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."

President Donald Trump knows that recent history, older history and current polling all point to Republicans sustaining massive losses to Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. After Virginia Democrats successfully pushed through a referendum on Tuesday to gerrymander the state to their advantage, Trump publicly revealed his strategy for coping with this — election denial.

“Writing on Truth Social, Trump on Wednesday claimed a ‘RIGGED ELECTION’ had taken place in Virginia despite there being absolutely no evidence of any irregularities or fraud in the conduct of the plebiscite the previous evening in which 1,575,288 voters cast ballots in favor of a constitutional amendment which permits the implementation of new districts drawn by Virginia’s Democratic-led General Assembly, bypassing an independent, bipartisan commission which has drawn district lines since 2020,” wrote The Independent's Andrew Feinberg on Wednesday.

He added that the measure, which voters approved by a three-point margin without any reports of irregularities, passed by levels similar to those at which Trump lost Virginia to Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

“Trump also groused about the ballot measure’s language, calling it ‘purposefully unintelligible and deceptive,’” Feinberg reported. “‘As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they!’ he said.”

Conservative historian Robert Kagan, who has written extensively about military history, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in February that he believes Trump plans on rigging the midterm elections so he cannot lose.

“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan told Amanpour. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”

Trump has a long history of denying elections when he loses them, such as the 2016 Republican Iowa caucuses, the 2016 presidential popular vote and the 2020 presidential election against Vice President Joe Biden. All of this Trump’s claims have been thoroughly analyzed by impartial experts and found baseless, especially about the 2020 election (since Trump used his loss to Biden as the basis for a coup attempt).

In the 2022 report “Lost, Not Stolen,” eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists) studied all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. As right-wing columnist George F. Will later explained in The Washington Post, “Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

President Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2026 midterm elections is in trouble, at least if the most relevant election results are to be believed.

“After Democrats snagged a likely House seat in Salt Lake City County, Utah, in February, the GOP was furious,” The New Republic’s Finn Hartnett reported on Thursday. “Republicans control all four House districts in Utah, and despite about 40 percent of residents voting Democrat in 2024, they considered losing even one unacceptable.”

Then when Republicans tried to use a local referendum to overturn the gerrymandered district, it “flopped,” although the results were close, Hartnett added. Despite spending $4.35 million on “professional signature gathering” and exceeding the 141,000-signature threshold by almost 30,000, “the petition also needed at least 8 percent of signatures in 26 out of Utah’s 29 state Senate districts, to show that voters across the state wanted the issue brought to the ballot. It was here that Republicans failed. After a nonprofit backing the new maps, Better Boundaries, convinced about 7,000 voters to remove their names from the petition, it fell just short of the 26-district threshold.”

In addition to boding poorly for Utah Republicans, the failure also has ominous implications for Trump overall.

“Since 2025, Republicans have redistricted in an attempt to add seats in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri,” Hartnett explained. “Dems have countered through redistricting in California and now, officially, in Utah. Trump may add an extra layer of complication to the midterms by suppressing the vote before them and attempting to overturn the results if his party loses.”

Hartnett concluded, “We can only hope the public’s general lack of support for the Trump administration will be strong enough that Democrats can pull through.”

Veteran journalist and author Michael Wolff also argued during a Wednesday episode of his podcast for The Daily Beast that Trump is intentionally sowing misinformation about the election and trying to pass unnecessarily restrictive legislation because he knows that it will help him discredit any results that do not work to his advantage.

“It’s just what is to his advantage is just the narrative that the election system in the United States is broken,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. “And chaos is to his advantage, and to create a bubble of uncertainty and controversy around that, no matter what happens, reverts to his advantage.”

Wolff continued: "Let’s assume this [bill] is not going to pass. So why is he doing this? The reason he is doing this is to set up and to continue the narrative when he loses the midterms. This then becomes the reason he lost the midterms, and he lost the midterms illegitimately… we’ve set up the enemy here."

Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him has been definitively discredited. A conservative think tank called The Heritage Foundation tracked election fraud cases for more than two decades and found a rate of 0.0000845 percent, with no cases of ballot fraud ever changing a result. Similarly a 2022 report by eight conservatives — including two former Republican senators, a former Republican solicitor general, three former federal appellate judges and two Republican election law specialists — examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed by Trump and his supporters during their 2020-2021 coup attempt. He only succeeded in .016 percent of those cases.

President Donald Trump wants to ban mail-in balloting, and MS NOW analyst Jordan Rubin is concerned that the Supreme Court is prepared to help him do it, even if that means “injecting needless chaos” into American elections.

“The Supreme Court may be on the verge of injecting needless chaos and uncertainty into the midterm elections and beyond,” Rubin wrote for MS NOW. “That possibility was on display Monday, when the court heard a GOP-backed challenge to counting mail ballots that come in after Election Day, even if they’re postmarked by Election Day.”

Describing the efforts of Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart to fight Trump’s mail-in ballots policy, Rubin wrote that some of the judges instead seem to “endorse” Trump’s position “to disqualify later-arriving ballots.”

“There’d be no reason for those parties to advance that position if they thought it would hurt Republicans’ electoral prospects,” Rubin wrote. “President Donald Trump has railed against mail ballots. He has also made unproven voter fraud claims a centerpiece of his elections stance. That dynamic was at play at Monday’s hearing, during which Stewart noted that the federal government has ‘sounded the antifraud theme’ but still could not show ‘a single example of fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipt in this century.’”

Rubin noted that the more pro-Trump judges clamored for mail-in voting bans.

“Justice Samuel Alito, who sounded likely to side with the Republicans, seemed receptive to the ‘fraud’ narrative, as he cited arguments that ‘confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome’ of an election ‘is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash’ of ballots,” Rubin wrote. “Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked about fraud, too, wondering, ‘Is that a real concern? Is that something we should be thinking about? Confidence in the election process?’

Ultimately Rubin predicted that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett will be the “pivotal votes in the relative center of the dispute.” Rubin’s nervous take was shared by Slate legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern, who argued that there have been “some very disturbing questions from the Republican-appointed justices in today's Supreme Court arguments — definitely several votes to strike down laws in 30 states which count mail ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day, as long as they're cast by Election Day. Not what I was hoping to hear."

He added, "Alito strongly implied that vote-by-mail, as practiced in most of the country today, is highly susceptible to fraud. [Neil] Gorsuch and [Clarence] Thomas leaned in that direction as well. [Amy Coney] Barrett and [Chief Justice John] Roberts are harder to read.” By contrast, Politico’s Josh Gerstein predicted that the Supreme Court seems “likely to deliver a defeat to Trump and rule states can count ballots received after Election Day, with Roberts, Barrett and maybe Kavanaugh joining the liberals.”

Trump has a long history of refusing to accept defeat when he loses at something. He accused the Emmy Awards of being rigged when he was not recognized for his reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” During the 2016 presidential election he falsely claimed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) stole the Iowa caucuses from him, and then declared he would only accept the result of the general election if he won. Despite winning in the Electoral College, Trump received fewer popular votes than Clinton, and so falsely blamed millions of illegal ballots. He created a voter fraud commission to find evidence of tampering but never produced any proof.

During the 2020 election, Trump preemptively attacked mail-in voting, declared victory despite losing and inaccurately claimed votes were being "dumped" on him. Biden won that election in both the popular and electoral vote, and in response Trump attempted a coup on January 6, 2021. Despite continuing to claim that the election was stolen, Republican columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post that Trump has had many days in court, and they all prove him to be stating untruths.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will said. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

President Donald Trump’s reaction to the death last week of former special counsel Robert Mueller was more than just cruel; it foreshadows how republics fail.

That’s the take of Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist who advised President George W. Bush. In a Monday Substack post, Schmidt responded to Trump’s social media post celebrating Mueller’s passing.

“Robert Mueller just died,” Trump wrote. “Good, I'm glad he's dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Describing Mueller as “a man who embodied a life of service, discipline, and duty to country,” Schmidt denounced Trump for his cruelty and Trump supporters like Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent for insisting on empathy for the president rather than Mueller’s loved ones.

“We are told that the appropriate response to a president celebrating his death is not condemnation, not shame, not even silence, but empathy for the family of the man doing the celebrating,” Schmidt wrote. “Let that sink in.” From the ex-top aide’s point of view, this coarsening of America’s character speaks ominously about the health of American democracy.

“This is how republics fail,” Schdmit argued. “It doesn’t happen in a single moment of catastrophe, but in a thousand small surrenders. In each instance where truth is bent. In each defense of the indefensible. In each shrug where there should be outrage.”

This is not the first time that Schmidt, who was a lifelong Republican until the party’s far right turn, has scathingly critiqued Trump and his administration. Earlier in March, he cited Trump’s refusal to accept his loss in the 2020 election and subsequent coup attempt as further examples of the “devolution” of American democracy.

“A mob, inflamed by a sitting president, attacked the seat of American democracy to overturn a free and fair election. And what did the party do? In large measure, it rationalized, minimized, or outright defended it,” Schmidt wrote. “That is the devolution.” Instead of standing for the expansion of freedom, Republicanism under Trump is defined by the “language of victimhood” and supporters’ “willingness to believe anything — so long as it serves the cause.”

Schmidt has also written with alarm about Trump’s warmongering, locating his attacks on Venezuela and Iran in the president’s personal character flaws rather than any coherent ideology.

“He wanted the Peace Prize, and when he couldn’t get it, Trump lost his mind,” Schmidt wrote. Quoting a letter Trump wrote to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre which hinted that he was no longer interested in peace because he was denied the prize, Schmidt concluded that “no man of violence and venom can resist the siren song of modern warfare, which, after all, is just a game” to people like Trump who do not understand the grave seriousness of war.

President Donald Trump and his administration are pushing AI, and according to a recent report by The Nation, this is part of a larger and insidious phenomenon — political action committees (PACs) devoted to inserting AI everywhere in our lives.

“The AI lobby has burst onto the scene in this cycle by spending millions of dollars in primaries,” Usamah Andrabi wrote on Tuesday. “And like AIPAC [the pro-Israel lobby], it is largely doing so by using opaquely named super PACs and flooding the airwaves with ads that don’t mention AI at all.”

Andrabi proceeded to list the super PACs doing this including “AI corporations like OpenAI (Leading the Future, Think Big, and American Mission PAC), Meta (Forge the Future Project, Making Our Tomorrow, American Technology Excellence Project, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across California), and Anthropic (Jobs and Democracy PAC and Defending Our Values PAC).” Andrabi then explained how, like super PACs before them, these organizations are donating generously to viable candidates so that they will oppose broadly popular policies that might hurt their industries.

“No matter what votes they take or tweets they post, any candidate backed by AI super PACs is complicit in Trump’s warmongering and the facilitation of US imperialism abroad,” Andrabi pointed out. “Despite media narratives praising Anthropic for standing up to the Trump administration, Trump used Anthropic’s Claude model to plan and conduct 1,000 strikes on Iran—including the elementary school bombing that killed over 100 children. Before that, Claude was used to help the Trump administration kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and conduct a military coup in the country. In the midst of all that ‘fighting with the Pentagon,’ Anthropic even dropped its flagship safety policy that it said differentiated it from companies like OpenAI.”

Andrabi added, “At home, AI corporations are trying to evade responsibility for the harm their data centers cause to communities across the country. Research clearly shows that AI data centers raise utility rates for the areas they’re in through their massive consumption of electrical power. They also use inordinate amounts of water to cool their computers, threatening access to water and raising bills, while poisoning the air with toxic pollutants.”

Because municipalities and states have successfully organized to prevent proposed data centers and impose various regulations, AI companies aim to thwart the democratic process through lobbying.

“AI is not only not going away but is doubling down on strategies that AIPAC and Crypto have spearheaded in our election,” Andrabi concluded. “So be warned: The AI PACs are here, and they are a threat to us all. The hydra has grown another head. We must organize accordingly.”

Andrabi’s warnings were echoed earlier this month by Mackenzie Arnold, Director of U.S. Policy at Law AI, who posted a spirited defense of some of these regulations earlier in March.

“Let’s be real,” posted Arnold. “Most of these state laws do not threaten our national security or our path to innovation. And trying to beat back all laws that touch ‘AI development’ seems like the wrong category, one that confuses more than it helps, and one that doesn’t really overlap with the state laws of greatest concern.”

Even one of Trump’s senatorial allies shared his concern.

“We’ve got to figure out how to do this in a way that addresses the concerns that a lot of our members have about not trampling state’s rights in the process,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said in March. “We’re just trying to figure out how to thread that needle.”

President Donald Trump is failing both with managing the American economy and prosecuting his war against Iran — and a top political strategist, one who advised the previous Republican president, characterized the current situation as that of a “lost war led by a fool.”

“The economy is in free fall — it's in a state of collapse,” Steve Schmidt, who advised President George W. Bush but is critical of Trump, posted on X on Tuesday. “There are fuel shortages all over the world, and diesel is $7 a gallon. In California, there will be food shortages because fertilizer can't make it through the Strait of Hormuz, and neither can hydrogen or helium, or dozens of other precursor agents that are necessary to sustain the global economy.”

He concluded, “This is a lost war led by a fool.”

Schmidt is an outspoken critic of Trump, frequently describing him as far to the right of the Republican Party that Schmidt worked for during the Bush administration. Earlier in April he described the US under Trump as “an age of epic cowardice of selfishness of greed,” and he called the president and his associates “despicable, villainous people, and I think the High Court of History is going to judge them very, very harshly.”

He also has turned to religious language to explain his criticisms of Trump. In March Schmidt argued that even a supposedly moderate member of Trump’s cabinet, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, had displayed a “rotten” character by attending a summit with one of the insurrectionists who helped Trump attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“Things are rotten in America,” Schmidt argued. “The president is rotten, and so is his villainous Cabinet.” Describing Enrique Tarrio as a “Proud Boy terrorist” because of his conviction for conspiracy for his role in Trump’s attempted coup, Schmidt cited this as an example of the “sickening picture — an MRI — that exposes the rot of Rubio’s character” and epitomized the rot in the overall administration.

“The scripture-quoting hypocrite is directly, personally and morally responsible for the destruction of American aid programs that will cause the deaths of 14 million human beings by 2030 before the bell tolls at the end of these rotten years,” Schmidt wrote at the time. Similarly his Tuesday video underscored the administration’s religious hypocrisy with a clip of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth using the Bible to vilify journalists who criticize the Iran war.

“Our press are just like these Pharisees — not all of you, but the legacy, Trump-hating press,” Hegseth said in the Tuesday clip. “You're politically motivated. [Your] animus for President Trump nearly completely blinds you from the brilliance of our American warriors.”

Earlier in April, Schmidt expressed dismay for the overall tendency of the Trump administration to talk like a theocracy rather than a democracy.

President Donald Trump supporters have stood by him despite his documented abuses of power, rhetorically violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election and numerous alleged instances of sexual misconduct. To those outside the so-called Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, this is mystifying — yet a recent study reveals the surprising reason why.

Three studies conducted between 2019 and 2022 examined hundreds of Trump supporters to establish how they reconcile negative information about him with their positive impressions, according to a recent analysis published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. The first found that a majority of 128 Trump supporters refused to believe sexual misconduct accusations against him and praised his handling of the economy, supposed competence, abnormal communication style and perceived outsider status; roughly a third said that they were so happy with his policies that they could disregard his personal behavior, while another third implied they were indifferent as to his potential guilt because they are cynical about elites like Trump.

The other two studies reinforced the trends in the original. One included 173 participants and the other included 187 participants, and both were taken after Trump-related legal hearings: His first impeachment, over an attempt to coerce Ukraine into discrediting then-Vice President Joe Biden, and his arraignment after the January 6th coup attempt. On the first occasion, Trump supporters again refused to accept evidence that the president attempted to force Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy to obtain anti-Biden dirt in return for military aid; they similarly praised Trump’s handling of economic issues, although 15 percent admitted they did not care even if Trump had coerced Ukraine. On the second occasion, a majority (60 percent) simply refused to accept that Trump had tried to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, although researchers noted participants did this with great emotion and while indicating distress at the accusations, suggesting they were motivated by a psychological reaction to unpleasant information rather than a calm dismissal of facts.

All of the studies found that Trump supporters use disbelief, compartmentalization and false equivalence — to resolve the mental tension between their positive views and negative reports about Trump. They also turn to their economic self-interest as a rationalization for ignoring conduct they might otherwise publicly deplore.

“I was motivated by real-life experiences. I’ve been puzzled and confused by the continuing support and admiration that Donald Trump’s supporters hold for him, despite the many accusations that he has engaged in sexual assault, corruption, and other immoral and illegal activities. I wanted to give those supporters a chance to explain in their own words why they support him,” study author Cindy Harmon-Jones, a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at Western Sydney University, told PsyPost’s Eric W. Dolan in an interview about her study.

“I also wanted to take a cognitive dissonance perspective to understanding their answers. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that when people hold beliefs that are in conflict, meaning that both ideas cannot be true at once, they feel uncomfortable. This discomfort motivates them to do cognitive work to bring their beliefs closer in alignment. I was interested in how people justify their support for Trump when reminded of the accusations against him.”

She also noted that (a) the studies reinforce the notion that Trump supporters engage in cognitive dissonance and (b) it is unclear whether this trend applies only to Trump or to other popular presidents.

“Some people might think that these findings aren’t due to dissonance and that the participants simply did not believe the information,” Harmon-Jones told Dolan. “However, in Study 3 was asked people whether the information about the accusations of Trump’s misconduct conflicted with their beliefs and if so, how bothered were they by the information. The more bothered they said they were, the more likely they were to say they didn’t believe the accusations. We interpreted this to mean that those participants were experiencing dissonance and not just coolly disbelieving the information.”

Harmon-Jones also told Dolan that “our findings only apply to supporters of Donald Trump. However, we don’t know whether this is the case. Would supporters of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton react similarly if they learned of similar accusations against them? That remains to be tested.”

Scientific research also finds another motive for Trump supporters to back him: Because when he is perceived as “winning,” they feel good. Earlier this month a study by researchers Deborah J. Wu, Kyle F. Law, Stylianos Syropoulos, and Sylvia P. Perry in the journal Advances in Psychology found that mental wellness corresponds closely to believing the government shares your values.

"Across all five weekly waves (Feb–Mar 2025), Republicans reported higher life satisfaction and happiness than Democrats,” the authors explained. Specifically they noted that "Republicans increased in well-being over time, whereas Democrats showed both linear and quadratic change, as initial decreases in well-being were followed by increases in well-being."

This means that ultimately "alignment with government actions may provide short-term psychological comfort, while opposition—though vital for democratic resilience—may carry psychological costs." Hence after Trump’s second inauguration “at all timepoints, Republicans reported greater life satisfaction over the past week, in comparison to Democrats.”