President Donald Trump's refusal to accept the 2026 midterm election results unless he wins has alarmed numerous experts. Now an expert on authoritarianism is explaining that Trump has already started laying the foundations for an excuse if Republicans lose as expected — and that this is part of his larger plan to overturn the result.
After reviewing cases in which Trump has used the full force of the federal government to persecute people accused falsely of voter fraud — a pattern that the author and her colleagues at Project Democracy are working through the courts to stop — the article argues that Trump has already brought upon America the early phases of authoritarianism.
"All of the helicopters, armed agents, press conferences, and propaganda are pieces of theater with one goal: convincing people that President Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud are true," wrote Project Democracy's Amanda Carpenter for The Bulwark on Thursday.
She added, "Over the summer, the Trump administration claimed 250,000 people were illegally registered to vote across the states of California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada—three of them led by Democratic governors. The government came up with these numbers by relying on a deeply flawed system that generates huge numbers of false positives."
She pointed out that "Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin previously said there were nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada—a claim that entirely evaporated under scrutiny. Instead of rethinking its methods, the administration is using the same kinds of lists to conduct high-visibility arrests and to pressure state officials to segregate ballots. But the administration escalated without evidence. Despite the claims of rampant fraud, the Department of Justice has charged only 156 people with voting-related offenses during Trump’s second term."
Speaking to AlterNet in September, a prominent law professor offered a different perspective on the threat Trump actually poses to American democracy.
Loyala Law School professor Justin Levitt — who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden as Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Senior Policy Advisor for Democracy and Voting Rights, respectively — told AlterNet that it is impossible for Trump to steal the 2026 midterms no matter how many possibilities he came up with. This observation came after this journalist listed five possible ways Trump could do it.
"None of them will work," Levitt told AlterNet. "Those five things, and 18 others, all sort of fall down at the point of possibility. You're absolutely right that he will try something: one, maybe several of those, or other things. But none of those things will succeed. And I can walk you through each and every one of them and point you to why they won't succeed."
Speaking to AlterNet in June, Common Cause voting rights advocate Dan Vicuña argued that regardless of how you look at it in terms of Trump's ability to steal the midterms, it is clear that he wants to do so.
“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.”
