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DONALD TRUMP’S PLAN TO SUBVERT THE MIDTERMS IS ALREADY UNDER WAY  
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David A. Graham
October 28, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ Our election system is reaching a breaking point. Imagine for a
moment that it’s late on Election Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans
have kept their majority in the Senate, but too many House races are
still uncalled to tell who has won that chamber _

Illustration by Carl Godfrey / The Atlantic,

 

Imagine for a moment magine for a moment that it’s late on Election
Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans have kept their majority in the
Senate, but too many House races are still uncalled to tell who has
won that chamber. Control seems like it will come down to two
districts in Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE agents and National
Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in
response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for
several years. The county is almost one-third Hispanic or Latino.
Voting-rights advocates say the armed presence has depressed turnout,
but nonetheless, the races are close. By that evening, the Republican
candidates have small leads, but thousands of mail and provisional
ballots remain uncounted.

Donald Trump calls the press into the Oval Office and announces that
the GOP has held the House—but he warns that Democrats will try to
steal the election, and announces plans to send a legal team to
Arizona to root out fraud. He spends the rest of the night posting
threats and allegations on Truth Social. In the morning, Republican
lawyers file to stop vote counting, arguing that any votes counted
after Election Day are illegal under federal law. Attorney General Pam
Bondi sends a letter to Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic
secretary of state, and the county board of supervisors, instructing
them to retain all documents and warning that the Department of
Justice may intervene if it suspects anything untoward. On X, FBI
Director Kash Patel reposts false rumors about fraud and announces
plans to lead a group of agents to Phoenix. Meanwhile, Democratic
candidates have pulled ahead in both races by Wednesday afternoon, but
the margin is just 143 votes in the Eighth District, with many votes
still not tallied.

By now, conservative outlets are running wall-to-wall coverage
alleging fraud, offering tales of immigrants being bused to voting
locations and accusing Democrats of treason. MAGA has learned its
lesson since 2020, and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are nowhere
near the cameras. Instead, administration officials like Bondi are the
face of the allegations on TV. Behind the scenes, Trump is making
phone calls. He’s unable to reach any county supervisors, whose
lawyers have warned them not to speak with him, but he gets through to
the county recorder, a MAGA loyalist elected as part of the backlash
to the 2020 election. No one knows quite what is said—the call
isn’t taped—but when Trump hangs up, he posts that the county has
agreed to hand over control of voting machines to the Department of
Homeland Security.

Fontes and the board of supervisors rush to court to block the move,
and a judge quickly grants an injunction. But Trump declares a
national emergency that he says supersedes the order; helicopters are
en route from a Marine air base in Yuma to take control of the voting
machines. By the time Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who is
assigned to hear emergency matters from Arizona, issues an order
blocking this, Marines have already commandeered ballots and machines.
Patel, having just arrived in Phoenix, holds a press conference and
announces, without providing evidence, that votes have been tampered
with. He proclaims the Republican candidates the winners.

Despite Marines on the street, small but fierce protests erupt in
Phoenix and elsewhere; Trump uses them as a pretext to invoke the
Insurrection Act and announces “martial law in Democrat-run
cities.” Who actually won the election can never be determined—the
Marines and Patel have broken the chain of custody, as well as some of
the machines themselves—but the state names the two Democrats as
winners. House Republicans reject Arizona’s certification and
instead seat the GOP candidates. Trump’s allies keep the House in a
profoundly illegitimate election rejected by many Americans.

This is just one possible scenario. Is it too pessimistic? Perhaps.
But at this stage of the election cycle in 2019, no one expected a
crowd of Trump supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6,
2021. No one expected the president himself to explicitly lend his
support to their efforts to “Stop the Steal.” Certainly no one
expected that there would be calls to hang the vice president for his
refusal to subvert the democratic process. If anything, when it comes
to 2026, I worry more about the limits of my imagination than about
the hazards of speculation.

Trump has made his intentions clear. At a rally last summer in West
Palm Beach, Florida, he offered his supporters a promise
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“Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to
do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed,
it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful
Christians,” he said. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not
gonna have to vote.”

_We’ll have it fixed so good._ It’s not hard to guess what Trump
might do to fulfill this promise. He has, after all, already attempted
to disrupt and overturn an election. In 2020, those efforts involved
questioning results, asserting widespread fraud without evidence,
pressuring local officials to overturn outcomes, filing spurious
lawsuits, and ultimately inciting supporters to sack the Capitol. Now
that he’s back in the White House, he will draw from this playbook
again—perhaps adding new maneuvers, such as deploying armed troops.

As president, Trump has very little statutory power over elections,
yet the office provides him with plenty of opportunities for
chicanery. He also has powerful reasons to interfere next year. If
Democrats recapture the House (by gaining three seats) or the Senate
(four seats), they could stall his agenda, launch oversight
proceedings, and potentially bring new impeachment charges against
him.

Trump and his allies will have before them less an orderly set of
instructions than a buffet of options. Some of these options will go
untested, or amount to nothing. But elections are a game of margins.
Only a handful of Senate seats and a few dozen House races may be
seriously contested, thanks to maps drawn to guarantee safe seats for
one party or the other. Of those, some may be very close. In 2024, 18
House races were decided by fewer than 10,000 votes
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Democrats won 11 of those.

To understand the threat to democracy, and how it might be stopped, I
spoke with experts on election administration, constitutional law, and
law enforcement. Many of them are people I have known to be cautious,
sober, and not prone to hyperbole. Yet they used words like
_nightmare_ and warned that Americans need to be ready for “really
wild stuff.” They described a system under attack and reaching a
breaking point. They enumerated a long list of concerns about next
year’s midterms, but they largely declined to make predictions about
the 2028 presidential election. The speed of Trump’s assault on the
Constitution has made forecasting difficult, but the 2026
contests—both the way they work, and the results—will help
determine whether democracy as we know it will survive until then.
“If you are not frightened,” Hannah Fried, the executive director
of the voter-access group All Voting Is Local, told me, “you are not
paying attention.”

Even so, the breakdown of the system is not a foregone conclusion. We
can take some comfort next year in the fact that messing with 468
separate elections for House and Senate seats is more complicated than
interfering with a presidential race. There will be more opportunities
for shenanigans—but it will also be harder to change the overall
outcome if one party leads by more than 10 or so seats.

It’s also worth remembering that courts have not looked favorably on
recent challenges to elections. Scores of pro-Trump suits failed in
2020, and although the Supreme Court has sanctioned many of Trump’s
executive-power grabs, most election cases are decided in lower
courts, where Trump has fared poorly thus far in his second term.
Finally, the decentralization of the voting system is both a weakness
and a source of resilience. The patchwork of laws and offices that
govern elections at the state and local levels ensures that some
jurisdictions are fairer and more secure than others. It also means
that nefarious actors might be able to access only small parts of the
system.

Yet Trump has demonstrated that he is more effective at executing his
will than he was during his first term. He has surrounded himself with
aides whose loyalty is to him, not the rule of law, and who have
learned from the flaws of MAGA’s 2020 plan. They are better versed
in the inner workings of elections and eager to use the Justice
Department as a tool for political gain.

Stopping any attempt to subvert the midterms will require courage and
integrity from the courts, political leaders of both parties, and the
local officials running elections. Most of all, it will depend on
individual Americans to stand up for their rights and demand that
their votes are counted. 

I. LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

Let’s get something out of the way: Donald Trump will not try to
cancel the midterm elections. He lacks both the power to do so—a
fact that offers only partial reassurance, with this president—and
the incentive.

Modern authoritarians love elections. In Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and
other countries, repressive leaders have kept the framework of
democracy in place
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while guaranteeing that they always or usually win. Doing so helps
them escape international condemnation and lends an imprimatur of
legitimacy. Trump himself has warmly congratulated these leaders on
electoral victories that much of the world has deemed unfair.

The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way coined the term
_competitive authoritarianism_
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describe a system that gives an all-but-preordained outcome the patina
of democratic choice. “Competition is real, but unfair,” Levitsky
told me.

Competitive-authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world offer models
for how a leader might make it harder for his adversaries to regain
power long before ballots are cast. For example, he might launch an
effort to undermine the rule of law, which could be used to hold him
accountable. He might seek to change or eliminate term limits. He
might seek to co-opt and intimidate the press, rewarding friendly
outlets to create a palace media and intimidating others into
tempering their criticism. He might seek to pack the government with
loyalists, replacing civil servants with political operatives and
appointing allies to the judiciary. Finally, a competitive
authoritarian might use the government’s powers to harass political
rivals, weakening the opposing party well ahead of elections. When
necessary, he might imprison rivals or even kill them; see, for
example, the fate of Alexei Navalny in Russia
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This is a last resort, though: Such heavy-handedness tends to attract
condemnation, and usually isn’t necessary anyway.

Trump has already done a lot of this. He has coerced law firms into
questionable agreements that aligned them with the administration. He
has launched criminal investigations into officials who have tried to
hold him to account. He has questioned whether the constitutional
right of free speech extends to criticism of him. He has pressured
social-media companies into ending their moderation of disinformation,
of which he is a prodigious source. He has used lawsuits and the
Federal Communications Commission to bully entertainment conglomerates
and news outlets. His administration engineered a deal for the sale of
TikTok, a major information source for younger Americans, to a group
of investors that includes political allies.

Trump has directed the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the
fundraising platform that raised more than $3.6 billion for Democratic
candidates in the 2024 cycle. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk,
he issued an executive order that could target a range of left-wing
political organizations. Trump has not yet arrested any high-profile
candidates for office, but, as of this writing, his administration has
launched an investigation into Senator Adam Schiff, a California
Democrat who led Trump’s first impeachment, and charged
Representative LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey Democrat, with assault
after an incident at a migrant-detention facility in Newark. The
Justice Department also charged former FBI Director James Comey with
felonies for allegedly lying to Congress and indicted New York
Attorney General Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud. (Schiff and
James have denied any wrongdoing; McIver and Comey have pleaded not
guilty.)

The cumulative effect in the United States is likely to be the same as
it has been overseas: Prospective donors, candidates, and campaign
workers or volunteers will wonder whether the benefits of
participation outweigh the risks of harassment and persecution. By the
time voting starts, the opposition party will already be at a steep
disadvantage. 

II. CHANGING THE RULES

Over the summer, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called the state
legislature to Austin for a special session in which, among other
things, it redrew congressional districts. The aim was to give the GOP
five additional seats in the U.S. House. This was a brazen move.
States normally redistrict only once a decade, after the census.
Texas’s 2021 map was already engineered for Republican advantage,
but the White House pushed the state to go further, hinting at
retribution for anyone who resisted, according to _The New York Times_
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This set off a chain of attempted copycats in red states and attempted
payback in blue ones. Trump reportedly threatened primary challenges
for Republicans who opposed him and sent the vice president to
pressure Indiana lawmakers—all of which suggests that the president
believes the midterms will be close.

Redistricting was an especially blunt and public effort to change the
rules ahead of Election Day. Most of the other methods that Trump and
his allies have tried or are likely to try will not be so overt, and
may also be less successful. The problem for Trump is that power over
elections rests with the states and, to a lesser extent, Congress, not
the executive branch.

Nevertheless, Trump has simply asserted control and dared anyone to
say no. In March, he issued an executive order that purported to make
several changes to voting. It instructed the Election Assistance
Commission, a bipartisan federal agency that helps states administer
elections, to require proof of citizenship to vote. (Congress is also
considering a bill that would do the same.) It also demanded that only
ballots received by Election Day be counted, regardless of state
rules. The executive order was largely blocked by two federal judges
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one of whom noted that citizenship was already required to vote and
added, “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific
powers over elections.”

Trump has been trying to teach the American people to distrust
elections since 2016, and many of his actions now are designed to
create a pretense for claiming fraud later. For example, he has
repeatedly suggested that millions of unauthorized immigrants are
voting, although this is not true. Now the Justice Department has
ordered many states to turn over voter-registration records with
detailed private information, which it says it’s sharing with the
Department of Homeland Security. Some states prohibit releasing this
information, which is unlikely to either produce evidence of fraud or
improve voter rolls. Previous attempts at matching voter lists against
other databases have produced many false positives but few actual
examples of illegal voting. An election-integrity commission
established during Trump’s first term also tried to acquire voter
rolls for the same purpose, but was rebuffed by states and tied up in
litigation. This time around, the Justice Department is suing states
that don’t comply
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and could use their resistance as a pretext for future allegations of
fraud.

Trump has consistently tried to spread distrust of voting by mail.
Most recently, he reported that, during an August summit in Alaska,
Putin told him, “Your election was rigged because you have mail-in
voting.” Trump then announced on Truth Social that, in an effort to
ban voting by mail and require paper ballots, he would issue a new
executive order, adding, “Remember, the States are merely an
‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the
votes.”

This is false, and no executive order has emerged yet, perhaps because
plenty of Republicans vote by mail, and eliminating it wouldn’t have
a clear partisan advantage. Even so, assailing mail-in voting is
useful to Trump because it creates a justification to claim fraud
after the elections. In 2020, Trump seized on claims about mailed
ballots being stolen, altered, or dumped in a river, even long after
those stories were debunked. And in 2024, he was preparing to do so
again, until it became clear that he had won.

Similarly, Trump and his allies have insisted for nearly a
decade—without ever providing proof—that many voting machines are
not secure. In his executive order on voting, Trump instructed the
Election Assistance Commission to decertify all voting machines in the
U.S. within 180 days and recertify only those that met certain
requirements. This would be impractical, in part because it’s
unclear whether any voting machines that meet those standards could be
available in time for the election. But again, the order may be
designed to serve a different purpose: If races don’t go the way the
president wants, he can point to the executive order and say that the
voting machines didn’t meet the standards. The results, therefore,
are not valid, or at least cannot be trusted.

The administration’s own actions are actually undermining election
security. In past elections, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency, a part of DHS, assisted local officials. That might
have meant providing protection from hacking or doing site visits to
make sure door locks and electricity were secure. But Trump has held a
grudge against CISA since Chris Krebs, then the agency’s leader,
vouched for the security of the 2020 election. (Trump fired Krebs at
the time and earlier this year directed the Justice Department to open
an investigation into him.) The administration has cut about a third
of CISA’s workforce and slashed millions of dollars of assistance to
local officials, potentially exposing election systems to interference
by foreign or domestic hackers. The big risk is not changing actual
vote tallies, but disrupting the system to create chaos and doubt and
to prevent people from casting ballots.

This summer, DHS appointed Heather Honey
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an election denier involved in efforts to challenge the 2020 election,
to the newly created role of deputy assistant secretary for election
integrity. Meanwhile, troubling examples of attempted interference
with the system are popping up in swing states.

In a peculiar turn this July, 10 Colorado counties reported being
contacted by Jeff Small, a Republican consultant, who told some of
them he was working on behalf of White House Deputy Chief of Staff
Stephen Miller and requested access to voting machines. According to
_The Denver Post_
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Small connected at least one Colorado election official with a person
at the Department of Homeland Security, suggesting that he was acting
with the administration’s cooperation. (Small did not reply to
interview requests. An administration spokesperson told CNN earlier
this year that Small “does not speak for the White House” and was
never “authorized to do official business on behalf of the White
House.”)

In September, Reuters reported that Sigal Chattah, the acting U.S.
attorney for Nevada, had directed the FBI to investigate claims of
voter fraud in that state
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hoping that a probe would help Republicans keep the House. (Shortly
thereafter, a court found Chattah’s appointment invalid.)

 

III. ELECTION DAY

Voter suppression has a long history in the U.S., but the methods have
become more sophisticated and less obvious than in the days of
literacy tests, poll taxes, and the KKK. Republican jurisdictions in
particular have enacted rules that have made it harder for people to
vote. They have placed restrictions on voter-registration drives by
outside groups; required photo identification to vote (which is
popular, although its effects are often discriminatory because Black,
older, and poorer people are less likely than other voters to have
qualifying ID); tried to limit the hours that polls are open; and, in
Georgia, put restrictions on giving food or water to people waiting in
line to vote.

The Justice Department recently announced that it would take the
unusual step of sending poll monitors to observe elections
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in six counties in New Jersey and California this November. Both
states have important elections—Californians are voting on a new
congressional map that could eliminate GOP seats, and a Trump ally is
trying to capture New Jersey’s governorship from Democrats. This
could be a test run for broader use of monitors in 2026 to intimidate
poll workers and voters around the country.

None of these things, in isolation, will prevent large numbers of
people from voting, but they create barriers that might make a
difference at the margins. They are likely to especially affect people
who vote infrequently. Whether this is beneficial for Trump and his
allies is a matter of debate among experts. (Traditionally, high
turnout was thought to help Democrats, but Trump’s coalitions have
included many irregular voters.)

In 2026, however, Trump could far surpass these small-bore measures.
The fear I heard, again and again, is that the president will attempt
to use armed federal agents to interfere with elections. In its
simplest form, this could look like federal law-enforcement officers
patrolling the streets in blue cities, a possibility that some
influential people in Trump’s orbit have already embraced.
“They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re
taking control of the cities, there’s gonna be ICE officers near
polling places,” Steve Bannon said in August. “You’re damn
right.”

 
Illustration by Paul SpellaIllustration by Paul Spella
 

But many people now worry that Trump would go further and use the
military. Not long ago, this would have seemed nearly unthinkable. In
January, the Brennan Center for Justice, the University of
Virginia’s Center for Public Safety and Justice, and the States
United Democracy Center held a tabletop exercise to consider best
practices for policing in a tense society. The participants imagined
that the National Guard might be deployed to cities—by sometime in
2028. “Even our most unlikely circumstances were far passed in the
first few months of this year,” Ben Haiman, the executive director
of CPSJ, told me. “We got there real fast.”

Federal law specifically bans
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“any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special
election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed
enemies of the United States.” But some of the experts I spoke with
believe that military intervention is now not only possible, but
likely. “They’re telling me that it’s really unconstitutional
and illegal for them to be there, but that doesn’t seem to make a
lot of difference to this administration,” Aaron Ammons, the clerk
of Champaign County, Illinois, told me.

The administration could try to get around the ban on troops at
polling places in a few ways. Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer
who was involved in “Stop the Steal” efforts in 2020 and remains
influential in the White House, suggested in September that Trump
could use emergency powers. “The chief executive is limited in his
role with regard to elections, except where there is a threat to the
national sovereignty of the United States,” she said on a
conservative talk show. “I think maybe the president is thinking
that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal
elections going forward.” Trump might allege foreign interference in
the elections—asserting, for example, that Iranian hackers had
changed voter results—in order to claim that national security
required him to intervene.

Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on presidential emergency powers at the
Brennan Center, told me that nothing like what Mitchell described
exists: “There are no powers that give him the authority to do
anything around elections, full stop.” But Goitein warned that Trump
could try anyway. One possibility is that he could invoke the
Insurrection Act, as he has repeatedly threatened to do, by claiming
it is necessary to enforce federal law or protect voters’
constitutional rights.

Mobilizing troops takes time and is hard to do without anyone
noticing. Trump might find it easier to deploy troops between now and
November and have them on the streets already when voting starts.
During a meeting with top military leaders in September, he said,
“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds
for our military.”

He’s already started. In June, Trump federalized 4,000 members of
the California National Guard and sent Marines into Los Angeles,
putatively to maintain order and protect ICE agents. He has since
deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and moved to send
Guardsmen to several other cities. These deployments could accustom
Americans to seeing troops in the streets well ahead of the elections.

A military or federal-law-enforcement presence creates the danger of
intimidation. Right-wing figures tend to write this off as blather:
_If you’re not an illegal immigrant, you have nothing to fear._ But
ICE’s recent dragnets have arrested and jailed American citizens.
Beyond that, the presence of police, or especially troops, could make
it harder to reach polling places and could sap voters’ energy. Even
a small presence of troops in a few cities might create enough media
attention to affect turnout elsewhere.

In the worst-case scenarios, armed troops could be ordered to close
polling areas, commandeer voting machines, or crack down on
protesters. These orders would be illegal, and units might refuse to
follow them, potentially producing a standoff between the president
and his military brass. But it wouldn’t take more than a few
officers complying to corrupt the election. 

IV. AFTER ELECTION DAY

As soon as the polls close, Trump and other Republicans will try to
stop the counting of votes. Scholars have documented a phenomenon
called the “red mirage” or “blue shift,” in which early
results seem more favorable to Republicans, but as mail-in ballots,
provisional ballots, and tallies in slow-counting Democratic-leaning
cities and states trickle in, Democrats’ outcomes look better.

In 2020, with many states still counting, Trump spoke at the White
House early on the morning of November 4 and demanded that no new
votes be included in tallies. “Frankly, we did win this election. We
did win this election,” he said. “So our goal now is to ensure the
integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This
is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper
manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all
voting to stop.”

In his blocked executive order on elections this spring, Trump
instructed the attorney general to target states that allow the
counting of votes that arrive after Election Day (but are postmarked
by then), arguing that “federal law establishes a uniform Election
Day across the Nation” and that any ongoing counting is thus
illegal. Even if that goes nowhere, Republicans will use the same
argument in lawsuits seeking to throw out any such votes. This will be
only the start of the lawfare. A flurry of lawsuits in close House
districts or states with close Senate races will aim to give
Republican candidates an edge.

To see how this might look, consider a 2024 race for the North
Carolina Supreme Court. Early returns suggested that the Republican
Jefferson Griffin had defeated the incumbent Democrat, Allison Riggs,
but once every ballot was counted, Riggs took a narrow lead, which was
confirmed by multiple recounts. Griffin then filed suit seeking to
throw out thousands of votes. Some were overseas ballots, including
from military voters, that did not include photo ID; others were in
heavily Democratic counties, from voters whose registration did not
include a Social Security number. Everyone agreed that these ballots
had been cast in accordance with the rules of the election at the
time, but Griffin wanted to change the rules after the fact. He almost
succeeded, with the help of favorable rulings from GOP-dominated state
courts, before a federal judge shut him down.

In the days after the 2026 elections, Republicans will announce that
Democratic victories are fraudulent. They may point to alleged
deficiencies in voting machines, using Trump’s decertification
mandate as a starting point, but many candidates have previously just
relied on rumor and innuendo. Republicans will demand that elections
be invalidated or rerun because they are tainted.

At the same time, Republican leaders—including Trump—will be
working the phones, trying to recruit local and state election
officials to help. In 2020, Trump called many local GOP officials
seeking assistance, most infamously asking Georgia Secretary of State
Brad Raffensperger to “find” him almost 12,000 votes. Given that
he was caught on tape doing so and has thus far faced no
repercussions, Trump has no reason not to do it again. The pressure he
exerted in 2020 didn’t work, in part because many Republican
officials refused to abet his schemes, but in some places, these
officials have been replaced by election deniers and MAGA loyalists.
Trump might, for instance, call someone like Linda Rebuck—the chair
of North Carolina’s Henderson County board of elections, who was
reprimanded last year for sending false election information to state
legislators
[[link removed]]—or
leaders in Cochise County, Arizona, who recently asked Attorney
General Bondi to investigate the results of the 2022 election, which
they themselves failed to certify on time.

Even the best-intentioned official might bend under pressure from the
White House, because it’s very hard to say no to the president of
the United States when he asks for a favor—especially if the
alternative is doxxing, harassment, political ostracism, or worse. And
if that prospect doesn’t sway them, a threat from the Justice
Department might. How many county clerks are willing to trust their
own legal advice over an order from the attorney general?

Stephen Richer, a Republican who was elected the Maricopa County
recorder
[[link removed]]
in 2020, described to me what it was like when he and other GOP
officials defended the integrity of local elections. Like other
Republicans who contradicted Trump, he was chased from office, losing
a primary to a MAGA-aligned candidate. “It is incredibly lonely,”
he said. “Very few people will have your back, especially if
you’re a Republican. There is no constituency.” Standing up to
Trump can stymie a political career, as it did for Richer, or lead to
criminal jeopardy, as it has for Krebs.

In 2020, Trump also contemplated seizing voting machines. The
ostensible reason was to search for evidence of fraud, but taking
possession of the machines creates its own huge risk of fraud, and
would destroy any trust in results. Aides drafted executive orders
instructing the Defense Department or DHS to seize machines, but, amid
resistance from advisers, Trump never went forward with the plan. Now
he’s surrounded by aides more likely to encourage his most
outrageous ideas.

If all of that fails, Republicans could attempt to refuse to seat
Democrats who are elected. The House is the arbiter of its own
members, and on several occasions—in 1985, for example, during an
election that came down to a handful of votes—the body has refused
to seat the winner as certified by a state. With Trump blowing wind
into flimsy fraud allegations, the House GOP caucus could try to use
them to preserve a narrow majority.

The backdrop to all of this will be the possibility of violence by
Trump supporters if they believe the election is being stolen. Just as
the Krebs investigation is a warning to anyone who might publicly
contradict Trump, the president’s mass clemency for people involved
in the January 6 riot—including those convicted of violent attacks
on police officers—is a signal to anyone who might act to assist the
president’s cause that he will help them out afterward. The
insurrection failed the first time, but the second try might be more
effective. 

V. THE WAY OUT

The most important defense against losing our democracy is the same
thing that makes it a democracy in the first place: the people. An
engaged electorate, demanding clean elections and turning out in
force, has been the strongest and most consistent xxxxxx against
Trump. “It is going to require that every single American do
everything in their power to ensure that elections happen, to ensure
that they are free and fair, and to push back on this extremism,”
Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, told me.

The burden will fall especially on local election workers, who will be
more prepared than they were six years ago but also more battered. In
a survey this spring conducted by the Brennan Center, four in 10 local
election officials said they’d received threats; six in 10 said they
worried about political interference. They also worry about funding
shortfalls. State and local governments are facing smaller budgets,
and since 2020, many states have banned private donations for election
administration.

Election officials are deluged by requests for information or demands
that certain voters be removed from rolls—even when the law
doesn’t provide for purges. Remaining apolitical has become next to
impossible. “We have been asked to definitively say whether the 2020
election was fair and legitimate,” Natalie Adona, the registrar of
voters in Marin County, California, told me. “I can say without a
doubt that that election was fairly decided. Does that now mean that I
have made a partisan statement?”

At a previous job elsewhere in California, Adona had to obtain a
restraining order because of persistent harassment. In Detroit in
2020, a mob tried to break into a vote-counting center. Since then,
poll workers have been doxxed, received death threats, and faced
persistent verbal abuse. One result is that many experienced officials
have left their jobs. Those who remain are forced to make plans for
their physical safety—at polling places, but also at facilities
where votes are counted, and even at home.

Despite all of this, there are reasons for hope. Even in a
competitive-authoritarian system, recent examples show, elections can
defeat incumbents. Scholars consider Poland one of the most
encouraging stories in the cohort of the world’s backsliding
democracies. Starting in 2015, the country saw a steady drop in
freedom. The ruling Law and Justice party pursued many of the same
strategies that Trump has now adopted, or might yet. But in the 2023
parliamentary elections, a coalition of pro-democracy opposition
parties was able to defeat Law and Justice, carried to victory on the
strength of an astonishing 74 percent turnout among voters.

The midterm elections could be a similarly pivotal moment for American
democracy. Defending the system in 2026 won’t guarantee clean
elections in 2028, but failing to do so would be catastrophic. Trump
will exploit any weaknesses he can find; any damage to the system will
encourage worse rigging in two years, and maybe even a quest for a
third term. And if the president has two more years to act without any
checks, there may not be much democracy left to save in 2028.

_This article appears in the __December 2025_
[[link removed]]_ print edition
with the headline “The Coming Election Mayhem.”_

_This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.
__Sign up for it here._
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_[__DAVID A. GRAHAM_
[[link removed]]_ is a staff
writer at The Atlantic and an author of the __Atlantic Daily
newsletter_
[[link removed]]_.]_ 

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