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The corporate media is brimming with headlines after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was rushed to Capitol Hill to claim that the Trump administration will not move forward with a terrorist slush fund—$1.8 billion for January 6th insurrectionists and others.

“We’re not moving forward with the fund, period,” Blanche said to the House Appropriations Committee. But there are few details of how this will play out. And unlike the announcement of the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” Blanche refused to put it in writing, nor does its demise appear on the DOJ website.

“You started it; you established it in writing, so it just makes sense to rescind it in writing,” New York Democratic Rep.Grace Meng told Blanche.

“I’m not committing to put anything in writing,” Blanche replied.

Are we really supposed to believe these people?

On top of that, Blanche confirmed that the part of the “settlement” in which Trump and his family get immunity from tax audits for dropping the $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, is staying. Let me remind you that none of the others among many wealthy people whose whose returns were leaked when Trump’s were leaked by an IRS contractor—during Trump’s first administration—got anything. Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin sued the IRS and settled—for an apology, that’s it.

“Nothing has changed with that,” Blanche sad at the hearing regarding the Trump family’s immunity from audits for the rest of their lives, which is insane. President’s are routinely audited each year by the IRS. Trump is estimated to own $100 million under an ongoing audit. Now it disappears, even as his administration claims they’re not paying out the $1.8 billion to the domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol and bludgeoned police officers.

It makes you wonder if that had been the plan all along. But I doubt it. Trump wanted this slush fund to create his own armed militia, looking toward the elections. And he’s going to have to find another way to do it. Don’t think he won’t try.

Still, it’s true that those of us opposed to the authoritarian regime had a big win, helping to raise the temperature enough on Trump’s terrorist slush fund to the point at which Republicans in the Senate came to see it as a liability.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he went to Trump and “made clear” that the $72 billion budget reconciliation package to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through 2029 wasn’t going to pass unless Trump dropped the slush fund. Getting the ICE funding, even though ICE has lots of money from the big, bad bill, has been a priority, and keeping the agency shut down was hurting the regime’s efforts.

And when unnamed sources in the White House fed the media the story that Trump was dropping the slush fund, it wasn’t enough for Republicans in the Senate, knowing Democrats would still have impact in forcing the issue. So Blanche was hauled up to the House to say it publicly—even though he wouldn’t put it in writing—while Trump still hasn’t addressed it.

The Democrats executed a great strategy on the ICE funding bill. They blocked funding, forcing the GOP to try to pass the funding bill under budget reconciliation, a process that would only require 51 votes. And after Trump demanded his billion-dollar ballroom be added into the bill, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that Trump’s ballroom couldn’t be added. There weren’t enough votes for the ballroom anyway.

Democrats had planned to introduce amendments on the ballroom, but when that was dropped, they switched to the slush fund. It caused the GOP to go home for the holiday without taking the ICE funding vote, fearful of the amendments.

After two rulings by judges that dealt blows to the fund late last week, and after the blowback from the GOP, the White House began to cave. But Chuck Schumer said Democrats will still add amendments to the ICE funding bill. And they’re right to do so.

Those amendments need to say that the slush fund can never be brought back in any way, shape, or form. We can’t trust the word of this administration.

The New York Times reported before Blanche went to the hill that “some administration officials privately expressed relief” at the judicial rulings but then added, “As with all things involving Mr. Trump, he could still decide to reverse course, especially as he tracks media coverage of his decision.”

That’s an indication that Trump won’t let it be.

The Florida judge who reopened the lawsuit against the IRS that Trump claimed to have dropped, creating the “settlement” for the slush fund, will keep this in the news for a while as she seeks to determine if the administration engaged in “fraud.”

And the decision to keep the part of the deal that prevents Trump and his family from being audited is another massive disaster for the GOP heading into the midterms. Even if the courts stop it, Democrats will be able to use this against the GOP, showing that Trump is executing his power to protect himself and enrich himself, while everyday Americans are suffering.

Spencer Gear told a judge that he is not a killer by nature, despite his disturbing threats. He’d merely caught a virus, reports The New Republic.

“The 34-year-old Nevadan was sentenced to five years in prison Monday for threatening to murder federal judges who handled cases involving Trump and January 6ers,” reports TNR. “His messages, which were mostly delivered by way of phone calls between November 2023 and July 2024, were explicit: ‘This is a death threat,’ he told one victim. ‘I’ll spill your blood,’ and ‘You can’t do s—— to Donald Trump,’ Gear warned targets.

But TNR reports the seeming MAGA fanatic changed his tune as he sat across from the judge handling his criminal case Monday, pleading for mercy as he tried to walk back his violent promises.

“I’m embarrassed that I ever talked to people in such a manner,” Gear reportedly said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “The republic cannot survive if we continue this path of political discourse.”

Gear claimed his brain had been infected by a “mind virus” from the internet and that the alleged disease had caused him to lash out at people he believed were going to destroy the country by, reported the Reno Gazette Journal. It did not matter that the people allegedly destroying the nation were judges overseeing the legal issues of Trump and his supporters.

This isn’t the first so-called attack from an internet head virus. Christian Zionists, say MAGA influencer Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, have been 'seized by this brain virus.'"

Billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk complained repeatedly of a “woke mind virus” threatening “modern civilization,” which he said prompted him to buy the social media platform now known as X.

The jury that convicted Gear of 20 counts, including nine counts of threatening a federal official and 11 counts of transmitting threats, appeared to have made no accommodations for Gear’s “virus.” His 5-year prison sentence will be followed by three years of supervised release.

Gear threatened to assault and murder public officials over a seven-month period before he was sentenced Monday by United States District Judge Jennifer A. Dorsey.

But while Gear is packed away, social observers warn the increasingly hostile political climate is showing no signs of abating, and some political scientists were worried about what that could mean for Americans in the near future, particularly after the assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk inflamed political tensions across the nation.

President Donald Trump has created such a strong political movement, some compare it to a cult. Yet on Tuesday Rick Wilson, the head of the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project, spoke with a former Trump supporter at a group called Leaving MAGA about how to deprogram Trumpers.

"And let me just open with my usual customary apology," Leaving MAGA founder Rich Logis told Wilson. "I would like to say that I'm sorry for my past support of Trump and MAGA. When I was in MAGA, the Lincoln Project was the devil — loathed and despised. And if I had met you when I was in MAGA, I would have said that you were an existential threat to our country."

Logis continued, "My journey really started in 2015. I was very politically disillusioned. I believed that the two parties had been the same — that they failed to represent most of the country, except for the wealthy and the powerful. I was unapologetically all in. I spoke to Trump groups. I donated to them. I was a sponsor. There was probably no one who was as devout a supporter of Trump and MAGA as I was.And born from that apology and recounting of my story was our organization, Leaving MAGA, which we founded as a new community — a new destination for people who are leaving MAGA, who are having doubts."

After Wilson gave Logis credit for realizing he was wrong about Trump, adding that that is difficult for many people to do, Logis predicted that many MAGA supporters will stick with the president no matter what.

"The fact is that MAGA, unfortunately, is going to remain, which I think makes our work at Leaving MAGA even more crucial," Logis said. "I believe that we're at the vanguard of trying to create this new community for people."

Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), who also previously supported Trump, argued in February that Trump supporters lost the right to deny they are in a cult when they continued to back Trump despite his wars against Venezuela and Iran. Trump had run for president in 2024 claiming he would end all wars.

“I thought you wanted him to end wars all over the world,” Walsh said. “You said you wanted him to end American entanglement in conflicts and wars around the world. America shouldn’t be involved in these wars, you said. That’s why you’re voting for Trump, you said.” Then, despite Trump’s actions against Denmark, Venezuela and Iran, they still support him.

He added, “And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters?What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”

The former congressman then concluded, “You’ve got no argument against people calling you a cult. And if he takes us to war against Iran, and you clap and applaud and throw him flowers, Trump supporters, I will be at the front of the parade calling you a cult.”

President Donald Trump’s acting attorney general reportedly admitted that he blames the children and women who were sexually exploited by the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — even as he continues to resist efforts to fully disclose Trump’s relationship with his own longtime friend.

After mentioning that Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, appeared before Congress earlier in the day and was asked about Epstein, CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked Rep. Madeleine Dean (R-PA) about her private conversation with Blanche after their public interaction before the House of Representatives.

“He actually did blame the victims — to me, to my face,” Dean told Tapper about Blanche. “When I said, 'When are you going to begin the prosecutions?' Because after all, we have one dead guy and we have a lady in a summer camp, and that's it — for more than a thousand children, girls and women who were trafficked, raped, and sexually assaulted by Epstein and the other perpetrators. And you know what he said to me at the Department of Justice, privately, just between us? He blamed the victims.”

Dean quoted Blanche saying “'Well, they didn't give us the names’” before saying that America’s top prosecutor should investigate more fully rather than simply let it rest at that.

“What I walked away with was: the cover-up is complete,” Dean said. “He blames the victims for not giving names. The victims have said, 'Please meet with us.' And the Department of Justice has not met with them. And of course, there are 20 years of investigation — the names are known to this Department of Justice, to this acting attorney general.”

She then argued Blanche is acting not with Americans’ best interest at heart, but as a personal advocate for Trump.

“He was paid nearly $10 million a year or so ago to defend Donald Trump as a private attorney,” Dean told Tapper. “He then hung a 30-foot banner on the Department of Justice — which I think is grotesque and revealing of the failure of independence of the DOJ — a menacing Trump face as the face of the DOJ. And then, do you know what he said when asked if he doesn't get confirmed as attorney general? He said, 'I would say to the president, I love you, sir.'”

She concluded, “The guy is under terrible conflict. You could see he was quite dismissive and agitated — in our conversation both privately at the Department of Justice and then publicly before the American people. He has no interest in pursuing justice. And that's what I'm going to keep pushing for.".

Trump denies all the sexual misconduct accusations.

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Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio barely contains his disdain for the Republican Party’s confirmation of a slew of President Donald Trump nominees that they knew were bumbling idiots.

“Naively, lawmakers assumed that anyone nominated for a powerful position and confirmed by the Senate would necessarily have the competence and integrity to serve in another powerful position briefly, while a permanent appointee is chosen,” Catoggio complained. “That the president might nominate henchmen and that a compliant Senate might rubber-stamp them seems not to have occurred to them.”

It also didn’t seem to matter that people like law professor Jack Goldsmith warned in 2024 that Trump would “game the vacancy process” by arguing that any Senate-confirmed officer serving anywhere in the government can fill his or her position if the president desires, potentially for years.

“Confirming Bill Pulte — or Todd Blanche or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel — to any position effectively meant confirming them to every position, at least on a temporary basis,” spat Catoggio. “No matter: Every Senate Republican voted yes on Pulte’s nomination to the FHFA anyway.

Federal laws permits an acting director — no matter how bad — to remain in the job for up to 210 days, then for an additional 210 days if a nominee to replace him is rejected by the Senate, and then for another 210 days if a second nominee is rejected.

“In other words, Bill Pulte can lawfully hold the position of director of national intelligence for the rest of this year—and then for all of next year, provided that Trump is willing to nominate two unconfirmable putzes in succession to replace him,” Catoggio said, adding that the authors of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act didn’t anticipate an autocratic executive who so adores the word “acting” in front of a job title. This, said Catoggio, leaves the nation with an acting attorney general who seems “downright eager to commit impeachable offenses to show the boss how eager he is to stay on the job indefinitely and a new director of national intelligence who will doubtless behave the same way.”

“It’s a coincidence, I’m sure, that two positions with outsized potential for abuse in harassing the president’s critics are now held by two of the biggest Trump chuds in the government, neither of whom was approved by the Senate for their current jobs,” said Catoggio. “Just as it must be a coincidence that this is an election year and the White House clearly expects both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to play influential roles in preventing, ahem, fraud at the polls this fall. In Bill Pulte, the president now has a figure who’ll wield that influence enthusiastically.”

This is Trump’s “middle finger” to a “Duma-fied Republican” Senate that is beginning to “resist his most loathsome impulses,” Catoggio said. “ … If the Senate GOP won’t make him happy, he’ll make himself happy by filling a key vacancy with a putrid loyalist appointment whom he surely knows they disdain.”

The GOP could amend the FVRA to prevent dirty appointments, provided they can find 20 Senate Republican votes “to override the inevitable Trump veto” But don’t get your hopes up, said Catoggio.

“The caucus of disgruntled GOP lame ducks, while big and growing, ain’t that big,” said Catoggio. “If there were 20 civic-minded conservatives in the chamber, the president would have been convicted and disqualified from holding future office five years ago.”

Catoggio also doubted the Senate GOP “has the stomach” to muster just four Republicans to join Democrats to roadblock Trump’s nominations and stall conservative judicial nominees and leave their fate to a Democratic Senate next year.

“Pulte will likely serve for as long as the president wants him to serve, and not a day less,” said Catoggio.

President Donald Trump’s policies have hurt farmers so badly, Republicans are getting nervous that they could flip the state in both its Senate and gubernatorial elections.

“Well, number one, this is Iowa and the tariffs are hitting them really hard. Before the tariffs, Donald Trump had a 52 percent approval rating in the state — still not super great for Iowa — but he is currently at 42 percent,” The Bulwark’s conservative founder political expert Sarah Longwell wrote on Tuesday. “Farmers are losing money, even with the federal subsidies that are trying to offset the impact of the tariffs.”

She added that “soybean farmers are losing about $75 an acre. Trump's one big, beautiful bill kicked nearly 100,000 Iowans off their health insurance. And [Republican Gov. Kim] Reynolds is one of the most unpopular governors Iowa has seen in a while.” In addition to complaining that the school vouchers program requires students to go down to four days a week of schooling, many voters also believe that “the six-week abortion ban they enacted there in Iowa, which people think is too extreme. And then there's this issue of cancer water, which I had not heard about until I started focus grouping in Iowa — but essentially you've got a lot of chemicals going into the water, and a lot of people in Iowa say that they're experiencing incredibly high cancer rates.”

As a result of all these issues, “Cook Political Report currently rates this race as a toss-up. So that's interesting for Iowa — they've got a toss-up for governor. Democrats looking strong.” Reynolds is not running for reelection, but Democratic nominee State Auditor Rob Sand has focused on her unpopular record and is expected to tie his eventual Republican opponent to Reynolds’ governorship.

“Now let's move to the Senate,” Longwell wrote. “We also have an open Senate seat because [Sen.] Joni Ernst has decided not to run again. There's no Republican primary because Ashley Hinson, who is a sitting member of Congress — she's been there for three terms, she's a former state rep, and she was also a news anchor in the state — is the de facto Republican nominee. But the Democrats have kind of an interesting primary. There are two of them: Josh Turek, who I think is likely to win, and Zach Walls.”

She added, “Now, Josh Turek — if you don't know who he is or you haven't seen him — he's in a wheelchair. He has spina bifida, and his dad had exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. He's knocking on doors by pulling himself up step by step. He's also a four-time Paralympian and a two-time gold medalist.”

In April, The Economist/YouGov conducted a poll which found that farmers are overwhelmingly opposed to Trump’s tariffs and Iran war, as both policies have raised prices on farmers on important products like fertilizer and gasoline. Despite these concerns, farmers remain one of the most staunchly pro-Trump groups and refuse to abandon their support, instead hoping that he will provide them with economic relief.

“A recent Economist/YouGov poll suggests such troubles are now commonplace,” wrote The Economist on Monday, referring to farmers who struggle to make ends meet thanks to Trump’s policies. “27 percent of rural respondents said it would be ‘impossible’ to cover an unexpected $1,000 bill. It would be easy to blame Mr Trump for the downturn. After all, he campaigned on promises to bring down prices and revive the heartland. But rural America does not.”

The article continued, “The president’s favourability rating is higher among rural voters than among any other group in our survey. Most still think he is doing a good job. In interview after interview with The Economist, farmers said they trust the administration—but that they need help to recoup the losses its foreign policy is causing them.”

President Donald Trump has already built a reputation for defying court orders, but now Politico reports his top Homeland Security commander, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, repeatedly confirmed to senators on Tuesday that he, too, is loath to accept court decisions that he does not like.

“If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that,” Mullin said. “But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law.”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the panel that funds DHS, pointed out to Mullin that even Republican-appointed judges have accused the department of violating almost 100 court orders this year. Murphy added that the Trump administration’s noncompliance as the main factor fueling the ongoing partisan feud over DHS funding that led to the longest funding lapse in U.S. history this year.

“This is a really important discussion for us to have, because this is — whether you want to believe it or not — at the root of our disagreement,” Murphy told him, adding, “it is very hard for us to figure out how to fund an agency that is violating the law.”

Somehow, Mullin, a former Oklahoma Republican senator, argued that DHS “will never break the Constitution, and we’re not going to break the law,” despite claiming they will not follow court orders they don’t like.

Court judges have recently handed Trump a flurry of losses. A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary restraining order against the National Park Service, ordering it to not interfere with a group that had been flying an “8647” flag in Washington, D.C. Common restaurant slang for “eighty-six” goes back nearly a century, the judge noted, saying that it meant “to throw out” or “to get rid of.” He made no reference to Trump’s politicized DOJ lobbing investigations and indictments against Trump perceived enemy former FBI head James Comey for posting pictures of the same numbers with seashells on a beach.

Anther federal judge recently dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit seeking access to Arizona’s detailed voter registration records, dealing another blow to the Trump administration’s national effort to obtain expansive voter data. And still another judge recently ordered that Trump to remove his name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and that he could not close it for what the Trump administration said were two years of renovations.

“[If] you look at the big constitutional suits against this administration — big separation-of-powers issues, big violations of law. There are hundreds of those cases, I think north of 700 in the courts, and the administration has been losing those 2-to-1 in the lower courts,” said Trump’s ex-security expert Miles Taylor on MS NOW.

Former Republican speechwriter Tim Miller told MS NOW that there is a reason President Donald Trump keeps delegating so many jobs to so few lackeys. He says it’s all comes down to math.

Trump recently appointed Bill Pulte to oversee the entire national security apparatus of the United States. He will serve in the job while also remaining in his current job as Federal Housing Finance Agency Director. This will add to Pulte's other job as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But Miller said there’s a reason Trump keeps nominating lackeys and yes-men to multiple positions.

“I think there is something interesting about the fact that he's going to have three jobs and … their ability to investigate enemies and go after enemies is limitless,” said Miller — adding, however, that his work “might be limited by having the horses to do so.”

“And, like, the fact that they can't find enough stooges to do all these jobs is the tiniest silver lining here, said Miller. “I expect that we'll start to hear more leaks out of DNI, and that there's some remaining people that are legitimate public service folks that's still work there. And so, you know, I'm a slightly skeptical about his ability to execute on all of this.”

But on the other side of that coin, warned Miller, the fact that Trump is spreading his stooges so thin means there is nobody competent working any particular problem at any particular time.

“Part of the reason that he can do the three jobs is that, again, like he's not gonna do the job of director of national intelligence — like he is only put in there to do the muckraking, to go after the political foes. Like that's why he's there. And I think that there's some areas of about that in particular that are pretty concerning.”

Do not expect, for example, National intelligence to astutely uncover plots to attack the U.S. homeland with any kind of deft. Miller says instead Pulte will be digging up research to sic DOJ prosecutors on Trump’s enemies, as he likely did with the DOJ’s failed investigation of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and Federal Reserve board of governors member Lisa Cook on shaky mortgage charges.

“I might not be an intelligence expert … but I'm a little bit of a MAGA-ologist. And I just think back to the 2020 election fraud stuff and think about all the fake allegations of foreign interference. There were Italian satellites, the claims of Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelans had gotten inside the Dominion voting machines. There were all the Chinese bamboo ballots in Arizona. They had all these accusations that there was foreign interference on behalf of the democrats that were all false. This falls in [Pulte’s] remit no,” said Miller. “Now, you have Kash Patel and Pulte, who can either chase down these fake investigations, fabricate them, and do what they did on the mortgage documents, come up with small pieces of evidence that Democrats or election officials were communicating with overseas people in ways that might have been totally appropriate. I think that is like the real plan.”

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President Donald Trump has earned a vicious new moniker: “commander in thief,” writes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who chastised the president for his efforts to engage in a “brazen, in-your-face attempted heist of the U.S. Treasury to benefit himself, his family and his political allies.” Those allies, he said, could include Trump’s supporters who were present at the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — whom Friedman labels “phony defenders of freedom’s frontier.”

Friedman also accused Trump of having “conspired with his own Justice Department, headed by his former personal lawyer, to use taxpayer money to create a $1.776 billion political slush fund.”

Having a president who “behaves like a commander in thief — not a commander in chief — is costing us dearly at home and abroad,” he writes. “This perversion of the American presidency is undermining the very alliance structure that won two world wars and the Cold War and generated one of history’s longest ages of peace and prosperity. Every day we tolerate such behavior we endanger our children’s future.”

Friedman argued those are just a few of several reasons why Trump has failed as commander in chief.

Trump has not even tried to get Democrats to support his war against Iran.

"Generally, when our nation has been at war, the commander in chief’s top domestic priority is to keep the country united,” says Friedman. “Because there is nothing more demoralizing for U.S. troops fighting abroad than to look back and see our country ripping itself apart at home.” And he warns that “seeing America at war with itself” just encourages the enemy.

Friedman also expressed alarm at how Trump’s actions toward America’s allies have forced them to engage in deterrence — not just against Russia, but against America.

“Our allies have watched Trump threaten to make Canada the 51st state and to seize Greenland from Denmark,” writes Friedman. “They have watched him start a war with Iran without consulting NATO and then demand that NATO help rescue us from what has turned into a mess. They have watched him slash U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine, put the Russian aggressor on the same moral footing as that country and then top it all off with reckless, ill-conceived tariffs on all our allies.”

Friedman also pointed to the early days of Trump’s second term, when the president “forced Ukraine to give the United States access to critical minerals in return for U.S. help against a Russian Army trying to overrun it. This is the real ‘Trump Doctrine’: Oppose America, and I will tariff you; depend on America, and I will extort you.”

A prominent conservative commentator recently argued that Democrats and Republicans are both applying a double-standard regarding seemingly disqualifying scandals for their Senate candidates in key races.

“Maine Democratic Senate primary candidate Graham Platner and Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton are different candidates dealing with different scandals,” wrote The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone on Tuesday. “Paxton’s infidelity is not the same as Platner’s, nor is Paxton’s pattern of corruption and other moral shortcomings the same as Platner’s Nazi tattoo and history of racist comments online. I am not equating their wrongdoings, nor do I propose doing so.”

Perticone is referring to the reports that Platner — an oyster farmer — had extramarital affairs, supported homophobic and sexist comments online and has a Nazi tattoo on his chest. Paxton has also had multiple extramarital affairs, fired whistleblowers, is accused of multiple financial crimes and participated in Trump’s coup attempt after the president lost the 2020 election. In 2023 he was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives on abuse of office and bribery charges, although the Texas Senate later acquitted him. Both Platner and Paxton are now considered by polling experts to be potential political liabilities to each of their parties’ chances of controlling the Senate after the 2026 midterm elections.

“I asked some senators from both parties, many of whom either jettisoned all principles after coming to Washington or came to power in the first place simply by not having any, whether Americans should demand more of their elected officials on the character front,” Perticone wrote. “Yes, they all seemed to agree: Americans should hold politicians from the other party to a higher standard.” He then cited comments supporting Paxton from Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, John Kennedy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas as well as Democrats backing Platner including Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (technically an independent) and Andy Kim of New Jersey (whose response to Platner was wishy-washy).

“Selective moralizing has been around in politics as long as the profession has been practiced. The prominent Republicans who admonished Bill Clinton for his peccadilloes in the 1990s were hardly men of high character themselves,” Perticone continued. “White evangelicals grew more supportive of Donald Trump the more his traditionally sinful behavior came to light. Many Democrats who admonished Trump for his character are now biting their tongue about Platner. That’s the way this stuff goes.”

While ha acknowledged understanding why partisans on both sides might support Platner or Paxton despite these scandals, simply because they don’t want their party to lose, he warned there is a practical as well as moral consequence to this attitude.

“Candidates like this are still a massive risk, and not just because we don’t know what is yet to come out about either,” Perticone wrote. “Just consider the recent spate of expulsions, resignations, and absences in this Congress alone. Very thin majorities are often just one scandal away from stopping regular business for an entire chamber.”

Editor's Note: This story was updated to include a comment from the White House.

President Donald Trump has done a number of things that suggest he plans on stealing the 2026 midterm elections. According to experts who spoke with AlterNet. If voters do not act now to stop him, he could conceivably succeed in doing so.

There are many factors suggesting Trump will try to steal the midterms. In addition to attempting a coup after his loss to then-Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, he has imposed restrictions on mail-in voting, insinuated that he would deploy ICE and radical groups to polling locations, suggested he will purge voters from the rolls using DOGE and state-shared voter files, pushed for voter ID laws and employed partisan gerrymandering all over America. When asked how he plans to win the midterms despite his historically low approval ratings (stuck in the 30s), he has repeatedly professed indifference as to what voters think of him.

A representative from the Democracy Defenders Fund — a nonprofit organization staffed by a bipartisan group of lawyers, politicians, activists and other experts concerned about Trump’s anti-democracy measures — elaborated on how each of these variables when combined pose a serious threat to the democratic integrity of the midterms.

“I think there are two things to consider,” Pooja Chaudhuri, Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director at Democracy Defenders Fund who specializes in voting rights as well as election law litigation and advocacy, told AlterNet. “One is that the election is made up of voters, and so the outcome depends on people turning out to the polls and voting. The problem is ... the chilling effect on voters.”

Chaudhuri added, “When voters hear that ICE may be deployed to the polls, that mail-in voting rules are changing close to the election, a lot of voters might say, ‘I'm just not going to go out and vote.’ That could happen in many different ways. There are vulnerable communities — people may come from mixed-status families — they're US citizens, but they might decide, "I'm not going to vote." So one aspect is the chilling effect on voters that all of these actions would have.” In addition to that intimidating factor, Chaudhuri argued the gerrymandering and FBI seizure of Fulton County, GA also could keep voters away from the polls.

“We're going to see consequences in terms of voters saying, ‘I don't want the FBI to get my personal ballot in the future,’” Chaudhuri argued. “So, to sum up, I do agree that putting it all together, it does paint an ominous picture.”

Dan Vicuña amplified Chaudhuri’s observations. He is Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, a nonprofit good government group with a distinguished pedigree tracing back to 1970.

“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.”

Not only are these efforts anti-democratic; some of them may be illegal.

“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña explained. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”

Susannah Goodman, Common Cause’s Policy Director in the Voting and Fair Representation Program, offered other examples of Trump’s potentially illegal behavior.

“The other thing is that, as you well know, the administration has been trying to compel states to turn their voter rolls over to the federal government and to consolidate all of that in a mega database,” Goodman said. “A number of states have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls with personal identifying information — Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, et cetera. Common Cause and our partners have intervened in, I think, 17 of those cases on behalf of voters.”

She added, “I don't believe there has been a single case, Dan — correct me if I'm wrong — where, when the state has resisted and claimed they are not going to turn these voter rolls over, the court has dismissed the case or compelled the states to turn them over. The government has not had a compelling reason, and the states have won. So when states fight back, they win. We have been involved in that litigation. That is another huge power grab by the administration. It is also an illegal power grab, and when we have pushed back, we have won.”

Some illegal power grabs, though, may not be caught until it’s too late. Chaudhuri pointed out that “even without the amount of chaos we're seeing for this election, we've seen it in past elections when well-meaning states might start scrubbing their voter rolls closer to the election and voters start getting notices — for example, ‘You have a felony, you have to come and verify at the elections office.’ Many voters don't get these notices and then can't comply with the timeframes under state law. So if we've seen it in the past in a different context, we're definitely going to see it here, because this is a much larger-scale assault on our voting system.”

The risk of being purged from the voting rolls without knowing about it is amplified by the possibility that Trump may do this intentionally.

“The administration's demand that every state turn over its voter rolls has culminated in the most recent executive order Trump issued, where one of the buckets orders two executive branch agencies to compile these massive databases called the state citizenship lists,” Chaudhuri explained. “Under the terms of the executive order, those lists have to be made available to the states 60 days before the election. We've seen states like Texas and Missouri use federal government lists — they've used the SAVE database — in order to verify whether people are citizens, and have wrongly purged and wrongly targeted people who are US citizens. The administration now creating these massive lists before every federal election is going to create not just massive chaos, but also, again, a chilling effect on voters.”

When asked if people could simply show up on Election Day thinking that they're registered to vote only to find out that they are not, Chaudhuri described this as “a very realistic concern.”

“I used to staff the Election Protection Coalition when I worked as a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers' Committee, and we actually saw voters going to the polls and being told by the poll worker, ‘You're not registered to vote,’ or ‘You're not in the poll book,’” Chaudhuri said. “And it's too late by the time you find out on Election Day to register to vote in many states. Here, a voter may very well be purged and find out too late — and then they will be disenfranchised. The one thing we would encourage voters to do is to vote early. And if they're voting by mail, to again vote early and not wait close to Election Day to get in their ballots.”

While voters may feel helpless in light of these threats, there are things they can do. If they want to confirm they have not been illegally scrubbed from the voting rolls, they can vote early and contact their local election authorities. Additionally Goodman explained that there are ways for ordinary people to stop what Trump is doing on an organized rather than personal level — but they need to act now.

“The first is that the voting rights community is fighting all of these attacks,” Goodman said. “So while it seems overwhelming when you read about them and, as you said, put it all together — and the through-line is that he wants to alter the outcome of the election — Common Cause, the ACLU, Lawyers' Committee, Campaign Legal Center, all of our groups are working together in a coordinated way to address all of these assaults on many different levels: legislatively, with litigation, with grassroots organizing, meeting people at the kitchen table. There is an assault, but it is being answered in the states.”

She added, “And the second thing is we have faith in voters — that voters will turn out and they will cast their ballots. Our election protection outreach is really designed not to intimidate voters, not to tell them that it's game over, but to tell them that the reason these attacks are happening is because their voice is very powerful and they need to make a plan to vote. They need to vote early if possible, and stay engaged.”

Vicuña added that voters similarly succeeded in stopping Trump’s anti-voter legislation, the SAVE Act. Yet even if voters are able to entirely thwart Trump’s attempts to steal the midterms, there still may be lingering damage.

“The only thing I'd add is that even when these efforts to subvert the election fail, they run a risk of sowing confusion,” Vicuña opined. “That's why we're involved with a lot of nonpartisan organizations and election protection efforts across the country — to combat misinformation and give voters the right information they need to know what their local rules are. Trump is a chaos agent trying to sow confusion, and we're going to push back in that way as well.”

Chaudhuri encouraged people to pay attention to these issues and not feel discouraged, despite “media fatigue” covering Trump’s scandals.

“There is so much going on, and that might be number six of your five — we're being bombarded by new things happening all the time every day,” Chaudhuri said. “The news is dominated by five new things that nobody even thought of. And so that's a tactic as well — to desensitize the public and the average voter, and shift the focus away from what matters, which is voters being informed of what could go wrong and having the tools to know what they can do in order to cast their ballot and have that ballot count.”

After this article was published, the White House reached out with a comment.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told AlterNet. "The Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act, and Help America Vote Act all give the Department of Justice full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls. This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House. The President has also urged Congress to pass the SAVE America Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting. Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”