Beware Donald Trump's October Surprise

For months, President Donald Trump has watched his grip on power collapse. It’s the consequence of self-inflicted wounds.

• Trump’s intransigence over releasing the Epstein files created fissures in his MAGA base.
• The Iran War worsened that fracture.
• Lifting crippling sanctions on Russia and abandoning Ukraine in its fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression drove the wedge between Trump and his most fervent supporters even deeper.
• The price of oil, gasoline, and diesel fuel soared, thanks to the war that Trump alone thinks America has won.
• Inflation and the national debt are moving in the wrong direction, while Trump’s illegal tariffs made everything more costly for Americans.
• The incompetence of the people he appointed to the most important cabinet positions, including Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., created havoc and killed innocent Americans.
• He destroyed alliances that have endured since World War II and compromised America’s international stature.
• His approval rating has plummeted to historic lows as independents deserted him.
• And ordinary citizens are finally fed up with the naked corruption of his pay-to-play administration. Trump, his family, and friends have made billions on the presidency while most Americans have struggled to survive.

Trump promised an “October surprise” that presumably would blind voters to his malfeasance and grift. What was it? A hollow promise of $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans maintained control of Congress after the midterms? Overtly siding with Putin in the Russia-Ukraine war? A last-minute award of $8 billion to farmers suffering under his idiotic economic policies?

I think it’s something far worse.

Avoiding Accountability

Trump is desperate to avoid accountability, and that makes the most dangerous president in American history more dangerous than at any previous point in his presidency. A Democratic majority in either chamber of Congress will begin investigations that will reveal the depth and breadth of his abuse of power to enrich himself and his cronies. Trump’s priority now is to prevent voters from electing Democrats. Period.

Trump can’t rely solely on the voter suppression techniques that Republican-controlled states have adopted over the past several years. Restrictive voter ID laws and an unprecedented gerrymandering effort aren’t likely to yield the GOP results that he needs. And his flurry of executive orders seeking to nationalize elections met hostile federal court decisions—even from his own appointees.

Attorney General Todd Blanche will continue to do Trump’s bidding. But in the end, the Constitution empowers the states to control the administration of elections.

So what will a desperate Trump do?

No one knows. But state and local election officials have been training poll workers to deal with previously unthinkable possibilities:

• Could Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) show up at polling places? In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said: “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats.” But he added that reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could be a reason for ICE to deploy. That’s a pretty big qualifier.
• Will other federal officials show up at polling sites?
• Will federal officials seize ballots, as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia?
• Will Trump seize voting machines as some of his advisers have urged in the past?
• Will Trump invoke the Insurrection Act and summon the military under sycophant Pete Hegseth? (He hasn’t ruled it out.)

A Citizen’s Remedy

Trump is relying on a combination of legal challenges and voter intimidation to complete his term without accountability. Courts may continue to provide some check on his most egregious actions, but Trump moves with such dizzying speed that the courts often cannot keep up with him. Trump is relying on that too.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ lamented that Trump’s demolition of the White House East Wing and replacing it with a ballroom that was already more than half finished “was likely unlawful” because Congress never appropriated the funds to do so. But without reaching the merits of the case, five other justices gave him a pass anyway.

The best chance for beating Trump is to heed his rallying call: “Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Vote accordingly.