trump election lies

Leaker reveals Trump using US adversary for help with midterm 'meddling'

On Friday, a whistleblower from President Donald Trump’s first administration alleged that China is integral to his plan for “meddling in the midterms.” According to security analyst Miles Taylor – who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security and leaked a number of White House secrets during Trump’s previous term – the president is counting on the threat of Chinese electoral interference to provide a pretext for his election denial schemes.

Taylor’s claims come as Trump is in the middle of a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in D.C., during which the president’s decorum has been questioned as “weirdly” deferential to the U.S. adversary. “It’s worth noting,” reminds Taylor, “that this is the same Donald Trump who told us over the summer — breathlessly in a primetime press conference — that China had compromised our electoral system and that the communist nation was assaulting American democracy. It was a serious accusation. But then he did nothing about it. No sanctions. No expulsions. No consequences of any kind. Not a peep since. Odd, right?”

But according to Taylor, this makes perfect sense from the perspective of Trump, who is desperate to sow doubt about election integrity. “After years in the intelligence community, I know that the worries about the Chinese Communist Party trying to manipulate American democracy are very true and very alarming,” writes Taylor. “So should Trump. But he doesn’t care much about that. What he cares about is that the threat is convenient for storytelling. To him, the China scare is the perfect pretext for his own meddling in the midterms, a threat to be invoked when useful and forgotten when not. How else do you explain that his answer to the supposed attack on our elections from China is to roll out the red carpet at Joint Base Andrews and grovel?” As many have noted, it is unusual for a U.S. president to greet visiting heads of state anywhere but the White House, but Trump met Xi at the airport personally, where he had U.S. service members on their hands and knees smoothing the red carpet.

Later at the White House, as American billionaires gathered for a lavish party Taylor notes was on par with Gatsby, in his estimation, “The widest smiles and biggest laughs may have come from the visitors. Honestly, maybe they were the only ones in the room who saw the whole picture. For two years this administration has made China the convenient villain for things Trump cares about — they’re the threat to our elections, the ones stirring up panic over data centers, the ones creating a trade imbalance that Trump must fix. Yet Xi’s delegation has long known what others are just starting to figure out. Trump doesn’t believe any of it. He uses Beijing as a foil for his own projects…. to take control of the elections… to profit from the data center boom… to run the American economy by brute force.” As Taylor concludes, ”The man who rails against communism on Fox News — and runs ads against it! — spent the evening rhetorically bear-hugging the communists scattered around his dining room. Everyone at every table was in on the joke.”

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Fired Fox host learns a hard lesson: Trump is not her 'boss'

Last week, Fox News dropped a media bombshell when it announced that Maria Bartiromo – a longtime anchor and ally of President Donald Trump – had been fired. According to political columnist Liz Dye, Bartiromo’s mistake was simple: she forgot that Trump wasn’t her boss, but that Fox – which has been at odds with the president – was.

As Dye explained on Wednesday, “Bartiromo got axed for leaking confidential company information to the White House. She made the mistake of thinking that the network and the administration were one and the same — an understandable error, since they operated as a seamless entity for almost a decade. Bartiromo believed that her job was to support Trump and use her platform to let his agents spread their message. And for many years, it was. But now Trump is a lame duck whose disastrous policies are driving the country into a ditch, and Fox is trying to execute a delicate pivot. Bartiromo doesn’t do delicate, and she’s not about to pivot. So now she’s out.”

According to Dye, this breakup has been a long time coming. Trump has long held a close relationship with Fox and its hosts, to the point where the network would back down from punishing pundits at his behest. For example, notes Dye, “In 2019, Jeanine Pirro was suspended after questioning whether Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab was ‘indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution.’ She got her job back after Trump publicly demanded she be reinstated, warning the network not to go ‘politically correct’ and hand its ratings lead to competitors. Pirro is now the U.S. attorney for D.C., while another former Fox host, Pete Hegseth, serves as secretary of defense. And the exchange goes both ways: Trump’s former Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany has her own show, and Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah served for years as senior vice president.”

Amidst this dynamic, Trump took it personally when Fox accurately called Arizona for Joe Biden during the 2020 election. Afterwards, Trump took to social media to tell his followers to look to “great alternatives” like OANN and Newsmax, Fox’s then-emerging far-right media competitors. This set off alarms within the network, which then made “the calculated decision to push Trump’s flagrant lies about a stolen election.”

Bartiromo was one of the network’s main purveyors of Trump’s election lies. For example, the day after the election, she hosted election denier Sidney Powell, whose “evidence” of voter fraud included a rambling email – reviewed by Bartiromo – from a person who claimed that “The Wind tells me I'm a ghost” and ”it appears that I was shot in the back shortly after submitting a tip to the FBI two years ago.” The email also noted that its writer had dreams that were “clearly predictions,” and that former Supreme Court Justice Antony Scalia was shot and killed during a “weeklong human hunting expedition.” Later, when Fox was hauled into court for spreading Trump’s lies, Bartiromo conceded that the email was “kooky,” but she never pushed back against Powell’s claims on air. Fox didn’t pressure its hosts to do so either, and ended up paying nearly $800 million in damages for its role in the denial campaign.

While Fox remains a “conservative behemoth,” it learned its lesson about pushing Trump’s most blatant lies. It fired Tucker Carlson in 2023 for a variety of reasons, including his participation in the big lie, and the network has backed down in other cases when Trump’s allies have attempted to stretch the truth too far. “And while the network remains comically pro-Trump,” writes Dye, “it seems to have dawned on management that yoking itself to a president whose approval ratings are sinking like a stone is not a long-term growth strategy. On July 16, Trump gave what he promised would be a blockbuster speech proving his electoral fraud claims once and for all. Fox dutifully aired it live during primetime, then instructed staff to give the fraud claims no further oxygen.”

Bartiromo, however, continued to push Trump’s conspiracies, scheduling an interview with Trump’s aide Peter Navarro, who had been convicted of contempt after refusing to testify before the January 6 Committee. According to Dye, “When Bartiromo canceled on Navarro, she forwarded the internal text from management warning against covering Trump’s speech. Navarro then passed it to the White House as evidence of Fox’s perfidy, inadvertently sealing Bartiromo’s fate. Bartiromo subordinated the needs of her employer to those of her real boss in the White House,” and learned who her real boss was the hard way.

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There is one thing that makes Trump worse than Nixon: biographer

Disgraced former President Richard Nixon “is having a moment” among MAGA, as young conservatives seek to prop him up as a victim and repair his reputation. According to Nixon biographer Lee Huebner, the 37th president’s “politics of resentment and his pugilistic style clearly appeal to the populist right," and "his antiestablishment sensibility is shared by President Donald Trump,” a longtime admirer of Nixon. But as Huebner explains in the Washington Post, “there is a fundamental difference between the two men” that MAGA is unlikely to appreciate: Nixon’s respect for democratic processes.

As Huebner wrote on Monday, the attempts to vindicate Nixon go to the top of MAGA. Perhaps the most blatant example came from Vice President JD Vance, who said in June, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” But according to Huebner, the real lesson Trumpists should take from Nixon isn’t his willingness to break the law, but his surprising devotion to upholding the Constitution.

“One of the most troubling aspects of Trump-driven MAGA politics denies election results and works to undermine confidence in America’s electoral system,” writes Huebner. “And it likes to blame an amorphous, villainous ‘deep state’ for the nation’s political problems. Nixon, by contrast, battled against such impulses even though on one notable occasion doing so cost him a chance at the presidency, and on another cost him the presidency itself.”

According to Huebner, one should consider former President Bill Clinton’s call to remember Nixon “in totality,” when the former reminded at the latter’s funeral that Nixon’s life extended beyond Watergate. “As serious as his mistakes surely were, and as Clinton also implied, a great deal can be learned” from Nixon’s other actions. And in the era of Trump, “the element of his totality that may be most beneficial to appreciate right now involves two moments when Nixon refused to join Republicans who were urging him to deny election results and defy court rulings. His refusals bookended his career in presidential politics.”

“The first such reckoning came in the 1960 presidential election, when Nixon, the vice president, finished in a virtual tie with his Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kennedy,” explains Huebner. “A 118,000-vote margin for JFK out of 68 million votes cast. Kennedy’s success depended on his extremely narrow margins in two key states, Illinois and Texas, both of which had a history of dubious vote counting. A broad chorus of his supporters urged him to contest the result, but Nixon quickly conceded, reportedly telling a friend, ‘Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.’ He may have agreed privately that he had won enough votes to elect him, but he discouraged Republican officials who began investigating the results and publicly emphasized his support for an orderly transition of power.”

Then, 13 years later as his political career collapsed under Watergate, “Nixon again demonstrated his commitment to constitutional order,” writes Huebner. “When the Supreme Court on July 24, 1974, denied the president the use of executive privilege to protect Oval Office tape recordings, including the ‘smoking gun’ tape that did him in, Nixon did not hide the tape, or destroy it, as many had urged him to do. Nixon immediately decided not only to accept the decision but also to announce publicly that he was doing so.” Impeachment pressure mounting, Nixon resigned within two weeks.

With this in mind, concludes Huebner, MAGA should take a hard look at itself. As he writes, “Respect for democratic processes — specifically, election results and court rulings — is not in vogue today in some Washington circles, even among those who purport to admire Nixon. But such respect, especially when the chips were down, was a key part of Richard Nixon’s totality.”

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'0 for 21': Trump’s 'losing streak' proves the limits of his authority

Over the course of his second administration, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has gone to federal court nearly two dozen times in its quest to seize state voter rolls, which many experts suggest is part of an effort to meddle with the upcoming midterms. But try as they might, his attorneys strike out every time. This “losing streak,” writes Casey Burgat, professor of politics and legislative affairs at George Washington University, proves that Trump doesn’t have the authority that he thinks he does.

As Burgat explains, “On August 6, a judge in Washington D.C., dismissed the DOJ’s attempt to compel D.C.’s Board of Elections to turn over its voter registration list, including sensitive information like dates of birth and driver’s license numbers. That ruling gave the Trump administration a record of 0 for 21 in federal courts across the country in their quest for state-level voter databases.”

According to Burgat, “21 federal district courts have outright dismissed the DOJ’s cases on the merits, meaning that judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents have all looked at the DOJ’s claims, evidence, and legal grounding and ruled they are so lacking that they didn’t need to hear any more. One of these cases has already been appealed by the DOJ, and the federal appeals court judge upheld the dismissal.”

Burgat argues that “twenty-one losses and zero victories is incredibly telling, especially since federal access to state voter rolls has clearly been such an important campaign for the DOJ (and Trump, for that matter).” As of August, with the midterms less than 100 days away, “48 states have received requests from the administration for their complete voter databases. For 30 states plus Washington D.C., those requests have escalated into full lawsuits in an attempt to compel the states to hand them over. A few states — notably GOP-friendly states — voluntarily handed over their data, and Oklahoma ‘settled’ its lawsuit with the DOJ by doing so. But plenty of others, including conservative states, have outright refused.”

While the Trump administration claims it needs voter rolls to prevent fraud, critics say that the president is trying “to prevent free and fair elections,” and that the voter rolls could be used for disenfranchisement and to other nefarious ends. Others argue that it’s simply a matter of privacy. As Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams declared, “I will not voluntarily commit a data breach” by handing over voter information to the DOJ.

So far 21 federal courts have sided with critics, and according to Burgat, “The judges aren’t contending that state voting rolls can be inaccurate, nor are they arguing that the DOJ isn’t a key player in enforcing federal election laws. But they are saying that the DOJ does not have the authority to compel states to hand over protected voter information that the states themselves created.”

In an effort to bolster federal control over elections, Trump has been desperately pushing Republicans to pass the SAVE Act. As Burgat explains, “Trump needs the law because he knows — and the lawsuit losses are reminding him — that only Congress has the constitutional authority to regulate federal elections. Only a Congress-passed bill can require states to provide voter data to D.C. or establish national voter-ID rules. Congress, so far, has proven unwilling or unable to turn Trump’s demands into statute. So the administration has tried to squeeze some of that authority out of laws already on the books. Judges, however, have interpreted those statutes to mean that the power the administration seeks simply isn’t there.”

As Burgat concludes, “Hidden beneath the DOJ’s losing streak is an important reminder about federalism, especially when it comes to elections in the US. Federal elections are purposefully decentralized. State and local governments are tasked with carrying them out in adherence to the federal protections and requirements Congress has deemed necessary. As we’ve seen, it can be a messy arrangement, but one that protects all of us from a federal government — and president — who wants to take over the process. And as 21 courts have reminded him, if Trump wants his executive branch to run elections, that authority can come from only one place: the United States Congress.”

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MAGA in meltdown after investigation disproves Trump’s new lie

Last year, the Trump administration hired a cybersecurity firm to investigate White House claims that voting equipment in Puerto Rico had been “compromised” in the 2020 election, but after the company found no evidence to support voter fraud, it has gone on to become the target of a smear campaign by the president’s loyalists.

According to new reporting by CNN, “After hearing that the firm had found no evidence of vote tampering, allies of President Donald Trump derailed the cybersecurity firm’s work with the government in part by spreading false claims that the firm was funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, according to the firm’s executives and documents they provided to CNN.” Jason Wareham, CEO of the firm, called Mojave Research, has revealed that a group of “White House-adjacent” Trump allies was “dissatisfied” that he “was not willing to name and shame at that moment and to say, ‘Turns out 2020 was a landslide for Trump. Nobody knew.’”

CNN notes that “Mojave Research had no prior experience in testing election systems when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence contacted them in the spring of 2025 as part of the agency’s broader probe into voting equipment. ODNI hired the firm to analyze a specific voting machine made by Liberty Vote (formerly Dominion Voting Systems) that the agency acquired from Puerto Rico. Mojave did the work in six weeks in Wareham’s basement in Reston, Virginia, according to Wareham.”

While Mojave submitted its report in July 2025, Wareham says that it has still not been made public. The company’s Chief Technology Officer Manbir Gulati, however, spoke about it at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas last week, saying, “We found extensive and largely unacceptable weaknesses, but we did not find evidence that those weaknesses were actively exploited or that votes were altered.”

“After the company made clear what it had found, multiple figures aligned with Trump began to cast doubt on the integrity of Mojave.” According to CNN, “What Wareham’s team found — and didn’t find — in his basement would become a Rorschach test for Trump administration officials focused on election issues. It’s a cautionary tale of how a company that says it wanted to provide the administration with unbiased election security analysis was rejected by a group of officials who still dispute the results of the 2020 election and have Trump’s ear. The Trump administration’s revisiting of the 2020 election has extended to Arizona, where the FBI has obtained records of an audit that confirmed Joe Biden won the state.”

“I lost count of the number of times I heard ‘Maricopa County is a crime scene,’” Wareham said. As CNN explains, “Maricopa County is Arizona’s largest county and has been at the center of Trump allies’ false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.”

According to Gulati, “What we encountered [were] a lot of competing factions within the government — people who want the boogeyman to be out there and are willing to do anything to find it and then people who actually do genuinely care about the issue [of election security]. There was a huge faction that was like, ‘Mojave doesn’t know what they’re doing.' They’re dummies and that’s why they can’t find evidence of compromise.”

CNN reports that “Wareham, a Republican, submitted a declaration in September under the penalty of perjury to the Trump administration to refute the notion that his company was ‘some form of deep plant meant to ensure the suppression of truth around compromised elections or election systems,’ the declaration says. Wareham submitted his declaration and financial statements to ODNI to prove he was not affiliated with Soros, who has long been the subject of antisemitic conspiracy theories about secret levers of power. The next month, Wareham said he received an email, reviewed by CNN, which said that ODNI had issued a ‘stop-work order’ on the contract.”

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Judge smacks down Trump’s 'desperate' attempt to seize control of elections

On Wednesday, a federal judge smacked down President Donald Trump’s “unconstitutional” attack on U.S. election integrity by ruling against an executive order that would assert federal control over mail-in voting. According to former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance, the judge’s order comes as Trump has given “every reason to take him seriously when he threatens to declare an emergency to seize control of the outcome.”

As Vance explains, “Today, in a case brought by the League of Women Voters, Judge Indira Talwani in Boston entered a nationwide order blocking the Postal Service from carrying out Trump’s efforts to assert federal control over mail-in voting policies ahead of the election. Previously, as a result of her decision in another case, his plans had been paused in some states, but not others (only states whose AGs sued were covered), creating still more confusion and an uneven playing field for voters to navigate.”

But per the judge’s order, “Where the EO is presently causing confusion and threatening both increasing chaos and an erosion of trust in our democracy, the court finds that enfranchisement heavily outweighs the executive’s attempt to unconstitutionally insert itself into the domain of election regulation.”

While the government had argued that it is too soon for a judge to deliver a final ruling, claiming that the Postal Service must first establish new rules in concordance with Trump’s EO, which could then be challenged in court, the judge “disagreed sharply,” writing, “The court finds it prudent to review the EO now, where less than 90 days pend before the midterms and the millions of citizens who rely on mail voting require clarity as to how or whether they will vote in November.” She also noted that the short amount of time before the midterms “underscores the critical need for an injunction to prevent Defendants from changing election rules on the eve of the election.”

Now, as Vance explains, the judge has “frozen the status quo in place; if her order stands, the vote will proceed without any of the modifications to the rules Trump is trying to put into place.” She also “goes to pains to emphasize how the system works,” emphasizing “that in the Motor Voter Act ‘Congress requires States to allow citizens to register by mail or when applying for a driver’s license ... and to attest to their citizenship through the use of a federal registration form ... Under the NVRA, States retain control over compiling rolls of citizens ... To avoid potentially erroneous disenfranchisement, the NVRA also prohibits States from systematically removing ineligible individuals from voter rolls fewer than 90 days before a federal election.’ States effectuate the law in different ways as is their right — Congress can set national standards in federal elections, but it’s up to the states to administer their own election.”

As a result of the ruling, “the Postal Service may not refuse ‘to transmit mail-in or absentee ballots’ and is also barred from issuing additional rules and regulations aimed at carrying out the Executive Order.”

“Today’s news is good,” writes Vance. “We would do well to remember that we are only here because of Trump’s insistence on trying to prevent the votes of Americans who don’t vote with him from counting. That’s something no president should do and no court, or citizen for that matter, should tolerate.”

“Trump has told us who he is. We absolutely must believe him and prepare to protect our right to vote,” concludes Vance. “With polls showing him seriously underwater, there is every reason to believe he will become more desperate with his back against the wall.”

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Trump’s scheme to steal the midterms will lose in court. That’s 'by design'

Faced with the prospect of a major midterm defeat, President Donald Trump is “laying the groundwork to seize ballots” and contest the outcomes of elections across the country. This is according to Miles Taylor — deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term — who on Tuesday detailed “how Trump might try to send the FBI to seize ballots & steal the midterms,” and warned that while the scheme will “likely lose in court, losing is actually part of the plan.”

As Taylor explains, “Earlier this year, the president’s agents did an obvious dry run for how to steal future elections. On January 28, the FBI raided the election hub in one of the most contested 2020 battlegrounds — Fulton County, Georgia, where Trump was previously indicted for pressuring officials to ‘find 11,780 votes’ that didn’t exist. The president himself said the raid would help him find out who ‘really won’ the 2020 election, despite the fact that those ballots had been counted three times, each time confirming that Trump lost.”

But what should worry states this time around, warns Taylor, is that the plan worked. “After Trump’s DOJ sued Fulton County for its 2020 records and failed, it decided just to go seize them. The FBI quietly went to a magistrate judge earlier this year and sought a warrant to raid the county’s election offices. Their filing rested largely on fraud claims debunked years ago and identified no concrete evidence of a crime. But the judge signed it anyway. Then FBI agents barged in and carted off 656 boxes, including the county’s only copy of its 2020 ballots. And Georgia wasn’t a one-off: the administration has gone after 2020 ballots in Arizona’s biggest battleground county, too.”

The Trump administration, says Taylor, is preparing to do it again. He notes that over the course of his second term, Trump has demanded that states hand over voter lists supposedly to search for registered noncitizens. “But the databases are notoriously faulty,” Taylor warns, “and there is limited oversight over who might get purged, raising fears that legitimate U.S. citizens in key battlegrounds would be dropped from the voter rolls.”

While several red states have complied, 30 states and D.C. refused and were sued by the administration. So far Trump has lost every case, but Taylor asserts that the intention was never to win. “They’re creating a pretext,” he writes. “In my opinion, the Trump administration is preparing the rationale for its future warrant affidavits to go seize ballots in these ‘non-compliant’ states. This will be their logic: We asked X state to let us verify its rolls to weed out fraud; it refused; the courts blocked us; therefore, no one can say whether noncitizens decided this election. So to investigate any fraud claims, we need to go get the ballots themselves.”

“The result would be chaos-by-design,” warns Taylor. “Picture FBI agents carting boxes out of election offices in two or three states with razor-thin margins, races that decide control of the House and Senate. While the ballots sit in federal custody, certification of a victor will be difficult if not impossible. In the meantime, voters will rightfully fret that Trump’s agents are meddling with the results. MAGA candidates on the losing end will refuse to concede, citing the ‘ongoing investigations.’ And the White House will make sure the fog stays thick enough to hand GOP leaders in Congress a pretext to delay seating new members, which will be the final step in preventing a peaceful transfer of power if Democrats win either chamber.”

While the matter will end up in court, once Trump has the ballots, retrieving them could take months of litigation, and “with the ballots in the custody of the feds, they’ll have the upper hand to claim possible ‘fraud’ because they’ll control the evidence,” says Taylor. “In the end, Trump’s team doesn’t care about losing in court. All they care about is fighting the battle in the court of public opinion for two months — between the election on November 3, 2026, and January 3, 2027, when the next Congress is supposed to be seated. That’s long enough to diminish confidence in the results and to create enough justification for Speaker Mike Johnson to secure support from his caucus not to hand over power.”

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The real reason the GOP election heist will fail: pure incompetence

Many commentators have raised alarm about the ways President Donald Trump and the Republican Party are laying the groundwork to steal or contest the November midterms. According to New York Times political analyst Jamelle Bouie, however, there is a clear reason the “intricate scheme” necessary for Trump to control the election results will fail: sheer incompetence.

As Bouie explains, many are “quite concerned about the midterm elections,” worrying “in particular about what Donald Trump might do to subvert the outcome. You remember January 6. You see the headlines about Trump trying to get control of mail and ballots, of Trump trying to sue states to get voter rolls. You see him issuing broad executive orders that purport to wrangle control of elections from the states to the White House. And you're worried that even if Democrats win, something will happen that will prevent them from taking power.”

But according to Bouie, actually stealing the election would be “an extraordinarily difficult lift.” He notes, for example, that the idea of posting federal agents at polls might be an intimidation tactic that “might work in a single state and might work in a cluster of districts, but there's going to be dozens of competitive districts. There are many competitive Senate seats, and states are huge. In many of these elections, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of voters will be voting. And voters, for the most part, aren't actually concentrated in a handful of places. You would need a literal army of guys to be able to successfully do this in one state.”

What’s more, asserts Bouie, “that's setting aside how the administration has acted over the past year. There's no real evidence on display that they're competent enough, put together enough, anything enough, to really accomplish this.”

He says that the same goes for the various lawsuits the Trump administration has filed regarding elections: “The administration has lost all of them. The Department of Justice literally does not have enough people to put forth to try to win these cases. And this is setting aside the fact that there's just no legal basis for the administration's attempt to seize control of elections.” While many argue that Trump and his allies don’t care about the law, Bouie says that’s not the case, explaining, “The law confers legitimacy, and they want these things to have a veneer of legitimacy, so they do care about the law. That's why they sue, right? That's why they engage in the legal process. And the fact is that the law just isn't on their side. Even Trump judges are rejecting this stuff. It’s a sign of how difficult it is to do this.”

Bouie notes that many are less worried about what happens in November than about the possibility that Republicans will have some scheme for subverting the outcome. But he argues, “I think a lot of you overestimate both Republican ingenuity and the success of various Republican plots. I think a lot of folks have bought into the Republican Party's own propaganda about itself, about the genius of figures like Mitch McConnell and the like. I think if you take an objective look at Republican plots, what you see is that a lot of them just aren't very successful. They don't quite amount to much. You see plenty of failure.”

Furthermore, he explains, there is no mechanism for Republican lawmakers to prevent the swearing in of Democratic members. When the House reconvenes in January, Mike Johnson (R-LA) will no longer be the majority leader, regardless of which party comes out ahead. He’ll have to be reconfirmed as such after the members have been sworn in. And while objections can be raised to the seating of individual Democrats, “there is no rule or law that says that objections have to be honored during the swearing-in process… The objection can be registered and they can receive the oath anyway, and then the majority afterwards would deal with those objections. And the majority in the case Democrats win would be the Democrats.”

Bouie does assert that Americans should remain "vigilant” by participating in the election in overwhelming numbers and “being ready to object with your physical presence should anything really pop off in January.” He also asserts, however, that it is improbable that the Republicans can pull off such a heist. As he concludes, “I'm not going to totally rule it out, but you have to recognize that to do all of these things together requires a kind of intricate scheme with a lot of moving pieces and a lot of high competence. And I need everyone to ask themselves: have they seen the capacity to do that from this administration?”

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'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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A whistleblower just exposed the truth about Trump’s election lies

On Thursday evening, President Donald Trump will deliver a prime-time address in which he’s expected to push his thoroughly debunked 2020 election denial lies. According to one former Trump official, however, Trump’s claims are not only nonsense, but his national address will backfire when the president comes off as a “sore loser.”

This is according to security expert Miles Taylor, who served under President George W. Bush then in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, famously leaking about the latter administration in an anonymously written New York Times piece entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” Taylor appeared on MSNOW Thursday morning to provide his thoughts on Trump’s pending address.

According to Taylor, the address will likely serve up “bad leftovers” of Trump’s typical election conspiracy theories, like that China interfered in the 2020 election.

“Here's the thing,” said Taylor. “They did. We already know about that. We also know that the Iranians tried to interfere, and the Russians tried to interfere. We know that because the American intelligence community, five years ago, declassified a report that said, here are all the foreign threat actors that tried to muck around in the 2020 election. What was really important is that the intelligence community said none of them managed to access sensitive systems. They didn't change votes. They may have tried to muck around. They may have used social media. They may have tried to get voter information. But they didn't change the outcome of 2020.”

Taylor guessed that Trump and his team are “hoping that we've forgotten about that and that they can dredge up the underlying intelligence reports that led to those conclusions, and that may be by cherry picking those reports and releasing them, they can convince people that it was worse than it was, and that somehow Donald Trump had the election stolen from him.”

He went on to explain that not only did he help build the election security architecture for Trump, noting, “I can tell you with great confidence that those elections that we protected during his presidency were the most free and fair and secure in modern American history,” but that they didn’t do it at the president’s behest. Rather, “we did it despite Donald Trump. He did not seem to want us to protect elections against foreign interference.”

“I mean that very sincerely,” Taylor elaborated. “The president seemed very averse to our efforts to protect elections. He groaned about it. He did not want to take briefings about it. And now he wants to claim that someone hacked our elections and stole them from him.”

Taylor then asserted that the president’s address later in the evening — in which it has been reported he will promote his election lies and declare the elections of Georgia’s Democratic senators illegitimate — will backfire for two reasons.

“From a national security standpoint,” he said, “by going out there and declassifying information that the CIA and other agencies apparently want to keep secret, you may expose sources and methods. You may put our country in danger by putting that information out there. But also, you are emboldening our adversaries. You are showing them that they don't have to hack into our voting machines to upend our politics. All they have to do is reach their hand into our country, and they can destabilize the political system. If you go out there and inflate their efforts as something bigger than they were, Mr. President, you are doing their job for them.”

“But if you don't care about that,” Taylor continued, “if that's fine with you, then I'll tell you politically why this is bad for you. Because if you make this case tonight that a country did something that they didn't actually do, that they stole an election from you that wasn't stolen, even your own supporters will think you look like a loser. They will think you look like a sore loser. And in politics, no one wants to associate with a loser. So if you're worried about the vibes in the MAGA movement, the worst thing you can do is what you're preparing to do tonight. Mr. President. I wouldn't do it.”

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'Why is this happening?' Republicans panic as Trump's lies pile up

On Wednesday, Fox News chief congressional correspondent Chad Pergram asked Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) a simple question: “In your mind, are Senators Ossoff and Warnock duly chosen and sworn?”

“I don’t know,” she responded.

“You don't know whether or not they are legitimately chosen as senators of the United States Senate?” Pergram pressed.

“There were concerns expressed not only about Georgia,” she persisted, "but about other states.”

Her response did not inspire confidence among Republicans hoping to leave Trump’s allegations of election fraud behind. As journalist Melik Abdul, who contributes to conservative outlets like Newsmax, Fox, and the Washington Examiner, put it, “We're back to straddling the fence over the 2020 election as we fight to keep control of Congress? This can't be happening. Why is this happening.”

Pergam asked Lummis about Senators Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Raphael Warnock (D-GA) due to rumors that President Donald Trump will allege the illegitimacy of their elections during a primetime address scheduled for Thursday. Trump has claimed that Georgia’s 2020 election was stolen, but state officials and audits repeatedly found these assertions to be false. Multiple investigations, recounts, and court reviews confirmed no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed Georgia’s results. Now, Trump's renewed fixation on denying the 2020 election has many legal experts warning it's a sign of Trump’s growing “authoritarian” ambitions.

As Pergam was questioning Lummis, the confirmation hearing for Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, was taking place, in which the issue of the 2020 election was raised again – this time by Ossoff, who asked Clayton, “Who won the 2020 election?”

“I’m not going to get into that with you,” replied Clayton. Ossoff continued to press him on the matter, and Clayton snapped, “I think I’ve answered your question,” even though he had not. This repeated several times – Ossoff asking who won the 2020 election, Clayton insisting he answered, though he had not – until Clayton simply sat back in silence and refused to speak.

“This is so incredibly embarrassing,” posted conservative journalist Brad Polumbo in response to the exchange.

“Trump requires everyone who wants to advance under him to constantly engage in public displays of humiliation,” claimed Project 2025 contributor Richard Hanania, a former Trump supporter turned vocal critic.

“This is an absurd person to nominate to run DNI,” declared Republican strategist Tim Miller. “Anyone who voted to confirm him cares absolutely zero about our national security and does not deserve the responsibility of being a US senator.”

Conservative radio host Erick Erickson seconded the humiliation, posting, "This is embarrassing. Ossoff is going to cruise to re-election when the GOP does stuff like this."

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Legal expert tears apart Trump's 'extortion' of blue states

New reporting has uncovered a White House policy that withholds antiterrorism funds from states that don’t comply with the Trump administration’s election rules. This effort, declared a former US attorney on Wednesday, amounts to “extortion.”

“Threatening to withhold federal antiterrorism funds from states unless they comply with Trump’s demands regarding elections is nothing but extortion,” posted Barb McQuade, who in addition to serving as a US attorney is currently a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and legal analyst for MSNOW.

As CNN revealed in late June, “The Trump administration is threatening to withhold tens of millions of dollars in federal homeland security funds from states unless they adopt a sweeping set of election changes.” These changes include “phasing out certain electronic voting systems and moving to hand-marked paper ballots. They must also run their voter rolls through a controversial Department of Homeland Security citizenship verification database.” States that don’t comply will lose DHS grants totaling more than $1 billion annually. These funds “are one of Washington’s main vehicles for helping state and local governments prevent terrorism, protect infrastructure and prepare for major disasters.”

According to the New York Times, “The changes could face numerous legal roadblocks, partly because the executive branch does not have constitutional authority to regulate elections, which states administer and Congress broadly oversees.” As McQade notes, “Conditions on grants must be tied to the purpose of the grant.”

A judge has already barred the Trump administration from forcing states to “use a centralized national database of citizens built for checking immigration status, known as the SAVE system, to verify voters on their rolls, saying the move violated at least three laws. Two provisions in the FEMA grants would require the same process.” Under these provisions, states would also be required to submit plans for transitioning to hand-marked paper ballots and provide proof that they are conducting manual post-election audits of 5 percent of ballots. The switch, reports the Times, would cost states hundreds of millions of dollars, and the affected grants tend to go to populous states with large urban areas, many of which have drawn President Donald Trump’s ire by voting against him, like California and New York.

“After denying disaster relief funding and stripping millions from counterterrorism programs, the Trump administration is once again putting New Yorkers’ lives at risk to forward their political agenda,” said New York Governor Kathy Hochul of the new requirements. “Unlike the President, my number one priority is New Yorkers’ safety, and I will fight to ensure our state has every resource available to keep us secure.”

The Times also notes that these “policies align closely with some of the goals pushed by right-wing activists that are rooted in false conspiracy theories about election machines and voting by noncitizens during the 2020 election.”

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‘Truly bizarre behavior': Trump DOJ threatens election officials to promote voting lie

On Tuesday, NBC News confirmed that the Justice Department has sent threatening letters to election officials spanning every state and Washington, D.C., asserting that they could “face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting.” According to NBC, the letters are the latest move in President Donald Trump’s effort to promote his false claims of widespread noncitizen voting and “assert more federal control over state elections.”

As NBC explains, “The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain ‘clean voter lists.’” And as NBC notes, noncitizen voting is so rare it’s almost nonexistent, “but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.”

The DOJ letters assert that state election officials “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” any noncitizen voting. They also emphasize that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a voting registration list or who helps noncitizens receive and cast ballots in any way could be subject to criminal liability, and that “an intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation.”

According to Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican election official who received one of the letters, the threats amounted to “truly bizarre behavior.”

Posting on social media, she revealed, “Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution. I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts. This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

Per NBC, “While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.”

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'Doomsday': Fox analyst says Trump’s election meddling 'has to stop'

According to Fox News senior political analyst Juan Williams, “doomsday speculation” is rampant on Capitol Hill as lawmakers from across the political spectrum watch President Donald Trump ramp up his election meddling. With Trump’s schemes pushing the country toward a full-on “constitutional crisis,” Williams says the effort “has to stop” before it destroys the American experiment.

Writing in the Hill, Williams asserts, “Trump is pushing every button with the November midterms getting closer.” With surveys showing not only that Trump is wildly unpopular, but that his party is at a major disadvantage heading into the November elections, Williams raises the words of Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who recently warned that Trump is willing to “deny the results of midterms if they do not go his way.”

Evidence of this, says Williams, is in the president's policy priorities. Instead of passing vital security bills and affordable housing legislation, he’s proven his willingness to tank both in favor of pushing his voter ID act, which he believes will suppress Democratic voters. As a result, “Trump’s fixation with stopping a blue wave in the midterms now defines all politics.”

Williams notes that Trump has scored a number of victories to his voter suppressive ends, like “pressing Republican state legislators to draw new congressional districts to increase the number of seats likely to be won by Republicans. The Supreme Court made history by weakening the Voting Rights Act to allow some of that mid-decade redistricting. That ruling ignited racial tensions nationally by allowing white Republican state legislators to dismantle majority Black districts that vote for Democrats. Trump has also pushed the Justice Department to force states to give him access to voter registration rolls so that he can look for voters he thinks should not be allowed to vote.”

His mindset, warns Williams, has been betrayed by Trump’s own words, saying recently, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” And it’s musings like these that have lawmakers worried about a “doomsday scenario” in which “Trump will press Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to refuse to seat Democrats who would form a new House majority. That fear grows because the scenario has precedent.”

As Williams explains, “Last year, Johnson delayed the swearing-in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ.) for nearly two months after she won a special election, in order to shield the president from the release of embarrassing files about his decades-long friendship with notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein ... Election rigging is small ball by comparison.”

In this scenario, Democrats win enough seats to take the majority, but the Speaker delays or refuses to seat members from narrowly won districts, “citing bogus allegations of voter fraud.” This fight would end up before the conservative Supreme Court, “who has already shown itself to be corrupt and serving partisan interests that protect Trump from accountability.”

To make matters worse, writes Williams, the nation “has grown accustomed to the threatening presence of Trump-controlled military and law enforcement agents in Washington, where Congress ultimately decides the disputed House elections. It is a constitutional crisis waiting to happen — the ‘sum of all fears’ that could bring the American experiment, now celebrating its 250th anniversary, to its greatest test.”

“This would all be a bad political satire if it was not so scary,” Williams concludes. “Comedian Bill Maher summed up Trump’s approach to elections during a recent interview with Vice President JD Vance: ‘Under Trump, you guys have two outcomes an election can be: Either we win, or they cheated. That s— has to stop.’ Maher is right. It has to stop.”

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On-air Trump meltdown reveals 'widespread awareness' of his unmistakable 'mental illness'

On Sunday, President Donald Trump stormed off from a Meet the Press Interview after correspondent Kristen Welker noted that he had presented “no evidence” to support his claims that Democrats have been stealing elections. While he was primarily focused on the 2020 election he lost, he also asserted that the election underway in California is in the process of being stolen. When pushed for evidence, he began shouting about the “crooked” media before saying abruptly, “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough,” then tearing off his microphone and stomping from the set.

According to political reporter Brian Beutler, Trump’s eruption offers “something that could help us beat back his election lies more thoroughly,” as the president made the allegation when he had already “toppled the firewall separating the White House and Justice Department.”

“The lie rests incongruously alongside federal inaction,” Beutler explains. “If there were evidence of fraud, this Justice Department would collect it aggressively and bandy it about for the whole world to see. It would raid counting facilities and seize ballots and air allegations at press conferences. The fact that nothing of the sort has happened is a tell. It confirms widespread awareness, even in Trump’s orbit, that his lies are just what they appear to be. And it should mark a change in how the political establishment grapples with Trump’s addiction to promoting election conspiracy theories.”

In this context, Beutler argues that the media and others should change how they frame these matters, because it’s not merely that Trump has “no evidence” — “it’s that the election was not stolen.” While it may be prudent for a journalist to admit their own lack of certainty by raising that there is “no evidence,” it leaves Trump a door open because he can say there’s no proof that it wasn’t stolen, “because proving a negative is impossible.” So Beutler suggests that the inquiry shouldn’t end at lack of evidence, but should take into account that there is “substantial evidence that Trump knows his claims aren’t true.” As he notes, there have been plenty of examples of the president admitting his loss.

With all this in mind, says Beutler, a journalist’s response to Trump’s claims should be, “A thorough investigation established that you know you lost and are being dishonest about it.”

Beutler says that it could be that Trump’s “mental illness may have weakened his grasp on reality” to the point where he’s actually convinced himself he’s won to protect himself from “ego injury.” But now, when he tells such a lie regarding the election in California and his DOJ does nothing more than make a vague statement about investigating without providing evidence, not only of a crime, but even that an investigation is happening at all, it suggests that he and his allies don’t really believe their own allegations. If the conspiracy they assert is underway, “Where are the FBI agents executing search warrants? Where’s the urgency to get to the bottom of it?” But in all likelihood, writes Beutler, Trump won’t be able to find allies willing to carry out such an effort because it would constitute “severe crimes” for which they could be punished.

Therefore, Beutler suggests that “this should be the end of the line for playing cute with Trump’s election lies. People who care about the truth should call his bluff, here and now, in order to have it out over something less consequential than a federal election. It would not be good, exactly, for Trump et al to incite a mini insurrection in southern California, but it might force the rest of us to improve our civic hygiene. Less eye rolling, fewer weasel words, more fighting to vindicate the truth.”

To that end, prescribes Beutler, journalists should stop saying Trump has “no evidence” or that he “believes” Democrats rig elections. Instead, they should say outright that “he has a habit of lying about elections when he or his friends lose.” At the same time, whenever he tells such a lie, House Democrats should raise the issue of impeachment as “it’s hard to imagine a more clearly impeachable offense or grave violation of the presidential oath than Trump’s years-long concerted conspiracy to mislead the public about the integrity of elections.”

“We should thus stop trying to race past Trump’s lies as though dwelling upon them would be rude, like pointing at someone’s acne or mocking their nervous tic,” Beutler concludes. “We should work as hard to vindicate reality as he does to deceive, and maintain that energy until he leaves office or the lies stop.”

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