President Donald Trump is aware that he is likely to lose in the 2026 midterm elections, and so he has a plan to stop them from happening: Just take over voting machines.
“If the federal government declared some digital voting machines off-limits at the last minute, it would set off a chain of emergency court hearings, leaving elections directors scrambling to find another way to print and count ballots before those cases resolved,” reported The Guardian. “Early voting could crater. Election Day voting could be curtailed. And results might not be ready for weeks.”
Trump openly admits that he hopes Republicans will take over the midterm elections so that his party will not lose control of the Senate or House of Representatives.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump told Dan Bongino on the former FBI staffer’s podcast in February. “We should take over the voting in at least – many – 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
The Guardian reported that Trump has focused on executive order 13848, which the president has already used “to impose sanctions and freeze assets in response to an ‘unusual or extraordinary’ foreign threat to national security or the economy. It requires an emergency declaration, which Trump made in his March elections order.”
Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, told The Guardian that the order was only written to empower the president to impose sanctions, “not to empower the director of national intelligence to fiddle with elections.” As Trump conceives of using it, the order would allow the president to directly meddle with voting machines if he does not like how they will potentially vote.
“It basically means you’re denied access to your property,” Taylor explained. “The evidence would then be classified, and states would not be able to certify what they would not be able to access.”
The Guardian further explained that Trump and his administration “could start seizing machines across the country while claiming to look for evidence of interference, while stating in court that they don’t have to disclose what they’re looking for or how long they’ll be looking because doing so would violate national security and the sanctity of the investigation.”
Although Trump’s efforts would likely be voided by court order, there is no guarantee that they would follow the order in such a fashion that would prevent their actions from interfering with the election results.
The Guardian is not alone in reporting that Trump has ambitious plans to rig the 2026 midterm elections. Earlier this month The New Republic’s editor Michael Tomasky reported that “we’re now beginning to see” Trump’s midterm agenda. White House activists are circulating a draft proposal in which Trump would declare a national emergency via executive order, ban mail-in voting and require voter ID. He would justify his actions by claiming that China cost him the 2020 presidential election.
"The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie," Tomasky explained, later adding, "But Trump administration officials—including Attorney General Bill Barr — pushed the China lie aggressively. So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures."
The Trump White House has defended its agenda.
“The only people who should be concerned by this are criminals,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Washington Post. “Noncitizen voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”
