President Donald Trump keeps threatening to use the military to prevent Democrats from taking one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections — and a commentator argued Wednesday that Democrats are correct in suing in response.
“There’s a new lawsuit that might sound dramatic at first, but the question at the center of it is actually pretty simple,” wrote NewsNation and The Hill contributor Lindsey Granger. “Are armed federal agents going to show up at polling places in the next election? Yes or no?”
Granger explained that the Democratic National Committee is suing the Trump administration because, despite filing 11 Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Department of Defense since October, they have allegedly not received a straight answer on “whether there are any plans or discussions about deploying federal officers or troops to polling locations, ballot drop boxes or election offices.”
Because Trump has previously argued he should be able to “take over” elections, and some of his outside advisers have suggested declaring a national emergency as a pretext for seizing voting machines or placing federal agents near polling locations, Granger wrote Democrats need clarification.
“The backdrop here is something bigger: months of renewed claims that elections in America are riddled with fraud,” Granger wrote. “The president has repeatedly suggested Democrats can only win by cheating, which is backed in no evidence. And when you look at the actual data, those claims don’t hold up.”
She pointed out that the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, tracked election fraud cases for more than two decades and found a rate of 0.0000845 percent, with no election outcomes changed by ballot fraud.
“Think about that for a second,” Granger wrote. “Every major election has lawyers from both parties inside counting rooms watching the process. For widespread fraud to exist, you’d have to believe thousands of Republican and Democratic attorneys are either incompetent or complicit.”
Granger is not alone in calling out Trump’s attempts to seize control of America’s elections as based on lies. In February conservative columnist George F. Will wrote in The Washington Post that in a 2022 report by eight conservatives — including two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general and two Republican election law specialists — “they examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”
Will later added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”
Conservative historian Robert Kagan told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in February that he fears Republicans are outright supporting dictatorship.
“The Republicans have become the party of dictatorship,” Kagan told Amanpour, adding that Democrats have not sufficiently stood up to Trump to counter him.
“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan argued to Amanpour. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”
