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.

President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to then-Vice President Joe Biden, yet his ongoing lies to the contrary continue to roil American politics. Indeed, as a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent pointed out on Thursday, Trump’s lawmakers keep making mistakes when trying to fault the Bureau’s investigation of Trump’s insurrection.

“Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has never concealed his distaste at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department’s attempt to hold Donald Trump accountable for his failed coup, an investigation code-named by the FBI as ARCTIC FROST,” former FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Michael Feinberg wrote for Lawfare. “Beginning as a case managed out of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, it was moved to Jack Smith’s Special Counsel’s Office upon his appointment, and was closed, with the associated indictment dismissed, upon Trump’s second ascension to the presidency.”

Identifying Grassley, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Co-Deputy Director Dan Bongino as the main promulgators of anti-FBI rhetoric regarding the investigation, Feinberg claimed they are politically motivated rather than objective in their assessments.

“Much like Grassley’s efforts to portray the opening of ARCTIC FROST as a deviation from normal case predications, these ideological confreres—Jordan, Patel, and Bongino—and their attempts to cast doubt on the wisdom and propriety of specific investigative steps once again relied on an unruly mélange of documents, proffered to the public in haphazard order, and without any context or reference to any extant FBI and Justice Department policies,” Feinberg explained. “But for those truly interested in understanding how the case unfolded—and who seek such comprehension without political goals or ideological rancor—it’s worth imposing a narrative architecture on the records, and examining them in a thematic fashion, investigative technique by investigative technique, to understand the special agents’ actions in a more incisive and objective fashion.”

Feinberg continued that “viewed through such a lens, something important becomes obvious: The FBI’s investigation into the fake electors plot was not overly aggressive in any fashion. If anything, the case agents acted logically, prudently, and, to use a phrase beloved by law and order types, by the book.”

Reviewing how the four politicians systematically mischaracterized routine procedures as partisan, dishonest or both, Feinberg summed up his assessment by saying that “the days of the FBI trying to speak only through indictments are apparently over, and Patel’s willingness to endlessly provide piecemeal documents, without any explanation, annotation, or context to the Bureau’s most vituperative critics is just one more sign not that a page has merely been turned, but that it has been ripped out of the book entirely and burned to cinders. But in spite of the help that the FBI’s leadership provides him, Grassley has yet to actually show anything inappropriate, or even out of the ordinary.”

During the 2020 presidential election, Biden defeated Trump by 81.3 million to 74.2 million popular votes and an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232, the same by which he defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who also won the popular vote 65.9 million to 63 million) in 2016. Because he could not stay in power through the democratic process, Trump attempted an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

As conservative columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post in February, the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Biden defeated Trump.

“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.”

Because Trump has fired FBI agents who investigated his attempted coup (as well as other Trump-related scandals), Feinberg recently created the FBI Support Network to provide assistance to those who need it.

President Donald Trump is losing the war he started with Iran — and a political expert is warning the president will behave increasingly erratically because he psychologically cannot handle losing.

“We are witnessing what happens to a person who is consumed with the need to dominate, but cannot,” Robert Reich, who served as President Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, wrote for The Guardian on Friday. Describing Iran’s success in imposing economic pressure on the United States by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and thereby rising prices on gas and food, Reich described Trump’s ongoing failure as “not just a serious geopolitical defeat for the United States; it’s a personal crisis for Trump. Those rising prices coupled with an increasingly unpopular war have increased the likelihood that Democrats will take back control of the House and even possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterms.”

Trump’s problem, Reich argued, is his inability to accept defeat from the perspective of his ego. This is why Trump attempted a coup after losing the 2020 presidential election despite the courts debunking his claims of fraud, and Trump is displaying similar erratic and violent behavior again because of his impending political defeat in the 2026 midterm elections.

As one example, Reich pointed to Trump’s “numerous social media posts, including a bizarre one ‘On Friday night, he posted an AI-generated image of himself, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum, all shirtless and with young physiques, standing in the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, along with an unidentifiable woman in a bikini.’” He also claimed that Trump “is fanatically seeking other ways to assert dominance” by attacking transgender college students and falsely accusing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffried of “INCITING VIOLENCE” by calling for a “maximum warfare” redistricting campaign to counter Republican gerrymandering.

More ominously, though, Reich predicted that Trump would attempt another coup if he loses the 2026 midterms.

“What if Democrats win control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterms and he claims they lost or cheated?” Reich wrote. “The nation barely survived the last time Trump’s fragile ego faced a major loss. We’ll also have to cope with Trump as a lame-duck president who can no longer dominate and gain submission as he did before. Will he try to remain president beyond his second term to avoid this?”

He concluded, “The man is unwell. Seriously unwell. Lame-duck presidents fade away, but injured dictators can be dangerous.”

Reich is not alone in worrying that Trump is mentally ill. Dozens of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have written, either in congressional testimony or in private editorials, describing his behavior as troubling because it is consistent with cognitive decline. Speaking with AlterNet last week, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham (formerly of Tufts University) — the chief signatory of a letter warning of Trump’s perceived decline — explained that “the president’s condition appears to be deteriorating,” adding that “there has been a frightening progression of symptoms. These include grandiosity without moral safeguards, paranoia, impulsivity, vindictiveness, easy misperception of being harmed, moments of omnipotence, uncontrolled rage, and sole control over the use of nuclear weapons in a time of war. As a psychiatrist reviewing these, I can only say Yikes!”

The Atlantic reports fringe nuts spreading election denier nonsense are now scattering their lies from inside the system thanks to President Donald Trump’s hiring practices.

Trump, an election denier himself who still claims without evidence that he was cheated out of his victory in 2020, has hired people like election denier Clay Parikh to push debunked election claims from within the systems he rails against as a special government employee in the Trump administration.

The search-warrant affidavit that allowed the FBI to seize election materials in Georgia cited an analysis by Parikh. And last fall, Parikh began a contract with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office that made him a player in the state’s process for certifying election equipment.

“He boasts of access to the Wyoming secretary of state, who, he said on Rumble, has invited him to participate in an online presentation with residents. And at 1:01 a.m. on Christmas Day, Trump made Parikh internet famous when he reposted a video of the 63-year-old testifying in court that election equipment could be infiltrated remotely,” reports the Atlantic.

Attorney Kurt Olsen is another fringe character that Trump brought on last fall to investigate the 2020 election. Olsen pushed debunked theories for years before working for Trump. Now he feed a trough of nonsense to support the seizure of the Georgia ballots. And the Atlantic reports Olsen and other Trump officials are holding extensive meetings with senior members of Trump’s politicized Justice Department to further delegitimize U.S. elections, according to four anonymous sources speaking with the Atlantic.

“So many people are pressing debunked and unsubstantiated election theories from within the government that their presence has become a feature of the system,” reports the Atlantic. “They range from those with immense power — including the president — all the way down to local officials. Others are investigating them. In Riverside County, California, Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican who is running for governor, seized about 650,000 ballots and other election materials in March after local activists alleged malfeasance when California voters last year overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to redraw the state’s congressional map in favor of Democrats.”

Even National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard has accused U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence personnel of participating in a “years-long coup” against Trump, and she was at the raid in Fulton County. Gabbard’s team also claimed to have found voting machines in Puerto Rico with security weaknesses without evidence the machines were actually tampered with.

And MAGA has “already won its war against American elections,” in some ways, reports the Atlantic.

“Confidence that a person’s state or local government will run a free and fair election is slipping. Trump’s administration is filled with election skeptics; federal investigations into 2020 are under way; and conspiracy theorists who were once marginalized now run some local election offices,” the Atlantic reports. “Several officials who have been integral to running fair and transparent elections in past cycles told us they are already burned out—just as the deniers are getting started.”

With the 2026 midterms only five months away, many GOP strategists are sounding the alarm about President Donald Trump's low approval ratings in poll after poll. Outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) fears that his party, in November, could suffer the "inverse of 2010" — meaning a midterms wipeout not unlike the one Democrats experienced during Barack Obama's first presidency. But Never Trump conservative Bill Kristol, in The Bulwark, warned that Trump's unpopularity won't discourage his "power grabs."

Kristol predicted that Trump, rather than feeling discouraged, is "intensifying" and ramping up his "power-grabbing efforts."

"Just yesterday," the journalist explains in the conservative Bulwark, "Trump signed an executive order converting some 8000 career, non-partisan civil service positions into political appointments, making those employees hirable and fireable at will. We all should be 'really, really freaked out.' Because it's clear that Trump's power grab over the executive branch is not just proceeding apace, but is intensifying. Yes, Trump is less popular than he used to be, and he has less of an absolute sway over Republican members of Congress than he once did. But this seems to be causing not hesitation on Trump’s part, but an intensification of his power-grabbing efforts."

Kristol continues, "He seems no longer to care much about political backlash, or electoral consequences. As he said last week, 'I don't care about the midterms.' It's almost as if he doesn't expect elections to matter because he's not going to do everything he can to allow them not to matter."

Trump's "power-grabbing," according to Kristol, is asserting itself with recent appointments — including Todd Blanche as acting U.S. attorney general and Bill Pulte as acting national intelligence director.

"Trump has been a fantastically successful demagogue, a master flatterer of the people," Kristol argues. "But at some point in an authoritarian takeover, one has to explain why one is taking over power despite or against the wishes of the people. What we are seeing is a president who is going full steam ahead on his centralization of power in a way that should make one doubt he intends to give it up — whether over the next two years, whatever a Democratic Congress tries to do, or in 2028, whatever the people try to do at the polls."

Trump, the Never Trump conservative observes, is claiming that he's trying to protect the U.S. from "communists."

"Over the past century, in many nations, fascist movements and authoritarian coups have sought justification in the need to save their respective countries from the communists," Kristol notes. "One hopes and trusts that American exceptionalism will win out, and that we will not go down in history as merely another chapter in this sad story. We're in no way destined to succumb to such a fate."

President Donald Trump and his movement of MAGA Republicans are venting their rage online after Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt lost to two Democrats, Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman, in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

Because Trump has accused all of the politicians he opposes of cheating, tracing all the way back to the 2016 Republican Iowa caucus, he naturally has accused Bass and Raman of cheating Pratt. MAGA Republicans online are taking notice.

"I'm at the rare intersection of: - Was rooting for Pratt - Thought he was good for the LA political conversation - Dislike California's election administration laws and policies - But understand how the process works,” posted an X user named Stephen Richer.

Similarly Republican pollster Frank Luntz observed "reality TV star Spencer Pratt says he ‘will be done with trying to live in LA’ if he doesn't win the mayoral election. Yesterday, he was surpassed in the Los Angeles mayoral primary for the second run-off spot in November."

Another Republican wrote going by Dr. Terry Simpson on X wrote that "I'm a Republican. Los Angeles is roughly 50% Democratic and about 10% Republican. Any candidate who wants to lead this city must win support well beyond the Republican base. Spencer Pratt didn't lose because voters didn't understand he was independent. He lost.”

Other Republicans reacted with the outrage that Trump is trying to stir up, even though there is no evidence that anything illicit is occurring in the California election.

"A 43,000-vote swing just handed Nithya Raman the edge over Spencer Pratt in LA,” an X user who goes by jay plemons posted. “The exact size of the city's homeless population. Ballot harvesting from shelters, universal mail ballots, and late drops made it happen. Coincidence?"

Similarly X user Mark Mendlovitz wrote, "The large variance of Pratt and Raman but not Bass should be setting off screaming alarm bells."

Even House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested there might be fraud in California, despite the fact that he also acknowledged there is no proof. Instead he cited the absence of evidence as being in itself suspicious.

“I'm not saying it's rigged,” Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju on Monday. “I'm saying it stinks to high heaven. And everybody knows that. Let's remove the appearance of impropriety. Let's have, what a concept, let's have votes on an election the day of the election. That's what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this.”

After Raju asked Johnson if he had proof the election was improper, he admitted that “I don't — some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here. And that's a concern. We need people to believe in the integrity of our election system.”

Trump, who attempted a coup after he lost the 2020 presidential election to then-Vice President Joe Biden, is reportedly falsely accusing the California election of being stolen as a preparation for denying the results of the 2026 midterms, which are also expected to swing against him.

“By baselessly framing Ms. Raman’s rise as a Democratic scam, Mr. Trump extended his long-running project to erode public faith in elections — and gave an unusually clear preview of how he could greet any disappointing results for his party in November, when control of Congress is at stake,” wrote The New York Times' Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman on Monday. “He has been anything but subtle about his desire to limit the ability of Democrats to vote by mail, implying, with no evidence, that simply choosing that widely used means of casting a ballot is inherently suspect.”

Swan and Haberman added, “Addressing a gathering of Republican lawmakers in March, he said the way to hold their majority was to pass a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots. ‘It’ll guarantee the midterms,’ he told them, warning that failure would bring ‘big trouble.’”