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Trump Is Already Telling Us He Will Steal the Midterms (If We Let Him)
If this sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it once before.
Jun 15, 2026
Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.
Back in February he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in fifteen states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.
They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re likelier to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.
The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.
The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.
The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that twenty-three Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.
Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.
These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.
If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.
Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd that :
“[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”
He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.
A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.
And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported this morning:
“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas Mr. Miller had been pushing that alarmed Mr. Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”
Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.
He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in thirty-four felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.
He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy-filled deal with Ghislaine Maxwell for keeping her mouth shut.
Now he presides over a Justice Department that he and Trump have remade into a personal instrument of vengeance, complete with a Hitler-like 60-foot banner of Trump’s leering face on its façade, and the president has just nominated him to hold the office permanently.
So when Blanche says out loud that he’s afraid, he isn’t being paranoid. He’s being a good lawyer, reading the room, and the room he’s reading is called “history.”
It reminds me of two lawyers I learned about when we lived in Germany, because the men doing Trump’s legal dirty work today are walking a road that better-dressed men walked ninety years ago, and, as a result, we know exactly where it leads.
The first is Hans Frank, who started out as Adolf Hitler’s personal attorney, defending Hitler and his Nazi thugs in court all through the 1920s the way Blanche once stood behind Trump at the defense table.
When Hitler took power, Frank was rewarded. He became the Reich’s chief jurist, president of the Academy for German Law, and eventually Governor-General of occupied Poland, where he presided over ghettos, mass plunder, and slaughter on a scale that’s still hard to grasp.
Frank was the respectable face of the regime, the man who insisted there was a legal theory for everything. At the Nuremberg trials he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 16, 1946, the respectable lawyer was hanged.
The second man is Roland Freisler, and if Frank shows you what happens to the enabler, Freisler shows you what happens to the judge who decides — like Blanche has argued and John Roberts went along with — that the law is simply whatever Dear Leader wants it to be.
Freisler ran the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, a tribunal stood up outside Germany’s constitutional structure for the express purpose of producing the verdicts the regime demanded. He handed down thousands of death sentences in three years.
He screamed at defendants from the bench, ordered their microphones cut, condemned the young students of the White Rose resistance to the guillotine for the crime of printing leaflets, and sent the officers of the July 20th plot to be hanged within hours of their show trials.
Freisler never faced a Nuremberg of his own, but only because an American bomb fell on his courthouse in February 1945 while he was reportedly clutching a defendant’s case file. The defendant lived; the judge did not. There’s a grim justice in the fact that the one man who most weaponized the law against his fellow citizens was killed holding the very file he was using to destroy one of them.
I stood in the small plaza at the University of Munich back in 1988, the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, named for Hans and Sophie Scholl, where the two of them were caught scattering their leaflets from the gallery before Freisler sent them to die. They were the Renee Good and Alex Pretti of their time.
The university has since pressed bronze replicas of those scattered leaflets right into the pavement, so that today you walk over them and have to stop.
You think, standing there, about how ordinary the machinery of all this was. It wasn’t run by monsters in uniform alone. It was run by men like Todd Blanche and John Roberts, men with law degrees, men who told themselves they were just interpreting the statutes, just following the orders, just serving the head of state.
And every honest accounting that came afterward, from Nuremberg onward, rejected that excuse and established the principle that a directive from above does not protect the man who carries it out.
That principle is precisely what must be keeping Todd Blanche awake, because we’re already watching the American version, as Mark Twain once said, rhyme.
When Trump wanted his enemies prosecuted, the career professionals balked, so the administration installed Lindsey Halligan, another former Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, as a U.S. attorney, and she promptly indicted James Comey and Letitia James.
In a contrast with Germany in 1933, a federal judge threw both cases out, ruled her appointment unlawful, and other judges in the district were so disgusted that one of them now puts an asterisk beside her name on every court filing.
Thankfully, at least so far, these are not the actions of a legal system that’s fully surrendered (although Aileen Cannon may soon have a word). They’re the actions of one that’s still fighting back, and that fight is the whole ballgame.
But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls.
If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas.
The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least twelve thousand eligible voters were wrongly purged, twenty-two times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were eleven percent of the electorate and forty-one percent of the people thrown off the rolls.
Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside.
That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.
When the Reichstag finally voted itself out of existence in March 1933, uniformed storm troopers lined the walls of the chamber so the legislators would understand the price of voting no.
That’s the tradition these men are drawing from, and we’d be fools not to be clear-eyed and ready for just about anything between now and November. After all, we all watched what Trump and his lickspittles did on January 6th, 2021, killing four police officers as they tried to “hang Mike Pence.”
But here’s the difference between Germany in 1933 and America in 2026 and, as Wendy Lawrence argues in a brilliant recent essay, it comes down to timing.
The Germans got their decisive vote after the seizure of power, when a newly seated Reichstag rubber-stamped the Enabling Act and handed Hitler everything. We get ours before. Which is why they’re so frantically trying to suppress the vote.
The November midterms will arrive while the courts are still ruling against this administration, while subpoenas can still be issued, while the power of the purse still belongs to whoever controls the House.
A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights.
The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling shields the president’s official acts, but it shields no one beneath him. The agents, the contractors, the lawyers who signed the unlawful papers, all of them remain fully exposed, and a future attorney general can act on that.
Trump understands this perfectly, which is why he told House Republicans that they have to win the midterms because otherwise “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.” It’s why his people muse about ICE at the polls and write rules to choke off the mail. It’s why Stephen Miller is reportedly pushing to suspend habeas corpus. It’s why Trump promised to “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office].”
These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible, the same reckoning Hans Frank met at the end of a rope and Roland Freisler escaped only by dying.
The coming reckoning — unless they can stop it this fall — isn’t vengeance. It’s the rule of law standing back up after being knocked down, and in this country that recovery still runs through a ballot box which the members of the Reichstag of 1933 no longer had.
So, make sure you’re registered, and make sure everyone you know is too, at vote.org, and if you vote by mail, request your ballot early this fall and send it back early so no postal rule can run out the clock on you.
Save the nonpartisan Election Protection hotline in your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and call it the moment anyone tries to intimidate you at a polling place, because no badge and no uniform has the right to stand between you and your vote.
Call your representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and remind them that funding lawless deployments, gutting oversight, suspending habeas corpus, and letting the Post Office police our ballots are against the Constitution.
Keep an eye on your own statehouse at openstates.org, where this fight is being waged district by district.
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'Straight-Up Intimidation Tactics': Kash Patel's FBI Raids Ohio Voting Rights Organization
"This is an unprecedented attack on democracy," said US Rep. Shontel Brown.
Jun 12, 2026
A voting rights organization in Ohio is accusing the federal government of waging a large-scale intimidation campaign after the group was raided by the FBI on Thursday.
MS NOW reported on late Thursday that FBI agents searched the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, an organization that helps register voters.
In addition to raiding the group's offices, sources tell MS NOW that "agents also fanned out across the state, showing up at the homes of the group’s leaders and staff members, carrying some subpoenas and seeking information and electronic devices."
MS NOW's sources also expressed concern that the raid was not a legitimate law enforcement operation but "part of the Trump administration’s efforts to sow doubt and distrust in voting integrity in key swing states ahead of the midterm elections."
In an interview with MS NOW, Ohio Organizing Collaborative board member Prentiss Haney accused the feds of using "straight-up intimidation tactics."
“They had agents all across the state going to civil rights leaders and community leaders’ doors intimidating them, coming and demanding that they talk about literally anything they would ask,” said Haney, who added that agents asked leaders "if they’re committing voter fraud, just on their doors, in front of their houses with their children, and just following them to work and school.”
In a separate interview with local public radio station WVXU, Haney described the FBI raid as a "full-on assault."
"This is not normal business," Haney said. "I mean there's no reason for over 100 agents to be knocking on the doors of everyday Ohioans, demanding and accusing people of voter fraud as if it was a witch hunt."
Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) said she was "alarmed and outraged" by the FBI raid, which she alleged was part of an effort by President Donald Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel to disrupt the 2026 midterm elections.
"This is an unprecedented attack on democracy: These raids must end immediately," Brown said. “Unfortunately, this appears to be part of a systematic effort by Trump and Kash Patel’s FBI to attack our elections and perpetuate more myths of voter fraud—all to undermine and challenge any election result that Trump does not agree with. It’s an attack on the people."
The Trump administration has waged a multi-faceted attack on voting rights ahead of the midterm elections.
In March, Trump signed an executive order instructing the United States Postal Service (USPS) to not deliver ballots in any states that have not given the federal government access to its voter lists, which critics have warned could lead to the "virtual elimination of mail-in voting."
A Tuesday court filing by the US Department of Justice, meanwhile, argued that states have the power to purge voter rolls at any time ahead of an election and do not have to abide by the 90-day “quiet period” established in the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
If adopted, this policy could result in states deeming voters ineligible without giving them sufficient time to challenge the decision.
Trump has also successfully lobbied Republicans in several states to engage in unprecedented mid-decade gerrymanders with the goal of creating more GOP seats in Congress.
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‘Brazen Partisan Power Grab’: Florida Supreme Court Defies State Constitution to Give GOP Another Redistricting Win
Florida's constitution explicitly bans partisan gerrymandering. But a court full of DeSantis appointees just upheld maps that give the GOP 24 of the state's 28 seats with no time to reverse it before November.
Jun 11, 2026
In defiance of state law and the will of voters, the Florida Supreme Court has handed Republicans another major win in the redistricting wars in time for this year’s midterms, approving a ruthlessly gerrymandered map that could hand another four US House seats to the GOP.
Florida’s state constitution is unusually explicit in its ban on partisan gerrymandering; the Fair Districts Amendment (FDA) approved in 2010 by 63% of voters expressly states that maps may not be drawn “with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.” The court has struck down previous attempts by Republicans to draw more favorable maps on these grounds as recently as 2015.
But six of the seven justices that make up the current court have been appointed by Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. And when voting rights groups challenged a new map signed by the governor last month that is projected to give Republicans an advantage in 24 of the state’s 28 House districts, the right-wing court gave DeSantis what he wanted.
By a 6-1 ruling, the court on Wednesday declined to rule on the merits of the case, denying opponents' request for an emergency injunction, with the majority arguing that, despite the rapidly approaching election, this was not enough of a reason to rule on it while it's still being reviewed by a lower court.
The lone dissenter, Justice Jorge Labarga, who happens to be the only justice not appointed by DeSantis, argued that the case could be reviewed under the court's "pass-through" provision, which allows the court to expedite rulings on matters of great public importance.
"Surely," he said, "the upcoming 2026 congressional elections affecting the representation of millions of Floridians meet that threshold.”
With the state’s primaries set for August 18, this virtually guarantees that, despite its unconstitutionality, the map will be in place come November, as Republicans across the nation try to "pack and crack" enough Democratic strongholds to cling to control of the House in 2026.
In a post to social media, Florida's Republican Attorney General, James Uthmeier, celebrated the order as a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL VICTORY.”
The Florida Supreme Court has REJECTED the challenge to the state’s redistricting plan and new map.
This assures that the recently enacted map will be in place for the 2026 election.
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 10, 2026
Opponents of the map—including Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and the League of United Latin American Citizens—have said that the governor has made no effort to hide the overtly partisan nature of his redistricting push, which he carried out rapidly under an emergency session of the state legislature without public input.
In their lawsuit last month, they pointed out that the governor himself provided a color-coded version of the map to Fox News to highlight projected GOP gains—although Republicans won just under 57% of votes in House elections across Florida in 2024, they’d be expected to control nearly 86% of seats under the new maps.
Meanwhile, Jason Poreda, a senior DeSantis adviser who has described himself as the map's "drawer" has acknowledged that he used "partisan data" to draw the map in spite of the FDA.
As is the case with many of the maps drawn to maximize GOP power, DeSantis' cracks up majority-minority districts, including one predominantly Black district in Palm Beach and Broward County, and splinters the Orlando-Kissimmee area's Latino community across four districts.
And here is the new Florida congressional map in Dave's Redistricting: https://t.co/fTqDHjncwz pic.twitter.com/UTxflFazT0
— The Redistrict Network (@RedistrictNet) June 10, 2026
“The fact that this is a partisan gerrymander is as obvious as it is unconstitutional,” said Bradley Heard, deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represented the plaintiffs last month. “And while this unnecessary map is egregious in how it advantages Republicans and disadvantages Democrats, the people who will suffer the most if it is allowed to stand are once again Black and Brown communities, whose voices are consistently silenced in these redistricting battles."
Florida Circuit Judge Joshua Hawkes, a DeSantis appointee who upheld the maps last month, declined to weigh in substantively on the question of whether the new map violated the FDA, but said it was more in line with the maps favored by the US Supreme Court in the recent Louisiana v. Callais decision, which struck at the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by effectively ending protections for districts drawn to give representation to nonwhite voters.
While Hawkes also did not weigh in on Republican arguments that the entire FDA should be thrown out because of Callais, he said it was ultimately fine for the court to defer ruling on DeSantis' map because "to the extent the court has to balance Florida’s FDA prohibition of improper partisan intent and the United States Constitution’s Equal Protection guarantees, it seems clear that the potential partisan intent is the lesser of the two evils."
The Callais decision has given Republicans a decisive upper hand in the redistricting wars that were kicked off last year when President Donald Trump called on red states to enact unprecedented hyperpartisan gerrymanders in an effort to beat back an expected Democratic wave in 2026.
An aggressive and explicitly racial gerrymander in Texas enacted without voter approval was upheld by the US Supreme Court last month, netting the GOP an expected five seats, and six other red states have redrawn maps to likely squeeze in one new Republican seat apiece.
And while GOP gains have been somewhat offset by California voters' approval of an amendment to allow Democrats to draw their own hyperpartisan maps, the US Supreme Court's refusal to stop the Virginia state supreme court from striking down of a voter-approved Democratic gerrymander dealt a critical blow to efforts to even the score, and Democrats have vanishingly few opportunities to make up ground before the coming midterms.
Florida Republicans blatantly violate their constitution and brutally gerrymander their map without a single vote = 100% legal.
Virginians vote to change their constitution so they can temporarily offset right wing gerrymandering = 100% illegal.
America is a banana republic. https://t.co/vTer29RSqQ
— Micah Erfan (@micah_erfan) June 11, 2026
Florida represents yet another notch in the win column for Republicans, but opponents say they will attempt to fight the gerrymander ahead of future elections.
"The Florida Supreme Court's failure to stop this brazen partisan power grab is not only an assault on democracy, but an abdication of its duty to the people of Florida," said Genesis Robinson, the executive director of the voting rights group Equal Ground. "Courts are meant to serve as a check on government overreach and a safeguard against constitutional violations, but, once again, when Floridians needed that protection most, the court declined to intervene."
"The time to protect voters from irreparable harm is before another election takes place under this map," he added. "And while we remain committed to ensuring that Florida's constitutional protections are fully upheld, Florida voters deserve fair maps, fair representation, and a democracy that works for everyone now."
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