Project 2026: How to Steal an Election.

Let me Count the Ways

Image: brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports

I know what the world has done to my brother, and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963

Charisma must of necessity move in one of three directions: toward dissolution, toward traditional authority, or toward rational-legal authority.

— Max Weber, Economy and Society, 1921

Obviously, no president in American history has exhibited more authoritarian tendencies than Donald Trump. Only Andrew Jackson — “Old Hickory” — comes close to matching the anti-democratic impulses of the current president. Not coincidentally, that same Jackson — the “Indian fighter,” slave owner, and land speculator — happens to be Trump’s favorite president.

Trump’s record is clear. He incited a violent and deadly insurrection in an attempt to remain in power after losing the free, fair, and democratic election of 2020. His effort failed, but the attack on the constitutional transfer of power remains one of the darkest episodes in modern American history.

After returning to office in 2025, Trump moved quickly to shield those involved. He issued sweeping, unconditional pardons to the January 6 rioters and granted commutations to others, effectively absolving the very people who had participated in his attempt to overturn the election.

Project 2026

As desperately as he may yearn to do so, Trump does not have the power to unilaterally cancel the midterm elections this November. The principal constitutional roadblock prohibiting him from taking over this nation-state’s election apparatus is that each state, with Congressional oversight, runs its own federal, state, and local elections.

Yet, Cleta Mitchell, as a former Trump lawyer who helped him in his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, has predicted that despite Congressional non-approval or constitutional prohibitions, Trump will find a way to “exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.”

What those “protections” look like relative to the upcoming midterm elections is the subject of this essay.

Given Trump’s autocratic tendencies, his well-documented narcissism, and his decision to surround himself with loyalists whose allegiance is to him personally rather than to the Constitution, the country, or even a coherent conservative ideology, it is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss the dangers he poses as merely hypothetical.

Many of the extraordinary — and in some cases arguably unconstitutional — actions Trump considered in 2020, including proposals to use the military to seize voting machines in key battleground states, can no longer be viewed as unthinkable. In today’s political, social, economic, cultural, and racial climate, the prospect of such abuses of power cannot simply be waved away as impossible or outlandish.

Fears about how far Trump may go to remain in power are grounded in his history of intimidation, coercion, and political aggression.

In 2018, Trump was still relatively new to national politics. In 2022, Democrats controlled both the White House and Congress. During those years, he lacked the power and institutional support necessary to realize his long-standing ambition of exerting comprehensive control over the electoral system.

The upcoming November midterms, however, will take place under a far more radicalized Trump administration — one that many critics argue is increasingly determined to weaken, marginalize, and suppress political opposition.

Our elections have faced an elevated level of risk for some time and now there’s one additional factor that’s going to exacerbate all the other risks, which is a weaponized federal government that might be deployed in ways that can disrupt or interfere in free and fair elections. That’s a dramatic new factor this year, says Wendy R. Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice.

Trump’s deployment of active duty National Guardsmen and Guardswomen, Marines and Army personnel earlier this year in response to protests against his personal goon squad — ICE — in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, was followed by a similar but even more repressive federal takeover of Dee Cee itself.

The midterm elections represent the Democrats’ last meaningful opportunity to check Trump’s power before he leaves office in 2029 — unless, of course, he follows through on his repeated public musings about seeking an unconstitutional third term. If Republicans retain control of Washington in November, it is entirely plausible that Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court majority could approve such a bid.

Trump’s escalating efforts to influence the upcoming midterms have made his intentions increasingly clear.

Below are some of the principal ways — at least so far — that Trump and his allies are attempting to shape the outcome of the midterms before a single vote is cast:

• He pressured Texas to adopt an unprecedented mid-decade congressional redistricting plan designed to create five additional Republican seats in the House of Representatives;
• Several other Republican-controlled states have followed Texas’s lead and are pursuing similar redistricting efforts;
• He has vowed to “get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES,” through an executive order. “If we do these TWO things,” he wrote, “we will pick up 100 more seats.” Indeed, he has ordered the Postal Service to sit on all mail-in ballots in states that do not turn over their voting rosters to him and/or his voter suppressors;
• In March, Trump signed an executive order that would essentially end all voter registration drives;
• An order that would determine how voters cast their ballots;
• Trump’s order further demanded proof of citizenship requirements, including a passport or birth certificate, in order to both register and to actually vote in federal elections.
• And, crucially, and perhaps most importantly, an order as to how and by whom votes are counted.

The voting rights group Fair Fight called calls all of these moves a “MAGA fever dream.”

As noted, Trump has special animus against mail-in voting even though he himself routinely votes by mail. His order specifies that mail-in ballots must be received by Election Day or else states will lose either federal funding or face lawsuits from his “Justice” Department — or both. And, the monstrosity known as DOGE and the Hitlerian named Department of “Homeland” Security will be tasked with sifting through a freshly minted Homeland Security citizenship verification database, and then subpoena any state’s voting records in search of alleged voter fraud.

Incidentally, where does Trump’s insistence that mail-in voting is inherently fraudulent come from? It is more than interesting that Trump issued this latest threat to ban mail-in ballots and outlaw voting machines after he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he claimed told him, “Your [2020] election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.”

There is also a little-noticed section of Trump’s order that calls on the little-known Election Assistance Commission to “rescind all previous certifications of voting equipment based on prior standards.” It specifies that states should adopt technology that is not currently available on the market, putting them in a seeming catch-22 — requiring them to use voting machines that are simply not available for sale or lease. If those “old” machines are used but not “certified” by Trumpanzees, Trump will resurrect his 2020 plan to seize them. “The executive order lays fresh groundwork for an attack on the outcome of elections that involves claims of compromised or errant voting machinery,” writes Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama.

All of these draconian measures have been packaged and labeled into the supremely Orwellian named Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. This latest Trump-inspired proposal is designed to codify many of his voter-suppression initiatives into federal law.

Among its most controversial provisions is a requirement that could prevent married women from voting if their voter registration records still list their maiden names rather than their married names. The SAVE Act has passed the Republican-controlled House multiple times, but it has thus far stalled in the Senate.

For now, many of Trump’s election-related executive orders and initiatives have been blocked by the courts. Trump, meanwhile, continues to denounce judges who rule against him, frequently branding them as “radical left” activists. Given his past conduct, there is little reason to believe he will quietly accept midterm election results that do not favor him; he is likely to challenge unfavorable outcomes as fraudulent.

At the time of this writing, the Supreme Court is preparing to issue its long-awaited ruling on birthright citizenship. Trump has challenged the long-standing constitutional fiat that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen. Although the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to persons born within the nation’s jurisdiction, Trump argues that the amendment was intended only to confer automatic citizenship on the immediate descendants of formerly enslaved people following the Civil War. Under that interpretation, birthright citizenship would not apply to black people as it has since passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which taken together, granted full citizenship to all black people regardless of their “previous condition of servitude.” Trump’s plan would place every African American’s citizenship status into a form of legal limbo which would then require every single one of us to somehow “prove” that we really are “Americans.”

Trump’s response to the nationwide No Kings protests on June 14 was his order for ICE to target America’s largest cities. He identified such cities as “the core of the Democrat Power Center…where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base [and] cheat in Elections.”

And then there is also much concern and worry that Trump’s mass deportation agenda will morph into a vast, nationwide police state which uses the election policing ruse as only one part of his final establishment of repressive police power against anyone who dares oppose him.

In addition to federalizing the National Guard and ordering the military to not merely patrol the polls, but Trump’s forces would also do citizenship checks at polling stations. They already are conducting ICE raids in Democratic areas and arresting politicians who do not comply with his policies — all in preparation for the outright rigging/theft of the November midterm elections.

To bring this point home, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon said on a recent podcast. “You’re damn right. They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s going to be ICE officers near polling places,”

Cleta Mitchell, referenced above, is a former Trump lawyer who helped the president attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Now Mitchell leads a national network of election deniers. She told former Congressman Jody Hice (R-GA) that “the chief executive’s authority is limited in his role with regard to elections except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States, as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have.”

Hannah Fried is Executive Director of All Voting Is Local, a pro-democracy group. Her response Mitchell’s threat is as obvious as it is telling:

“The thing I learned on January 6 was that election deniers don’t have to change the laws or the policies. They will take what they want by any means.”

The enemy within

Recall that two weeks after Trump’s 2020 resounding loss, he fired Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Trump fired Krebs because he tweeted an interagency statement declaring the 2020 November elections to be “the most secure in American history.”

Firing Krebs, however, did not come close to soothing Trump’s but-hurt ego. Indeed, he issued an executive order in April 2025 stripping Krebs of his security clearance for having “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.” He also ordered all federal agencies to “suspend” any security clearances held by Krebs’ and/or his associates. Krebs unceremoniously resigned as chief intelligence and public policy officer at SentinelOne, a cybersecurity company worth $5 billion. “It’s about the government pulling its levers to punish dissent,” Krebs told the Wall Street Journal.

So…when Trump declared that one of his primary purposes in running for the presidency again was to wreak revenge, vengeance upon, and exact retribution from all those who had prosecuted (read “persecuted”) him during his first ill-fated term as president.

Thus, in March, Trump issued an executive order against New York City’s whitest white-shoe law firm, Perkins Coie, because it had had past dealings with Hillary Clinton and George Soros.

Also in March, Trump revoked the security clearance of lawyer Mark Zaid, who represented an intelligence community whistleblower who exposed Trump’s attempt to force Ukraine to falsely accuse Joe Biden and his family of wrongdoing before and during the 2020 election. Zaid’s efforts led directly to Trump’s first impeachment.

These moves against lawyers and premier universities and “mainstream” media function as de facto election interference moves.

Yet another, April 24 executive order, accused ActBlue, a long-time Democratic Party-friendly activist group which has raised $16 billion for Democrats since 2004, of accepting illegal foreign contributions and straw donations. He ordered then Attorney General Pam Bondi to complete and investigation of ActBlue within 180 days. ActBlue called the “investigation, “Trump’s latest front in his campaign to stamp out all political, electoral and ideological opposition.”

“The targeting of individuals and groups, using the unique law enforcement powers of the federal government, can really be devastating,” says Weiser. “Even if they’re unlawful, and even if you win, there’s so much damage that that could cause, as a method of control or intimidation or retaliatory punishment against people involved in the elections process.”

And who can forget Trump’s public demand that Russia hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 campaign? And then, after he actually won the Electoral College, which put him into the soon-to-be lily-white White House, he repeatedly called evidence of Russian interference “a hoax.”

In that vein, voting rights experts and advocates are concerned that Trump’s unwillingness to stop election interference amounts to a not-so-tacit invitation to foreign and/or domestic actors to access voting machinery, and/or compromise state voter rolls, or even disable power grids or other critical infrastructure. During the 2024 election, for example, actual bomb threats were called into polling places in largely Democratic counties in at least five battleground states.

“The idea that we would unilaterally disarm our intelligence capabilities when the world is far more dangerous and more contentious and the role of the United States in the world is being challenged far more than in 2017 and yet we have far less capabilities aimed at protecting our elections, it’s madness,” says Alexandra Chandler, a military intelligence analyst who now serves as director of the elections program at Protect Democracy.

Punishing Democrats

During the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka in May of 20225, Trump allies in the DOJ charged Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) for clashing with ICE agents. Arresting a sitting Congresswoman for simply protesting what was clearly and unlawful arrest signaled a dangerous escalation of Trump’s “weaponization” of ICE and law enforcement generally. Congressional historians informed us that the last time a sitting House member faced similar felony charges was back to 1799.

This tactic was only gradually becoming more common in high-profile political situations until the Trump regime ratcheted it up exponentially. For example, Trump’s DOJ overruled its own career prosecutors and forced them to drop corruption charges against former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, which one ex-prosecutor said amounted to a quid pro quo made in return for the mayor’s support of Trump’s mass deportation program. The Justice Department subsequently announced an investigation of Adams’ then-leading opponent, Democratic mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, a month before the election. ICE agents also arrested Democratic mayoral candidate Brad Lander a week before the primary as he was escorting a migrant out of a New York City court. Lander held onto the migrant and demanded to see a judicial warrant as federal agents moved to detain the man.

Trump’s InJustice Department

Obviously the DOJ is the nerve center of Trump’s attempt to weaponize the federal government for his own ends, including rigging and stealing the midterm elections.

Earlier this month, Trump called for a special prosecutor to yet again investigate the 2020 election. This signals quite clearly that the Department of Justice (DOJ) could launch high-profile investigations into alleged voter fraud and pressure states to adopt more restrictive voting policies — for this year’s elections. Project 2025 — the widely discussed conservative policy blueprint for a second Trump administration — even had the nerve to propose that the DOJ use a Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan Act to prosecute election officials who issue voting guidance that Republicans oppose. This, of course, would represent a dramatic departure from the law’s original purpose, which was to protect the civil and voting rights of formerly enslaved people — black people. The DOJ is also reportedly considering criminal charges against election officials whose voting systems fail to meet the administration’s standards for election security.

Trump’s political appointees at Justice have removed all senior managers in the Department’s voting section and ordered the dismissal of every single major active case.

Most egregious is Trump’s complete dismantling of the DOJ’s civil rights division, which was developed historically to enforce and protset the civil rights of black people. As such, the civil rights division has been known as its “crown jewel”

Despite its storied history, Trump appointed Harmeet Dhillon, a loyalist with a long history of attacking voting rights, as head of the division. She promptly gutted the division’s staff and completely changed its priorities.

Seventy percent of its 250 lawyers have left the civil rights division since January, and the department’s voting section, which enforces the Voting Rights Act and other voting rights laws, has shrunk from thirty lawyers to just a handful.

And, of course, both the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act have been completely gutted by Trump’s Supreme Court. Those landmark rulings are now legally defunct and meaningless and essentially dead letters. As such, within hours after The Supremes put the final nail into the Voting Rights coffin, practically every GOP-controlled state virtually tripped over themselves in their rush to eliminate black-majority Congressional districts, hoping to ensure Republican control of the House come next January.

Conclusion

This list of the Trump regime’s efforts to subvert the November midterms is far from exhaustive. It is meant to serve as a wake-up call for anyone who cannot fathom the fact that Trump is yet again leadisng an insurrection, albeit so far a non-volent insurrection.

He learned much from his failed attempt to overthrow the government in 2020. The most important thing that he learned then is that he did not have the “right”{ people in place to effectuate his power grab.

Since and because of his win in 2024, Trump has filled his regime with a complete clown car full of sycophants, acolytes, quislings, and bootlickers. These people’s principal mission is to subvert the midterms in any and every way possible — whether legally or illegally.

Indeed, it is already well underway.