Donald Trump's plan to launch a "coup d'état" against the upcoming midterms is becoming more and more inevitable, according to a new analysis from the New Republic, and while his purported plan can be stopped, time is running out to do so.

In a piece published Friday, The New Republic's editor, Michael Tomasky, said that while early on he struggled to envision what Trump could actually do to try and rig the midterms against Democrats, in light of recent reports, "we’re now beginning to see" what the plan is. Specifically, he cited reports this week that activists close to the White House have been circulating a draft proposal calling for Trump to declare an emergency via executive order and use it to ban mail-in voting and require voter ID, all under the long-debunked pretense that China rigged the 2020 election.

The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election, and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

"The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie," Tomasky wrote, later adding, "But Trump administration officials—including Attorney General Bill Barr — pushed the China lie aggressively. So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures."

Tomasky further noted that this specific effort by Trump would almost certainly be demolished in court, just as his tariff agenda recently was by the Supreme Court. For starters, as Tomasky broke down, the basis for this proposed election security emergency is completely unsubstantiated by any concrete evidence. Secondly, despite what he might claim and his past use of executive orders, he lacks any authority as president to actually impose new rules on elections. Tomasky cited legal expert and Trump critic Norm Eisen, who said that the president has "even less" power over elections.

However, Tomasky warned, lack of authority has never stopped Trump from trying things anyway. The real danger inherent in this emergency plan is that there might not be enough time to stop them before the midterms begin, as the story of Trump's tariff's show.

"Between tariff 'Liberation Day' (April 2, 2025) and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs (February 20, 2026), more than 10 months passed," Tomasky wrote.

There would, therefore, be nothing to stop Trump from trying these executive orders just weeks before Election Day, giving them enough time to derail voting across multiple states. Failing that plan, he could then take even more drastic measures.

"Trump has no power to 'decree' that voters must present ID or to end mail-in balloting," Tomasky explained. "But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both. Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute, he can declare a state of emergency. Then he can decide that said state permits, nay requires, him to take extraordinary measures."

He continued: "On October 5, say, that might mean outlawing early voting. By October 13, it might mean no mail-in voting. By October 29, a reminder that all voters must present ID to vote. And by Sunday, November 1, two days before the election — an announcement that all these 'reasonable' measures have alas failed, and he is now forced, against his will, to postpone the election."

Veteran journalist Jonathan Alter has published a fictitious yet “all-too-plausible” scenario whereby President Donald Trump attempts to overturn the results of the 2026 election — especially in the Senate — which could narrowly move to Democratic control in November. He suggests that it will take two sets of citizens: the general public and former U.S. presidents, among others, to defeat what he sees as the current president’s “slow-motion rolling coup attempt,” which he says is “already underway.”

Writing at Washington Monthly, Alter acknowledges that Democratic control of the House after the November election is likely, while control of the Senate is possible but not the “big blue wave” or “tsunami” he sees in the House.

Calling him a “chaos agent,” Alter explains that Trump’s “fear of impeachment and a Senate trial are making him desperate and more dangerous.”

“It’s easy to miss that a slow-motion rolling coup attempt is already underway, staged by Stephen Miller and, of course, Trump himself,” Alter writes. “When Trump told The New York Times early this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in 2020, that was a clear signal that he will likely try to do so after the midterms.”

Ultimately, Alter predicts in his war-gamed scenario that democracy will prevail but not before a months-long constitutional crisis.

“The resolution of the crisis came after more than two months of efforts by President Trump to overturn the results of the midterm elections with unfounded accusations of vote fraud,” Alter writes, as if it were January 2027. “His efforts sparked mass protests, which gave him a pretext to invoke emergency powers and interfere in elections that, under the U.S. Constitution, are handled by the states.”

Alter points to several critical events when Trump telegraphed his intentions.

January 6, 2026: “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told Republicans on the fifth anniversary of what some have called his coup attempt.

That same month: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good,” Trump told The New York Times.

Also that month, he told Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

Alter also points to two critical documents that presumably could give Trump broad emergency powers.

One, the National Presidential Security Memorandum (NPSM-7) that, Alter writes, “grants the president broad wartime powers to designate Americans as possible terrorists if the federal government considers them or their sponsors ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.'”

The second, Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), “which were developed during the Eisenhower Administration as a single instructional book in case of a nuclear attack on Washington.”

Alter continues his war-gamed scenario: “With Mr. Trump now running a police state, former presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices finally came off the sidelines. On December 22, a hastily-organized Committee on Election Integrity issued an open letter in support of certification of the legitimate winners and filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the president’s use of NPSM-7 and PEAD powers—intended for nuclear war—was unconstitutional in domestic politics.”

Read the entire article here.

CBS News reports sources familiar with the speech that President Donald Trump teased earlier this week claim the president will be accusing China of election tampering.

“Part of President Trump's speech Thursday night is expected to touch on previously unreported alleged Chinese meddling in U.S. elections, according to sources familiar with the matter,” said CNS News. “One component: Allegations that Beijing compromised U.S. voter data and evidence the CIA knew about the action and didn't share that information with Mr. Trump during his first term.”

Earlier, Trump had only mentioned that his speech would focus on election security.

CBS reports the audience for the primetime speech is expected to include “members of the president's cabinet. Among those invited are the heads of CIA, FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security, as well as other agencies and staff,” suggesting the speech might act as marching orders for the federal government to pursue the allegations.

But even though important agency leaders and staff may be present, social media was already lambasting the claim and calling out Trump’s hypocrisy.

“It’s all projection after Russia helped him win in 2016,” said one commenter on X, who echoed many similar comments about Trump focusing only on China because that was the tampering that was intended to help Biden. Russia’s tampering, however unmentioned, advocated for Trump.

“Will he talk about Russia meddling in 2016,” said another.

“OK we've moved on now we're gonna focus on China meddling and elections instead of Russia right?” intoned another X heckler with clear memory of the Kremlin’s advocacy for Trump in 2016.

Other critics wondered on X just what Trump planned to do about China’s alleged tampering if true: “Are we going to kidnap their leader and pirate their natural resources too?”

Other critics, however, including CNN and Fox News legal analyst Jeffrey Evan Gold, said Trump’s impending announcement smelled more like a set-up for U.S. election rigging himself: “The excuse for shamelessly using the Insurrection Act to rig the 2026 election,” said Gold on X.

“Well, it's been a good 250 year run anyway,” Gold added in a later post. “... Trump sowing the seeds for a declaration of emergency in November.”

Trump has been obsessed with his investigation into the 2020 election that he lost, and he has sent staff to dig up proof of wrongdoing despite multiple judges dismissing allegations throughout 2020. Researchers claim Trump himself orchestrated a coup in 2020 by ratcheting up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.

President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the BBC for claiming he incited violence during his Jan. 6th coup attempt — but that gambit may backfire on him.

“Trump filed the $10 billion lawsuit over ‘Trump: A Second Chance,’ a Panorama documentary, after the BBC admitted it ‘gave the mistaken impression that [he] had made a direct call for violent action’ on Jan. 6 by editing together ‘excerpts from different points’ of Trump's speech from the Ellipse out of sequence,” LawandCrime’s Matt Naham reported on Tuesday. Yet the BBC also issued 47 subpoenas to various third parties to discover whether the “Stop the Steal” rally and Jan. 6th attacks were in some manner violent in their conception or execution.

“A hearing on these issues was pushed back to July 21” by U.S. District Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee, according to Naham. “Ahead of that, Trump has lodged his complaints about the BBC's ‘impermissibly broad’ discovery aims and how it will add to the expense of his litigation against the broadcaster.” If Judge Altman accepts the BBC’s filings, the Trump administration could be forced to divulge information they consider sensitive about the events leading up to the 2020-2021 coup attempt.

"Defendants have engaged in excessive and impermissibly broad discovery efforts in such a manner that it distracts from the core issues in dispute in this case," the Trump administration replied in its filings, alleging that the BBC is "attempting to distort the allegations in the Complaint in order to unnecessarily expand the scope of discovery into a sweeping inquiry into January 6th, post-election challenges, government investigations, congressional productions, call logs, calendars, and unrelated litigation, thereby needlessly increasing the cost of litigation."

But the BBC argues that having launched his lawsuit Trump "cannot now prevent Defendants from seeking records that would shed light on his true knowledge, intent, and state of mind in delivering his speech at the Ellipse."

Indeed, far from describing the insurrection as violent, Trump told CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins earlier this month that the Jan. 6ers acted “with love.” He said this to justify creating a $1.8 billion slush fund (which he has since then said is dead) for payouts to individuals who participated in the attempt to overthrow a legitimate election.

“As far as I'm concerned, it was a beautiful thing,” Trump told Collins. “It was something I was — I didn't make it, but I was — I heard that — I thought that was the greatest thing, because people like you have abused our people so badly. The fake news, like CNN, like the New York Times, and like others, have abused our people.”

After telling the other journalists speaking to him to be quiet, Trump said that they “have abused our people so badly, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Then, speaking to Collins, he said: “You. You used to be a conservative. She was a conservative from Alabama — can you believe it? But CNN in particular — CNN does such false reporting. But now they have new ownership, so maybe it'll straighten it out. I doubt it, but it's hard to straighten garbage out.”

The “new ownership” in questions are David and Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle founder and his son, who have reportedly promised to Trump that they will fire CNN journalists he dislikes much as they fired CBS News journalists who Trump opposes. Trump is also reported to have used his power as president to aid the Ellisons in purchasing CNN, despite viable competition from Netflix, in order to help them take over the network and presumably make it into a pro-Trump station.

President Donald Trump did not have access to a slate of documents specifically showing him how to derail democracy when he tried to overthrow elections in 2020 with a fake electors scheme. But now he does, said Trump’s former intelligence analyst Miles Taylor.

“Years ago, I warned that if Donald Trump returned to office, he’d dust off something no American has ever heard of — the presidential ‘Doomsday Book’ — to wield dictator-like powers. Now, he has the book in his hands,” said Taylor, who became a whistleblower in Trump’s first administration after allegations of the administration’s constitutional abuses.

Trump will likely push his bogus claim about the 2020 election being stolen from him in a Thursday address. But Taylor said more worrisome, the president may lay the groundwork to invoke extraordinary emergency powers to interfere with the midterm elections, beyond what he’s already done.

“And most Americans have no idea these powers exist,” said Taylor, who said he sought permission from the DHS in 2023 to speak on the documents. “Somewhere inside the White House complex, hidden in a secure location, sits an instruction manual that almost no one is allowed to see. Officials who know about it call it the ‘Doomsday Book.’ It contains the president’s break-glass options for national emergencies. These are the actions a commander-in-chief might take if, say, Washington, D.C. becomes a smoking crater from a foreign attack, if enemy forces are hunting down American leaders, or if the survival of the republic itself hangs in the balance. Not something you deal with every day.”

Taylor said the formal name for the documents is “deliberately” boring: PEADs, or “presidential emergency action documents.” But the contents are anything but dull. Taylor said declassified records hint at draft orders that would let a president detain “dangerous persons” without trial, censor the press, flip an internet kill switch, commandeer social media, or even ground Americans and stop them from traveling.

Career professionals around that book has worried Trump might abuse the emergency powers is contained, and Taylor said they worked hard to keep Trump toadies away from it to keep them from deftly manufacturing a crisis to justify using it.

“That nightmare nearly came true,” said Taylor, as officials “worked every person” they knew to keep Trump loyalist and OANN personality Christina Bobb off the National Security Council. Bobb went on to become a central player in Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election, said Taylor, proving the value of the book’s security.

“Former NSC staffers believe the coup plot could’ve been dramatically more dangerous if someone like her had known the full extent of the president’s dormant emergency powers, which might have conceivably been twisted to justify seizing all of the ballots that had been cast, stopping Mike Pence from certifying the election, and who knows what else,” said Taylor. “The only thing that saved us? Trump apparently didn’t know what he had.”

That was then, said Taylor. Today, Donald Trump is back in the Oval Office and surrounded by loyalists chosen precisely because they will use war powers to hijack our democracy.

“In other words, the guardrails are gone. The book is in his hands,” said Taylor.

But elections are run by states, Taylor reminded, and if Trump tries to usurp them he will be challenged in the courts, “where Trump has spent the past year getting his a—— kicked.”

Still, Taylor warned he wouldn’t bet the republic on the Trump administration’s “drooling incompetence.”

“No matter what happens, our ultimate backstop must be to make these elections Too Big To Rig,” said Taylor.

President Donald Trump has a plan to steal the midterm elections, argues The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Will Bunch, and he’s “screaming it out loud.”

Bunch writes that “nothing is scarier than when the 47th president speaks the truth about what’s really on his mind. Because the only thing that’s in Trump’s brain right now is stealing the November midterm election, by changing the rules in his favor…or worse.”

It should not have been surprising that Trump called the bipartisan housing bill he is now refusing to sign a “big yawn,” before he embarked on promoting his SAVE America Act legislation, which critics call a voter suppression bill.

Trump has made clear that that bill is his top priority, and has said so repeatedly. He’s even declared that if the SAVE America Act becomes law, Republicans will not lose an election for the next 50 years.

On top of the SAVE America Act are Trump’s executive orders, Bunch notes, which include effectively ordering an end to most mail-in voting.

“That effort suffered a bit of a setback Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can continue to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive after the polls have closed,” writes Bunch. “But that will not stop the Trump regime from politicizing the U.S. Postal Service ahead of November.”

“Last week, Postmaster General David Steiner told Congress that USPS plans to not deliver mail-in ballots in states that don’t turn their voter rolls over to the Trump regime, a demand that many governors have resisted so far.”

Then there is Trump’s use of the Intelligence Community.

“The Trump regime has been signaling for months that it sees the U.S. intelligence community — spy agencies like the CIA — not as a tool for finding out what comes next in the Persian Gulf, or if or when China is invading Taiwan, or when Vladimir Putin’s Russian empire will fall,” says Bunch. “No, Trump wants secret agents who can creatively invent theories of foreign-born election fraud that would demand a strongman response.”

Bunch points to then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s appearance in Fulton County, Georgia, “to oversee an FBI raid of voting materials from the 2020 election that Trump, with no evidence, continues to dispute. That link made clear that the regime is looking to create links to foreign actors.”

Gabbard’s replacement, Bunch notes, is Bill Pulte, who has no requisite experience for the job. Pulte “showed up Monday and immediately began firing current staffers, with a rumored list of hundreds. The steep reduction in eyeballs on the world’s trouble spots is disturbing, but what’s even more alarming is the one person Pulte has hired.”

Bunch points to the newsletter SpyTalk, which describes Pulte’s new chief of staff, Christina Norton, as “a party-loving MAGA activist with no background in national security issues” who previously ran what she called “the largest election integrity operation the Republican Party has ever seen.”

He surmises that Pulte and Norton “will have one job: investigating fantastical ‘foreign election plots’ that will be cited to justify radical measures like sending troops to polling places, seizing voting machines, or worse.”

“Now Trump is not only staging another coup, but he is yelling about it, in your face,” Bunch concludes, writing that there is nothing Trump will not do to prevent Democrats from “investigating how he and his family have made billions of dollars off the American presidency.”

President Donald Trump’s policies and public relations approach are in large part shaped by a journalist who has long had a reputation for being unreliable.

“Solomon’s decades-old reputation for letting down his audience is starting to reach conservatives,” wrote The Bulwark’s Will Sommer on Thursday, referring to right-wing influencer John Solomon. “Popular conspiracy theory blog Conservative Treehouse has grown skeptical of Solomon’s promises, even adding a bolded warning label of sorts to a preview of Trump’s Thursday speech so readers wouldn’t get too excited.”

Sommer quoted a popular conspiracy theory blog, Conservative Treehouse, which warned readers about Solomon by saying “caution should be noted as newly appointed Special Government Employee John Solomon is responsible for the content.”

Similarly an anchor from MyPillow founder and right-wing conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell’s channel, Emerald Robinson, expressed skepticism about Solomon’s record.

“LOL why would anybody trust John Solomon based on his record?” Robinson posted on the social media platform X.

Sommer noted wryly, “When you’ve lost Lindell’s crew…”

In advance of Trump’s speech, Sommer cited reporting that indicated Solomon was likely a major influence on Trump’s rhetoric and approach.

“Whatever Trump does, it’ll be because of John Solomon—a star conservative reporter who is, somehow, also a White House staffer,” Sommer wrote. “For nearly a decade, Solomon has had a hand in the creation of nearly every major MAGA grievance narrative, from the Russia investigation to Ukraine to 2020 election fraud.”

He added, “Solomon has a pretty clear M.O.: He’ll spin a story that seems like a massive exposé, getting it trumpeted on Fox News and throughout the right-wing media ecosystem before it has a chance to deflate under scrutiny, as it usually does.”

While working on a short-term basis for the Trump White House, Sommer described Solomon as a man who tries to help Trump find information about the president’s perceived political enemies and his upcoming attempt to delegitimize the 2026 midterm elections.

“Yet this narrative impresario and his brand of quasi-journalism remain largely unknown outside the world of right-wing media,” said Sommer who covers MAGA-related news in addition to other topics for Bulwark. “In 2007, when Solomon was an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review was already complaining that his stories amounted to the ‘John Solomon special’: front-page revelations that, when scrutinized, turned out to be little more than a ‘steady stream of mediocrity.’”

Sommer wrote, “Now, thanks to his role in the Trump administration, Solomon has a chance to work that magic on a much larger scale.”

Among Solomon’s various controversies, last year he hosted a phone interview with Trump in which he agreed as the president spread misinformation about the investigation into his ties with Russia, his coup attempt after losing the 2020 election and his baseless allegations of Chinese interference in American elections. Back in 2019, he spread debunked conspiracy theories that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election, coming under heavy criticism from the company which published those pieces, The Hill, which promptly investigated all of his work on Ukraine.

Then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), a staunch Trump supporter, ran interference for Solomon at the time.

“‘The Hill’ told its staff yesterday that it would conduct a review of Solomon’s Ukraine reporting — and this is just three days after a Democrat on this committee told a Hill writer that she would stop speaking to The Hill because it had run Solomon’s stories,” Nunes said. “And she urged the writer to relay her concerns to The Hill’s management. So now that Solomon’s reporting is a problem for the Democrats, it is a problem for the media as well!”