“Anything to Win – Anything”: Ten Trump Threats to the Midterm Elections

All the signals are flashing red. On the square, the @GOP would take a beating this fall, largely because of Trump’s unpopularity. So he’s setting up Plan B–do whatever you need to do to win. Anything. Anyone who says ‘Well, he wouldn’t do THAT’ hasn’t paid attention.”

– David Axelrod, July 11, 2026

I’m no fan of the former top Obama strategist David Axelrod, his party (the dismal capitalist-imperialist Democrats), or US bourgeois electoral politics more broadly, God knows, but Axelrod ain’t wrong here. Anything indeed. We should be long past “Trump wouldn’t do that” by now, no?

News flash: the putschist Trump’s fascist regime and party are working relentlessly and in numerous ways to rig if not cancel the 2026 mid-term elections as part of their enduring coup against previously normative bourgeois democracy.

Below I discuss eight interrelated ways in which this fascist attack on what’s left of “free and fair elections” in the United States has been unfolding and two ways in which the coup will likely continue to develop under Trump47. I suggest going through this list and perhaps adding to it or revising it before listening to the deranged and depraved wannabe dictator Trump speak to the nation on “election integrity” tomorrow night, when he is scheduled to make extreme claims of “foreign interference” in US elections (more on this at the end of this essay) past and present.

+1. The Trump campaign to nationalize the elections – to place them under the control of the federal fascist Trump regime in defiance of the US Constitution, which strictly assigns the management of elections to the states.

Last January, the unconstitutionally re-elected January 6 instigator and insurrectionist Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump chillingly told the New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his 2020 election loss.

As part of this assault on previously normative election law and procedure, Trump in March of 2025 issued an executive order (EO) purporting to require documentary proof of US citizenship as a requirement for voting vote and directed instructed the US Attorney General to hunt for and prosecute election crimes. The order was based on the false claim that the nation’s voting system is plagued by fraudulent noncitizen voting.

Trump has demanded voter files from all US states, directing the federal government to weed out suspected noncitizens and other unqualified voters. Sixteen states have so far complied.

Last March, Trump ordered the creation of a federal state by state list of eligible voters and purported to restrict the use of mail-in ballots. Trump’s handpicked Postmaster General has recently said that the US Postal Service will not deliver mail-in ballots to states that don’t turn over their voter rolls to the Trump administration.

Earlier this year, Trump ordered the creation of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. SAVE pools federal data from Social Security, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies for states to use to verify the citizenship of registered voters.

Last year, the Trump regime floated the idea of the federal government prosecuting state and local election officials for “failing to secure voting computer systems.” That was a warning: the officials could face arrest if outcomes don’t go Trump’s way in their states or locales.

Last week, Trump’s DOJ sent out letters threatening state election officials with criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting. The message is clear: if election outcomes in these states don’t go the Trump party’s way, the officials could face federal charges.

In addition, Trump has furthered the project of federal election takeover by ordering: his Director of National Intelligence to seize voting machines in Puerto Rico; the FBI to raid the elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, a county he lost in a swing state in 2020; the DOJ to subpoena the 2020 election records of Maricopa County, Arizona, another county Trump lost in a swing state. Trump has also demanded federal access to voting equipment in Missouri and to 2024 election records in Wayne County, Michigan.

2. Shrinking the Electorate by Restricting Voter Eligibility. The false claim of rampant noncitizen voting lay behind the Trump-initiated Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (“SAVE America”) Act , which has passed in the US House of Representatives multiple times since 2024. After repeated failures in the US Senate, Trump is still trying to get the “SAVE America Act” through the upper body of Congress. He has recently called on Senate Republicans to suspend the use of the filibuster so that they can jam the bill through with a simple majority vote.

The SAVE Act would require states to provide their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security and ban mail-in ballots. Above all, it would fundamentally change how Americans register to vote, requiring that voters present documentary proof of citizenship in person and thereby effectively eliminate most existing online and mail registration procedures. In nearly all cases, this will mean bringing a passport or a certified birth certificate. Based on the Big Lie of noncitizen voting, it would significantly shrink the electorate in MAGA-friendly ways. As the Brennan Center for Justice reports:

“The SAVE Act would require American citizens to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Our research shows that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents. Roughly half of Americans don’t even have a passport. Millions lack access to a paper copy of their birth certificate. The SAVE Act would disenfranchise Americans of all ages and races, but younger voters and voters of color would suffer disproportionately. Likewise, millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports would face extra steps just to make their voices heard.”

While the SAVE Act is stalled in Congress, fourteen red states have since 2024 passed SAVE Act-like laws requiring Americans to provide proof of their citizenship, chiefly a passport or birth certificate, to register or stay registered. More MAGA-ruled states are taking this up.

Even if the SAVE Act is not jammed through Congress before the midterms (current efforts focus on including it in a House appropriations measure), Trump regime will try to criminally enforce its requirements (which were embodied in Trump EOs last year) anyway. He will use Congress’s failure to pass the vote suppression measure as supposed justification for claiming that the midterm outcomes (if they don’t go the regime’s way) are illegitimate, or even for cancelling the midterms.

The regime knows it will likely face lawsuits for such actions but likely calculates that any judgements against its conduct will come after the fait accompli of an electoral coup. The punishment will come too late to stop the MAGA steal.

In other efforts to shrink the non-MAGA electorate and block a Democratic victory in the midterms, the Trump47 DOJ dropped all previous voting rights lawsuits and slashed the DOJ’s voting rights staff.

Of special chilling significance, Trump this year set off a wild mid-decade southern state orgy of arch-partisan and virulently white-supremacist gerrymandering of US House of Representatives districts. This massive neo-Jim Crow assault on Black voting rights and Democratic seats has eliminated as many as 20 majority Black House districts across “red” (MAGA-ruled) states. This racist attack was greenlighted by the Trump fascist Supreme Court’s April 29, 2026 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by proclaiming that majority minority voting districts are no longer constitutional.

It’s all about tightening control over who can vote and how people vote. As Trump’s original fascist Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last year, the regime is trying to make sure they “have the right [fascist] people voting, electing the right [fascist] leaders.”

3. Attacking Faith in Future Election Outcomes by Questioning Past Election Outcomes. Trump47 has:

+ Consistently refused to concede his 2020 election loss despite more than 60 court cases upholding that outcome. (His wild and unsubstantiated claims will be front and center in his speech tomorrow, replete with dubious intelligence from his national security minions and claims of interference from a hostile nation.)

+ Opened his second term by pardoning more than 1600 putschists convicted January 6 putschists and commuting the prison sentences handed down to the two leading fascist-paramilitary January 6 commanders.

+ Put up a White House website accusing the Democratic Party of “gaslighting” Americans for pointing out that Mein Trumpf lost the 2020 election and that Trump tried to overthrow the US republic by leading a criminal insurrectionary campaign to subvert and cancel that election.

+ Ordered the aforementioned federal interventions in Puerto Rico, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Missouri (see Point 1) on the theory of anti-Trump elections conspiracy and fraud.

4. Punishing People Who Worked Against His Fascist Attack on the 2020 Election. Trump has pushed out FBI agents and DOJ attorneys who worked on investigations into his attempt to subvert and cancel the 2020 election. He has revoked the security clearances of intelligence officials who questioned his 2020 “steal” narrative. He has ordered a vindictive and menacing DOJ investigation of Jack Smith, the special federal prosecutor who was belatedly appointed by the Biden administration to investigate Trump’s 2020 coup attempt.

5. Stocking the US Executive Branch with 2020 Election-Deniers. Accepting Trump’s Hitlerian narrative about 2020 is a requirement for holding any significant position in the Trump executive branch. Republifascist 2020 election-deniers are now spread across the federal government. They include the heads of the DOJ (the current acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is Trump’s former personal J6 defense lawyer), the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon, among numerous other top posts.

6. Encouraging local election officials to cheat for the Trump MAGA Party. Trump this year successfully bullied Colorado’s lame Democratic governor into commuting the prison sentence handed down to the county-level election clerk Tina Peters, who tampered with voting machines on behalf of Trump’s “steal” narrative in 2020. This is a bright green light to MAGA election-riggers at the precinct and county level.

7. Distorting the corporate media narrative through heightened federal pressure on the media, including drastically escalated FCC control over broadcast ownership and content. Trump is using the executive branch to shape the media narrative on elections and his conduct in ways that favor the normalization of an electoral coup.

8. Blackmail. The regime has recently threatened to withhold FEMA funds from states that don’t jump on board with Trump’s voter suppression program. Last January, in the wake of US Border Patrol’s murder of two immigrant rights protesters (Renee Good and Alex Pretti) in Minneapolis, Trump 47’s original fascist Attorney General Pam Bondi told Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz that he had to send the Trump regime his state’s voter rolls if he wanted to see the end of the Department of Homeland Security’s massive and lethal attack on immigrants and citizen activists in his state.

+++

Looking ahead….

9. Trump Will Attack the Outcomes of the Elections if they Even Happen (see below) and Don’t Go the “Right” — the Right’s/MAGA’s/Trump’s — Way. In that case, Trump and his minions and party will certainly do some or all of the following: prematurely declare victory, call for an end to the count, raise doubts about the legitimacy of the ballots, and file endless suits to delay determination. Election night will be turned into a national crisis, followed by massive security around counting locations and the casting of suspicion on tabulations that don’t go the “right” way. Another danger point comes in January of 2027, when a Trump regime loaded of election deniers could fight the certification of results and the seating of election winners.

10. Last but not Least, Trump Could Use Federal Military Police State Force to Menace Voters and Even Cancel the Elections.

The influential Trump-fascist strategist Steve Bannon applauded the deployment of ICE at airports as good training for the job of “surround[ing] the polls” next November.

Trump’s fascist Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin has refused to rule out deploying ICE at the polls this fall.

Numerous fascistic federal deployments that have already occurred under the Trump47 regime – federal raids on election offices, National Guard deployments in blue cities (Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Memphis), and ICE and Border Patrol attacks on blue cities – suggest that the Trump regime is primed to use militarized police state force against communities aligned with the other major capitalist political party to prevent/negate Democratic Party electoral success.

The regime knows that judicial rulings against these domestic force deployments would be handed down after the fact – too late to matter. These actions would likely be found unconstitutional and illegal, but the rolling coup does not depend on real time court victories. It relies on coercion and interference. By the time courts step in, the damage to public confidence and turnout and to the courage of local officials will already be done.

Among the scenarios to take seriously we should include the flat-out declaration of martial law before, during, or after the elections, under the pretense of some sort of “state of emergency.” Trump has already proclaimed numerous fake national emergencies and has repeatedly expressed his desire to declare the Insurrection Act, under whose authority regular duty military forces can be sent into American streets.

The recent escalation in ICE and Border Patrol sweeps and violence, including two public executions in the last week, may be part of a strategy of provoking protests that can be used to justify and emergence declaration leading to the suspension of the midterms, the cancellation of their outcomes, and perhaps the refusal to allow non-MAGA victors to take up elected office.

Trump has been hungering for a Reichstag Fire moment since his first election to the presidency. He tried to turn the George Floyd Rebellion into such a moment in the summer of 2020 but did not have enough like-minded full-on fascists in place around him to pull that off. The Trump47 regime is very different in that regard.

“Anyone Who Says, ‘He Wouldn’t Do That’ Hasn’t Paid Attention”

David Axelrod may be a talking head of the inauthentic opposition “Weimar” party of fascist appeasement (the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems). but he is dead-on right to say that Trump is “setting up Plan B–do whatever you need to do to win. Anything. Anyone who says ‘Well, he wouldn’t do THAT’ hasn’t paid attention.”

Those who find the last scenario above (#10) should bear in mind (among other things) that Trump brought 800-plus high US military commanders to Quantico, Virginia last September 30^th to tell them that the nation’s leading adversary is not China, Russia or Iran but what he called “the enemy within,” by which he meant any and all of his political opponents, including above all the Democrats.

Two weeks ago, the deranged, depraved, and debased fascist leader Trump said this at Mount Rushmore:

“Yet as we approach this magnificent anniversary (the 250^th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence), we see our American identity under a renewed attack… There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land…You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both…We’re [going to]..send them into exile. We will send them quickly away,.. America will never be a communist country. We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years. We do that. We’re not going to lose an election for 100 years…The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”

Trump here actually calls the militantly capitalist-imperialist Democrats “The Communist Party” and equates the prospects of the Democrats winning the midterms with the supposed menace of the US “becom[ing] a communist country.” He wants one party – his MAGA fascist Amerikaner party – to rule the country without serious contestation “for 100 years.”

Anyone who thinks the fascist Trump regime is going to permit normal free and fair bourgeois-democratic elections under the rule of law this fall is living in denial.

An Ominous Address…

Speaking of wild speeches, we’ve got one coming up Thursday evening (I am writing on the morning of Thursday, July 16), hours past the submission deadline for Weekend CounterPunch. Reports are that Trump is going on national television to re-amplify his Hitlerian claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him and declare that Georgia’s two senators, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, are illegitimate. According to CNBC:

“President Donald Trump plans to claim in a Thursday night speech that newly declassified intelligence reports reveal a foreign nation’s plans to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, two White House officials told MS NOW on Monday. Trump will be joined by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, FBI Director Kash Patel, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and others, according to one of the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the internal plans, MS NOW reported.”

According to US News and World Report:

“President Donald Trump will give ⁠a ⁠national address on Thursday night about newly declassified intelligence ⁠on investigations into U.S. elections and what the White House says are voting machine vulnerabilities, an administration official said…By casting the 2020 election as illegitimate, Trump is laying the groundwork to challenge Republican losses ⁠and undermine ⁠Democrats if they win back power ⁠in Congress in November…”

(The most likely candidate for the “foreign nation” to be charged with 2020 interference is China, but who knows what the madman will come up with in that regard – Cuba? Venezuela? Spain? Iran? Denmark? Cape Verde? Canada? Ukraine?)

Perhaps Trump will order Department of Homeland Security officers to clean out Ossoff and Warnock’s offices and instruct Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp to appoint two fascist senators who can be counted on to vote for the SAVE Act?

The post “Anything to Win – Anything”: Ten Trump Threats to the Midterm Elections appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.