Search results for "Trump Election Coup"

'Antidemocratic plot afoot': Presidential historian exposes Trump’s 'slow-moving coup'

In recent months, experts have pointed to various warning signs that President Donald Trump is engaged in a “slow-moving coup” as he attempts to maintain his grip on power. On Monday, with the highly consequential midterms less than 100 days away, a leading presidential historian took to Vanity Fair to assert there is an “antidemocratic plot afoot,” and to explain Trump’s “authoritarian formula.”

According to lawyer and presidential historian James Robenalt, “There's a radical, antidemocratic plot afoot, cooked up at the highest levels of the Trump executive branch — drawing in the Department of Justice, the leadership of the intelligence community, and possibly even the Pentagon — to tilt November’s midterm elections to Republican candidates, so as to ensure that the president’s party retains control of the House and Senate." As Robenalt explains, the plot is revealed by Trump’s effort to federalize elections, which the Constitution very clearly states are to be overseen by states. Trump has attempted to assert federal control via executive order, but has been “consistently” and “easily” rebuked by the courts, as the Constitution allows only Congress to override state mandates.

“Trump’s defeats in court help explain his fixation on the so-called SAVE America Act, short for ‘Safeguard American Voter Eligibility,’” writes Robenalt. “The president has even admitted, however grudgingly, that only Congress can create new election standards. The proposed bill, already considered by a somewhat skeptical House, and even more wary Senate, fuses two of Trump’s favorite obsessions: illegal immigration and voter fraud. Illegal immigration helped carry him to victory in 2016; alleged rigged elections powered some of his political messaging in 2024.”

“If enacted, the SAVE America bill would make states demand documentary proof of citizenship — passports, birth certificates and the like — before voters could register or update their registration, and would require the corresponding paperwork to be presented in person to a local board,” but according to Robenalt, repeated pushback from both sides of the aisle suggests that Congress won’t pass the bill. “Here, then, is where the story turns thorny,” he writes. “If Congress chooses not to support initiatives to curb certain types of voting or certain types of voters, Trump and his surrogates have other options.”

“First off,” he explains, “they have been using what many observers consider an authoritarian formula to attack democracy itself: attempting, through public pronouncements and a flurry of activities, to slowly and steadily degrade voters’ confidence in election integrity; raise the specter of criminal indictments of enemies; increase the rhetoric against ‘violent left-wing extremists’ and ‘communists’; and take endless swipes at the free press.”

“Secondly,” Robenalt continues, “the administration’s recent moves fit a pattern. Remove election guardians and guardrails. Weaken intelligence channels that might deter foreign interference. Use strong-arm tactics, such as the confiscation of old ballots, to intimidate officials and possibly serve as a dress rehearsal for federal muscle-flexing in future elections. Threaten prison time for those who refuse to comply. Announce to America’s adversaries that US elections are vulnerable, thereby inviting the very interference the administration decries. Then, theoretically, use that alleged foreign interference as a pretext to cancel elections, invoke the Insurrection Act, or send troops or ICE agents to the polls.”

“It could all play out,” warns Robenalt, “as several pundits have remarked, very much as Hemingway famously described bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. Some catalytic event — a Reichstag Fire analogue, or another January 6, or a bogus declassification purporting to show foreign hackers changing votes — could be used to manufacture a phony rationale for emergency action.”

As journalist Jonathan Alter pointed out, “Trump never made any secret of his intentions, explaining to Republicans in January of 2026 on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, ‘You’ve gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me.’” According to Robenalt, “The president has shown, time and again, that he will go to unprecedented lengths so as not to relinquish power,” and Americans must not take for granted that he will give up without a fight.

“Those who cherish democracy must stay alert,” Robenalt concludes. “Vigilance remains the first defense. But the essential act is simpler still: vote. Vote early, if you can, because early voting makes election-day obstruction that much harder to pull off.”

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Alarming analysis details just how Trump’s midterms coup could go down

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."

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Trump admin escalates its war on young voters

President Donald Trump's administration is now aiming to make the voting process harder for college-age young adults ahead of November's midterm elections.

That's according to a Monday op-ed by MS NOW's Ja'han Jones, who wrote that the Trump administration's Department of Education may be exploring a way to curb young voter turnout with a newly announced investigation into Tufts University. The Education Department announced its new probe in a recent press release, saying the Boston, Massachusetts-based school may have been "illegally sharing college students’ data with third parties to influence elections."

The investigation is centered on Tufts' National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE). Tufts describes the NSLVE as "a service to over 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities that can use it to understand and improve their student voting rates." However, the Trump administration is saying the program could have potentially violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

"American colleges and universities should be focused on teaching, learning, and research — not influencing elections," Education Secretary Linda McMahon stated. "The Biden Administration, with little to no regard for student privacy laws, openly encouraged institutions to share and utilize student data in order to target certain populations."

Jones pointed out that the Trump administration's claims are false on their face, as Tufts' program uses publicly available data to conduct its research while maintaining students' confidentiality according to its website. Jones instead asserted that this probe was "little more than yet another gambit to prevent young voters from mobilizing and acting on their potential political power" ahead of what is shaping up to be a Democratic wave election in November.

As the MS NOW columnist wrote, Trump ally Cleta Mitchell — who represented Trump's 2020 campaign and frequently made baseless allegations of election fraud in swing states Trump lost — gave a presentation to Republican donors in 2023 warning about the "young people effort" to vote. Mitchell warned that polling places were too close to college dormitories, allowing students to "roll out of bed, vote and go back to bed."

The investigation comes not long after the Trump administration conducted a raid of an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and a cryptic announcement from an FBI official inviting state election officials to a conference call to discuss the 2026 election.

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Former Trump official doesn't know how Republicans 'sleep at night'

President Donald Trump’s former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews blasted Republicans trying to deny the facts of Trump’s attempted coup of the 2020 election.

Some GOP lawmakers at the Thursday testimony of former special investigator Jack Smith attempted to arbitrarily absolved Trump of any wrongdoing, despite evidence of correspondence between Trump and Republican allies and footage of attacks on the U.S. Capitol. Some attempted to make the argument that Trump did not really believe he had lost the election, so his machinations to “find” more votes and other tactics were in earnest.

Matthews, who worked with Trump, flushed those claims.

“Trump knew that he lost, and he had been told by multiple advisers, both in the White House, on the campaign and state officials, that he lost, so that this was a propaganda effort by his part to try to find these votes,” Matthews told MS NOW anchor Ari Melber. “For example, in Georgia, spreading these conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines. He knew that he lost, but he was willing to cling to anything and any excuse in order to try to stay in power.”

Melber brought up Thursday Republican attacks on former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who provided incriminating testimony to the January 6 Committee on Trump’s scheme. Matthews similarly Blasted Republicans who attacked her without evidence.

“Any attack on Cassidy Hutchinson is pathetic, because I know her to be someone of good character, and she is extremely brave for coming forward with what she knew and testifying before the January 6th committee,” said Matthews. “She faced death threats as a result and had to go into hiding. So, I think that it's really rich for a lot of these members of Congress to sit there and attack her when there is no basis to their attacks against her.”

“Cassidy told the truth at great cost,” continued Matthews, “and I think that those who are sitting in those positions of power, who are two or three times her age, should really look at themselves in the mirror and consider what they're doing and how they go to sleep at night, because honestly, I don't know how they do it.”

She further hammered Republicans for “know[ing] that Trump lost a free and fair election and that he tried to overthrow it as a result.”

“[He] caused a violent insurrection. And he is the first president in us history to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. And for them to attack Cassidy is just BS, honestly. And it's really frustrating because there is one person to blame for January 6th and it is Donald J. Trump.”

- YouTube youtu.be

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How the Supreme Court could hand Trump an electoral 'coup'

American democracy, writes political commentator Brian Beutler, is trapped in a precarious contradiction. On one hand, outrage against the corruption and harmful leadership of President Donald Trump has made it likely that he and his party will face backlash at the polls, but at the same time, the likelihood of that backlash provides Trump supporters with “fuel for further attempts to overturn elections.” This creates a situation in which “Trump has everything to lose by losing, and nothing to lose by attempting another coup.” And according to Beutler, the Supreme Court has been motivated to help him do it.

“While his corruption will make it easier for Democrats to sweep the midterm elections, it will also make him more determined to steal back their victories,” Beutler explains. “That’s why the past month’s news read the way it did: A slush fund to buy a second insurrection. An election-denying prosecutor in North Carolina named Dan Bishop who’s up to god knows what. A promotion for the acting attorney general who’s promised Trump total loyalty. A new interim spy chief, chosen for his willingness to mine confidential government documents seeking dirt on Trump’s enemies. All while Trump increases the pace of looting, and abandons any pretense of trying to win the old-fashioned way.”

More alarming still, says Beutler, is that Republicans in key positions “seem willing or eager to go along with him. His allies in state legislatures helped national Republicans steal perhaps five to 10 House seats through mid-Census gerrymandering. They were given a leg up by Republicans on the Virginia Supreme Court, which summarily voided a voter-approved pro-Democrat gerrymander, and by Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court, who allowed southern Republican legislatures to redraw congressional maps in the middle of primary elections, creating new Republican seats just in time for the midterms.”

And it is this meddling by the courts that Beutler argues should have Americans most concerned. As he notes, while in 2020, the Supreme Court and lower courts across the country rejected Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, now, the political landscape has changed, and “they, too, have everything to lose by losing, and nothing to lose by helping Trump complete his coup. In the winter of 2020, their interests diverged, or at least seemed divergent. Today, they are completely aligned.”

When Trump staged his political comeback, says Beutler, he “gave the Republican justices a choice: you’re with me or you’re with the Democrats. They didn’t hesitate to pick a side. They went out of their way to protect Trump from political and criminal accountability for the January 6 insurrection. Then when Trump returned to power, they used their shadow docket to advance his interests by fiat, without explaining themselves to the public. And that was before their ruling in Callais, which transformed the Voting Rights Act from a statute that prohibited gerrymanders intended to disenfranchise black voters into a doctrine meant to encourage anti-black gerrymanders and forbid pro-minority gerrymanders.”

They’re taking such action because “they can see the anti-Trump rebellion brewing, and they know it doesn’t just threaten their power. It threatens to consign them to the legal anticanon along with some of the country’s greatest historical villains. ... Every law student in America learns about the anticanon — the worst rulings in the Supreme Court’s history: Dred Scott, which upheld slavery. Plessy, which upheld segregation.” Now the Roberts Court has been adding its own decisions that will be decried by history, such as gutting the Voting Rights Act and “Trump v. United States, which transformed the presidency into a zone of lawlessness for would-be dictators.”

Today, as Beutler explains, Republicans face a near-future where Democrats score big midterm wins, flipping key districts and states and maybe taking back the Senate, which would allow them to block Trump’s judicial nominees and agenda. “Now ask yourself,” Beutler wonders, “what wouldn’t Roberts and the other justices do to stop this?”

In the face of such sweeping Democratic wins, forecasts Beutler, “Trump alleges fraud. So does the loser, Ken Paxton, who also happens to be [Texas’s] sitting attorney general. They race to federal court, claiming Paxton is the rightful victor. A Republican judge disqualifies enough ballots to flip the result. Democrats appeal. The appeal reaches the Supreme Court quickly. Control of the Senate, and thus the legitimacy of the entire U.S. government, hangs in the balance.”

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Schumer just dropped a preelection bombshell on Trump’s criminal enterprise

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer understands better than anyone the difference between, on the one hand, a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower’s “bombshell” revelations about Trump administration schemes to rig the 2026 midterm elections and, on the other hand, old, “trumped-up,” ultimately wrong charges of election fraud that were brought against Schumer in 1982 by over-zealous Republican federal prosecutors in New York.

The long-discredited case against Schumer was killed by none other than the Reagan Justice Department, thanks partly to columns that I wrote for a now-long-defunct Brooklyn weekly, The Prospect Press, which was never online, and thanks to an affidavit that I submitted at the behest of Schumer’s pro-bono defense counsel, Arthur Liman.

If you’re a glutton for punishment, read the whole story, which I tell in full on my website in “The Truth About the Schumer Case”. Suffice it to say here that, in that infamous "Schumer case,” in 1982, New York federal prosecutors were earnest but over-zealous, probably for somewhat-partisan reasons. But now Schumer and California Senator Alex Padilla have made clear

that what's truly indictable and probably criminal are moves by the Trump administration to rig the coming mid-term elections against state officials’ constitutional obligations and prerogatives and against countless voters’ rights.

Nothing short of massive public organizing will stop Trump’s latest coup attempt. Every conscientious young lawyer (including many a former Yale student of mine) who's working in a law firm or public agency should be assigned to “pro bono” work against the coup or should take “leave time” for it in the coming six weeks to rescue the American republic. Retired Federal Judge Michael Luttig, a former Republican, makes clear has explained what happened to his party, what's at stake for the country, and what must be done, now or never. Heed him. And if you have a lever near at hand, grasp it and act.

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Brace yourselves: The midterms are about to go thermonuclear

The debate over the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump is getting hot right now but wait until November's congressional elections. It's going to get thermonuclear.

Before we get there, however, I think we all should remember that nothing in our system of government – not the Constitution, not the law, not the institutions of justice – was originally designed to handle the God-tier level of cheating and impunity we are seeing.

It's not that impeachment and removal are inadequate. They are woefully inadequate.

It's that they are the only thing we have.

So either we try to impeach and remove a criminal president or the rule of law isn't really that important in this country. Given that the American people have already shown willingness to trade the rule of law for the promise of "economic stability" – the equivalent of an IOU – I would say the rule of law is already struggling for air. It could be that Trump gets away with it all: the thieving, the lying, the corruption. It could be that America shrugs.

Maybe the focus shouldn't be the rule of law. Maybe it should be the economy, specifically, Trump's failure to deliver on that IOU. That might be an easier lift politically than trying to convict him on this or that crime. Anyway, the Supreme Court has said the president is immune to criminal prosecution. "High crimes and misdemeanors" is kind of meaningless.

Illegal war, illegal deportations, illegal taxes – the consequences of each are profound and overlapping, hurting everyone everywhere, except the very obscenely rich. Diesel has broken records three days in a row. Food prices are going to go up as a result. Home heating oil is expected to shoot up by 30 percent. One more energy shock could trigger a recession.

And ending the war won't stop the pain.

Risk analyst Brett Erickson wrote Tuesday that "the problem that should concern every person right now is that Iran has no intention of letting Trump off the hook before the US midterms, and will seek to escalate aggressively in the days and weeks leading up to November in order to ensure maximum political fallout takes place for President Trump."

Erickson added: "It is also increasingly clear that President Trump will himself throw a Hail Mary escalation after the midterms, which will subsequently force Iran to escalate once again in order to move to checkmate Trump and potentially bring this war to an end."

So the war continues, impoverishing us.

Or the war ends, impoverishing us still.

There should be spectacular consequences for spectacular failure on a scale like this. Impeachment and removal are the only ones we have. Either we try or we go on shrugging.

Writer, author and poet Noah Berlatsky is hopeful. In a new piece for his newsletter, Everything Is Horrible, he argues that impeachment and removal are likelier than you might think. In this interview with me, Noah explains that the keys are how big the blue wave is, how badly Trump reacts to Democratic victories, and how painful things get for everyone else. These factors, Noah said, could coalesce, driving his support through the floor.

"Twenty five percent approval would mean the GOP would be about evenly split on him," Noah told me Tuesday. "That could be an inflection point."

Aside from the expected blue wave, one of your conditions for the possibility of removal is that Trump will continue to do damage for two more years, which is to say, continue to do damage to the GOP brand. How bad does the damage have to be to get Republicans on board?

Hard to know! Obviously with Trump's approval at around 35 percent. We're not there yet.

There have been a couple of times when significant numbers of Republicans seemed ready to abandon Trump. One was after the "Access Hollywood" tape came out; the other was after the insurrection. He rode those out, in the first case because he was already the nominee and there seemed no other options; the second because he was out the door and they all just hoped he'd go away.

I think that a similar crisis after a disastrous midterm, when he's a lame duck president, and seems likely to destroy their 2028 chances, might go differently. A disastrous midterm (Democrats end with 56 or 57 senators) followed by another (unsuccessful) violent coup attempt, with Trump approval going down to 25 or so. Maybe then?

Twenty five percent approval would mean the GOP would be about evenly split on him. That could be an inflection point.

What do you make of Hakeem Jeffries playing down impeachment and prioritizing "affordability"? Is he being coy or is his signaling something about accountability? As you know, the people to our left do not have faith in him as a leader. What do you say to them?

I mean, I generally think of myself as a leftist, and I am not super confident in Jeffries, though I think he's maybe more flexible than some on the left give him credit for.

House leader is a position where you're accountable to the caucus, mostly, and where you're usually focused on protecting vulnerable districts. Jeffries' statements are best understood in that context. They're strategic rather than an expression of his deeply held opinions. And they are generally what purple and red district Democrats want to hear as the message of the party. I think Democrats in close seats think impeachment is unlikely and isn't likely to play well with persuadable Trump voters. Affordability (they think) is a better bet.

Which I'm not sure I agree, but the point is that it doesn't really tell you much about what might happen going forward if there's a massive blue wave and Trump's popularity falls. Democratic leadership wasn't enthusiastic about impeachment in Trump's first term either, but his Ukraine election interference and then the coup forced their hands. That could easily happen again.

As an example, Jeffries has started pushing for Supreme Court expansion. He's also called for aggressive blue-state gerrymandering. I doubt those would have been positions he'd support pre-2024, but Trump's actions have pushed him (and more importantly the caucus has pushed him). So I think individual personalities are often less important than events.

You suggest that "if there’s a real possibility that [the Republicans] will remove him ... let them pick the grounds of removal." Putting that much trust in the hands of people who previously backed Trump all the way might be a bridge too far for some law-and-order Democrats, no?

I mean, there will be pushback and negotiations! But I think the calculus is pretty straightforward. If there is a grounds for removal that Republicans will vote for, and there's a real chance to get the needed votes, you use those grounds!

You saw this with the coup impeachment, I think. There were tons of grounds to impeach Trump in theory. In practice, the post-coup impeachment focused on the coup, because that was the thing that Republicans might vote for. (And seven of them did in the Senate.)

There is an argument that says "let Trump cook." Don't do anything to remove him, short of an attempted coup, and just let him destroy the Republicans over the next two years, as he did during the previous two. What are your thoughts?

I think that this is probably behind some Democratic reluctance to move forward with impeachment. But I think Trump is really extremely dangerous, and I think that leaving him in power is an ongoing threat to the Constitution and democracy, and to the lives of many globally.

Obviously, JD Vance would be terrible, but I don't think he's as utterly divorced from reality as Trump. Trump just has no recognition of a world outside his skull, which means he does really reckless things that are unlikely to work but can cause terrible harm (like the coup).

Also I think removing him would chasten his successor (Vance in this case) in ways that would be very helpful. Basically, accountability is good in and of itself, and Trump is a unique danger. If they can remove him, they should.

OK, Trump is impeached and removed. Then what? It's not like this man has ever obeyed the law? America has never been in this situation. I'm asking you to speculate. Will he go quietly or hold the country for ransom?

My understanding is that as soon as he's removed, he has no power. He's no longer president. JD Vance is then president.

Trump would have no power to order anything. He wouldn't be in charge of the military. He wouldn't have a right to be in the White House. He wouldn't have the power to order anyone to do anything.

The question is whether his followers would try to stage a coup to overthrow Vance, I guess. Or whether Vance would still treat Trump as president or something. But if there's a removal, Trump would already be massively unpopular, and it's hard to imagine Vance foregoing the presidency to help out anyone else.

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MAGA election chief fires official who revealed his plan to fake threats

According to a recently-filed lawsuit, this includes, a supporter of President Donald Trump is firing officials who they view as insufficiently compliant to MAGA demands.

"A former Missouri election integrity director alleges Secretary of State Denny Hoskins fired him after he reported plans to manufacture a whistleblower complaint and threats against local election officials," reported The Kansas City Star's Ben Wheeler and Jack Harvel on Monday. "In a lawsuit filed Monday in Cole County Circuit Court, Nicholas La Strada accuses Hoskins of terminating him one week after he reported that senior officials had discussed fabricating an anonymous whistleblower complaint to use in a federal court hearing."

They added, "La Strada had served in the position for roughly 15 months."

The article continued, "The lawsuit details a series of allegations dating back to April 2025, shortly after Hoskins appointed La Strada, a Republican and former Pettis County Clerk, to the office. The complaint lists Hoskins, the State of Missouri and the Secretary of State office as the defendants."

Writing for The New York Times on Sunday, conservative commentator David French warned that Hoskins' various actions as Missouri Secretary of State foreshadow MAGA plans to rig the upcoming midterms.

"It’s only September, and America just barely averted the first constitutional crisis of this year’s midterm elections," The New York Times columnist David French wrote on Sunday. "Hang with me here because this gets a bit complicated. Last September, the Missouri Legislature passed a redistricting bill called H.B. 1. This bill was part of the wave of mid-decade census redistricting initiated after President Trump essentially ordered the state of Texas in July to redistrict to create more Republican-majority congressional districts and diminish Democratic voting power in the state."

A former judge, J. Michael Luttig, argued early in September that Trump plans on completing the coup attempt he initiated on January 6, 2021 during the midterm elections.

“Trump instigated a war against America’s democracy on January 6, 2021,” Luttig explained. “Today, almost six years later, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021. That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.”

Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, argued to AlterNet in June that Trump ultimately is afraid of being held accountable by voters.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He concluded, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”

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The forgotten tape proving the GOP never stopped rigging democracy

Back in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall.

On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump:

“Let me put an idea in your head. Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. …
“And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, in INS vs. Chadha that if you declare a national security emergency as the President of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.
“So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote.”

Trump seemed both unsurprised and unfazed, as if this were a regular topic of conversation in the White House.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” he replied, adding, “OK, I’ll leave it at that.”

Since 1968, stealing elections has become a sport for Republicans. That was the year that Nixon was running for president against VP Hubert Humphrey — who had just successfully negotiated peace between North and South Vietnam — when Nixon had his people reach out to the leaders of South Vietnam and promise them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the deal.

When the FBI informed President Johnson about it, he correctly called it “treason,” although we didn’t learn about it until years later when the LBJ Library released the tapes.

In 1980, it was Reagan’s turn to steal an election. Jimmy Carter was riding high in the wake of Nixon’s resignation and VP Agnew’s stepping down to avoid a bribery prosecution, but then the Iranians seized the American embassy in Tehran.

The president of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, wanted to release the hostages and had worked out a deal with Carter to do just that, but the Reagan campaign met with the Ayatollah’s people and promised to sell them weapons and military spare parts if they’d just hold the hostages until after the election, destroying Carter’s re-election chances.

The hostages were released, by way of sealing the deal, at the exact moment when Reagan put his hand on the bible to be sworn in, and for years Reagan shipped them banned weaponry until the deal was busted wide open as the Iran-Contra Scandal.

In 2000, Republicans knew the election would probably come down to Florida, the state then run by candidate George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, so Jeb had his secretary of state purge at least 50,000 Black people from the voting rolls just months before the election. His brother won the state, and thus the White House, by 537 votes: it would have been an epic loss without that last-minute voter purge. And then five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court shut down the Florida Supreme Court-mandated recount, which would’ve revealed the purge.

None of these Republican election thefts are controversial; all are well-documented.

As was Trump’s willingness to see his own Vice President, Mike Pence, hanged by an angry mob if that was what it’d take to keep Donald in the White House for another four years. It’s safe to assume that if he was okay with that, there’s nothing off the table for this fall.

While Trump’s legal power to seize control of our election this fall is in dispute, his ability to disrupt it isn’t.

— He’s already issued an executive order directing the Post Office to refuse to deliver ballots to or from citizens not on his approved voter list or in states that refused to give him their voter rolls. Postmaster General David Steiner says he’s willing to do what Trump wants.
— A federal judge back last October ordered ICE to provide his court with the details of ICE’s plans for this fall’s election and ten months later they’re still stonewalling, refusing to turn over any internal documents.
— Reuters reported last month that White House officials had already discussed declaring a national emergency and creating a federal voting task force, including ways of bypassing the Election Assistance Commission and seizing control of voting and vote-tabulating machines.
— Voters in 41 states have election deniers on the ballot this fall, while dozens of known election deniers have taken control of election-running positions across the country.

So, given that the feds are not only not going to help but are actively working toward rigging or even seizing control of this November’s election, it’s going to be up to us and the individual states to make sure our voices are heard and our votes are properly counted.

We should be thinking of this as an election continuity exercise that may not be necessary but, like wearing a seatbelt, could be essential if Trump tries to repeat 2020 in some way. At the moment, he’s essentially a cornered rat.

Therefore, Democrats must:

— Educate Americans about the Constitution, which hands elections off to the states exclusively with only minimal federal standards.
— If Trump tries to claim a national emergency — even if it has a real basis, like Iran hitting us hard or some other 9/11-type event — Americans need to know that we held elections through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Republican Great Depression, both World Wars, and through other times of national crisis, and 2026 must not be an exception.
— States need to prepare for litigation with complaints, TRO motions, and even appellate briefs composed and ready to file on a moment’s notice. Taking days to fully respond to a Trump attempt to blow up our elections could be disastrous, as Al Gore learned 26 years ago.
— Involve Republicans when we can find the rare ones who will put country above party. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia pushed back in 2021 when Trump tried to get him to “find” roughly eleven thousand ballots; we must be looking for other Republicans who may have enough integrity to resist a Trump-led coup attempt.
— Steel the spines of our election administrators by having their backs, both legally and physically. Secretaries of state, county clerks, election boards and governors should all know in advance exactly who has authority to order what. The last thing we want are thousands of local election officials asking, “Are we supposed to comply?” on Election Day. When coup attempts work it’s typically because they used the element of surprise to their benefit; we need to blunt that weapon.
— Prepare for Trump’s goons — federal (like ICE or the National Guard) or Proud Boys/Klan-types — around polling places. This is a violation of a federal law that dates back to the Civil War; it’s illegal for “troops or armed men” to show up at any polling places in the country, and the penalty is five years in prison.
— Encourage early voting and other ways to build redundancy into our election systems, and tell people to check their voter registration now at vote.org, particularly if they live in a Red state, as those states have been actively and aggressively purging their voting rolls for months now, especially in their blue cities.
— Be prepared for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, as they did in the 2000 election, to try to hand various elections to Republicans. They’ve already granted Trump sweeping immunity from criminal acts, presumably including election fraud.
— Finally, as Al Gore can tell you from sad experience, we need to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of rightwing propaganda calling elections into question and claiming fraud.

People old enough to remember how the GOP gamed this in Florida in 2000 know what I’m talking about; Republican congressional staffers flew down to Florida (along with John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) to pound on counting center windows and demand the election Al Gore won be given to the “rightful winner,” George W. Bush.

While Trump can’t legally cancel the election, the more he and his toadies can cast doubt on its legitimacy, the more likely it is that they can pull off the same type of coup as Republicans did in 1968, 1980, and 2000.

For over a decade now, close races immediately produce Republican claims of fraud: lawyers, election officials and communications systems must be fully prepared to deal with lies and propaganda long before November.

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'We'll never lose': Trump has a wild new prediction

Trump and his Republican partners in the destruction of American democracy really don’t want us to vote this fall or in 2028. And there’s a good reason for it, at least in their minds.

Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election.

It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028.

Also this week, the Center for American Progress released an extraordinarily disturbing fact sheet summarizing an investigation they published that documents fifteen separate, interlocking tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are engaging in right now to rig this fall’s election.

Their tactics range from firing the bipartisan Election Assistance Commissions’ commissioners to encouraging Red state voter purges to putting ICE agents outside polling places in clear violation of federal law.

The six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court are also deciding, perhaps this week or next, whether to let Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General have your mailman refuse to deliver your ballot if you’re not on Trump’s approved voter list.

Trump’s executive order to do this has been blocked twice by a federal judge, noting that the Constitution is clear that only states run elections and the executive branch has no authority whatsoever to even try to regulate them. And now it’s in the hands of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

And the plain words of the Constitution — which references the “right to vote” six times, including five Amendments that say, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…” — have never been an obstacle for Republicans on the Court. Just read the plain text of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and compare that to ICE’s behavior, which the Court is allowing.

Sadly, we need to be ready for anything, because Republicans now have a 58-year-long record of committing crimes and treason to get their men into the White House.

— Nixon sabotaged LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal just before the election of 1968, an event LBJ and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen called “treason” on a phone call that wasn’t released until decades after Johnson’s death. Because the war continued, Nixon beat Humphrey that year by lying that he had a “secret plan” to end the war, and an additional 20,000+ Americans and over an additional million Vietnamese died.

— Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollah to hold the 52 hostages they’d taken during Carter’s presidency until after the election. Iran kept the deal destroying Carter’s chance in the 1980 election, and for six years Reagan secretly and illegally sold them American-made weapons in violation of the law. We remember that as the “Iran-Contra Scandal.”

— Florida Governor Jeb Bush had 57,000 mostly Black Floridians purged from the voting rolls just months before the 2000 election, which let his brother George W. Bush squeak by with a 537 vote margin. When the Florida Supreme Court, smelling a rat, ordered a recount, five corrupt Republicans — including Bush’s father’s nominee Clarence Thomas — violated the state’s rights Tenth Amendment and blocked the recount, putting Bush into the White House even though a later recount found that Al Gore had won the election. President Jimmy Carter told me on my radio program: “I don’t think that George W. Bush won the election in 2000, and he probably lost Florida and nationwide…”

— And then there was the GOP’s theft of the 2024 election. Greg Palast, a reporter with a masters’ degree in statistics, went through the official state-by-state statistics and found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls: 2,121,000 mail were ballots disqualified by Republican challenges, 1,216,000 provisional ballots were thrown away uncounted, 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or never processed, and 585,000 in-person ballots were “spoiled.”

He found Black voters were four times as likely as white voters to have their mail ballot rejected; Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were more than 3 times as likely as white people to be given provisional ballots that were never counted. Had that voter suppression not worked, he concluded, Kamala Harris would be president and the House and Senate may well be in Democratic hands.

So, here we go again, only this time state-by-state voter suppression — remember when Texas AG Ken Paxton told Steve Bannon on the air that if he hadn’t blocked Houston from sending out mail-in ballots Trump would have lost Texas? — is getting a big boost from the feds under Trump’s control.

— Trump and his lickspittles have fired or pushed out at least 75 career election security officials, gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and removed the Election Assistance Commission’s commissioners so the agency is now functionally dead.

— The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, now run by an apparatchik devoted to undoing civil rights, has threatened election officials in all 50 states with prison if they make even small errors in running their elections. The DOJ itself has sued more than 30 states trying to seize their voter files.

— The FBI raided the Fulton County elections office with Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence, standing over the process at the personal direction of Trump himself as agents hauled away hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots.

— Steve Bannon has repeatedly promised — most recently this week — that ICE agents will defy the post-Civil War federal law that bans armed government officials from polling places.

— And Trump has, on multiple occasions, floated declaring a national emergency or state of insurrection to shut down this fall’s elections, either nationwide or in places where Democratic majorities may win.

Back in the old days, Nixon and Reagan at least had the decency to commit their treasonous election thefts in secret.

Trump is now bragging about it, telling Congress that if they pass his voter suppression bill to prevent low-income people and married women from voting, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

This is Putin-level corruption, right out in the open, and not a single Republican is pushing back as our national press tries their hardest to avoid discussing it.

We’ve suffered through five illegitimate presidencies in the years since Nixon’s 1968 treason largely because our press has refused to investigate or tell the stories and Democratic leadership has been too timid to bring it up. You know how Republicans would be reacting if the shoe were on the other foot.

This time the press can’t claim they just didn’t realize what was going on, as happened in 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2024: Trump and his cronies are doing all this right out in the open, and his advisors like Bannon are crowing about it on TV.

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Dem upends the 'groveling' GOP's 'gotcha' playbook with 'perfect retort'

Republican efforts to best Democrats in the midterms with their typical "gotcha" tactics must face a "perfect retort" from their enemies, according to a top conservative analyst for the New York Times, as the party's "groveling" to President Donald Trump deserves much more pushback.

In a piece published Monday morning, conservative Times columnist Frank Bruni highlighted the Michigan Senate race as a prime example of this dynamic. Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who remains solidly tipped to win the race, has faced numerous attacks for allegedly being too left-leaning in his politics, part of a broader "discussion about the extremes to which many Democrats took wokeness," as Bruni described it. El-Sayed refused to take the "gotcha" bait in a recent Fox News interview, shrugging off questions about his past "expressions of support for the Green New Deal and defunding the police, as well as his suggestion that the country ditch the Second Amendment," instead focusing on the economic issues concerning voters now.

In the face of such attacks accusing Democrats and the left of wearing "different faces on different days," Bruni suggested taking a close look at El-Sayed's opponent, Trump-endorsed Republican nominee Mike Rogers.

"The face that Rogers flashed in January 2021, when President Trump was scheming to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, signaled disgust with Trump," Bruni explained. "Rogers denounced his behavior as 'more gangster than presidential' and decreed: 'This trend of refusing to accept free and fair elections, without any proof of fraud, must end for the sake of our democratic republic.' In response to news reports that Trump was privately accepting some blame for a MAGA mob’s storming of the U.S. Capitol, Rogers said: 'You’re damn right you had responsibility for this.' How firm. How furious. How fleeting."

He continued: "When Rogers went on to make his first, unsuccessful Senate bid in 2024, he pretty much groveled for Trump’s endorsement, then proudly touted it. Not a word about Trump as thug, Trump as fabulist, Trump as ringleader with blood on his hands. For his current race, Rogers has again cozied up to Trump; while most Republicans tried to ignore the president’s bizarre and largely baseless primetime speech last month about American election irregularities, Rogers made a point of praising it. I wish Democrats would whack at that even harder than they already have."

Bruni stressed the politicians of all leanings deserve scrutiny when they appear to "change their tunes," but also argued that there has been "a lopsidedness to all the attention to Democrats’ inconstancy" and that "Republicans have more to answer for in that regard." Many GOP lawmakers and candidates who once condemned the president for the Jan. 6 riots now "poo-poo that perfidy or wholly rewrite its history," entirely at his demand.

"They’ve worked their way around to forgiving an assault on the peaceful transfer of power and blessing a failed coup attempt," Bruni added. "Democratic contortions on policing and pronouns pale in comparison."

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