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.”