among the three branches of government, with no single branch able to govern unilaterally."
He continued, "Then the other thing that Americans have become much more aware of, more so than really since the Watergate scandal, although this is a little different, is the amount of graft: how, despite immense conflicts of interest, the president has used his political office to enrich himself and enrich his family."
