“When You Think About It, We Should Not Even Have an Election”

“The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.” - if you don’t know who said it, you are the problem…

Trump told the New York Times in early January that he regrets not instructing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Let that sink in. The president of the United States wishes he had used military force to override the outcome of a democratic election, and he said so out loud, to a reporter, for publication. When he told Reuters in mid January that when you think about it, we should not even have an election, he was not joking. His press secretary said he was joking. His press secretary lies for a living. Just a week earlier, Trump told House Republicans he would not say cancel the election because the fake news would call him a dictator. He said the quiet part out loud and then pretended he had not said it. He expressed envy when Ukraine's Zelensky mentioned they do not hold elections during wartime and mused about how convenient that would be. This is who he is. This is what he wants. Anyone still pretending otherwise is either lying or not paying attention.

The political math explains his panic. Democrats need to flip only three seats to win control of the House. The Cook Political Report shifted 18 races in the Democrats' direction on January 15. A Fox News poll from February 1 showed Democrats leading 52 percent to 46 percent on the generic congressional ballot, the highest percentage for any party in the history of that poll. Fox News. If he loses the House, Trump faces impeachment for a third time, subpoena power aimed at his cryptocurrency grift, investigations into his violations of the Constitution's emoluments clause, and a Congress that can block everything he wants to do. He knows this. He is not subtle about knowing this. He told lawmakers that Democrats will find a reason to impeach me if they win. So he is going to make sure they do not win.

On January 31, Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special runoff election for Texas State Senate District 9 by 14 percentage points in a district Trump had carried by 17 points just two months earlier. Republicans had held this seat for over 30 years. Rehmet, a union leader and Air Force veteran, improved on Kamala Harris's November performance by more than 50 points in some heavily Hispanic areas of Fort Worth. Fifty points. The Democratic National Committee chair called it a warning sign to Republicans across the country, which is the kind of tepid language Democrats use when they should be screaming from the rooftops that the ground is shifting beneath Republican feet. Trump's endorsement and his party's massive funding advantage could not save a MAGA candidate when actual voters showed up. That is what terrifies him.

So what is he doing about it? Everything. He has pressured Texas to pass a redistricting plan that could add five more Republican seats to the House, and he has lobbied Indiana, Missouri, and Florida to do the same. He has issued executive orders vowing to eliminate mail in ballots and voting machines, claiming these two changes alone would pick up 100 more seats for Republicans. He is not even pretending this is about election security. He is saying, openly, that if fewer people can vote, Republicans win. His administration has sued numerous states demanding they turn over complete voter rolls, including Social Security numbers and home addresses, which would give federal authorities the ability to challenge and intimidate individual voters. When California and Minnesota did not immediately hand over this data, the Department of Justice threatened legal action. This is voter suppression conducted in plain sight, and most of the country is not paying attention because the story is complicated and the news media would rather cover whatever stupid thing Trump said on Truth Social this morning.

He has systematically dismantled the infrastructure that protects elections from foreign interference. He paused all election security activities at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. His budget would cut nearly 500 million dollars from CISA. Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI task force charged with combating election interference from Russia, China, and Iran. Trump fired Chris Krebs, the CISA director who called the 2020 election the most secure in American history, and then targeted him via executive order because Trump is a vindictive man who never forgets a slight and never forgives anyone who told the truth about him. The message to anyone else thinking about defending election integrity is clear: we will come for you.

Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election and who should have been disbarred but was not because accountability is for suckers in this country, predicted on a podcast that Trump would exercise some emergency powers to protect federal elections. Protect. That is the word she used. Trump has already deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington DC, and other cities over the objections of Democratic governors. He has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. Federal law explicitly prohibits stationing troops at polling places unless necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, but the Trump administration has argued in court that the president has inherent power to use the military to protect federal functions. Federal elections are a federal function. You can see where this is going. Everyone can see where this is going.

What happened in Minneapolis is a preview. On January 6, Homeland Security ordered approximately 2,000 federal agents into the city. Governor Tim Walz called it the war being waged against Minnesota. The next day, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37 year old mother of three and American citizen, in her vehicle. She had been observing ICE operations. The Trump administration immediately called her a domestic terrorist and claimed she weaponized her car. Bystander videos showed her trying to drive away. On January 24, two Customs and Border Protection agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37 year old intensive care nurse at a veterans hospital. Also an American citizen. Also observing ICE operations. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called him a domestic terrorist too and claimed he was brandishing a firearm. BBC Verify analyzed the video and found no evidence of a gun. Two American citizens dead for the crime of watching what federal agents were doing in their city.

Trump's response to the protests that followed was to order 1,500 soldiers from the 11th Airborne Division to prepare for deployment. He threatened on Truth Social to invoke the Insurrection Act. A federal judge ruled that ICE could not arrest peaceful protesters, but by then the point had been made. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said on CNN what should be obvious to everyone: the crisis here is Donald Trump and he needs a crisis because he seeks an excuse to cancel elections down the road. He was blunt about it. He said this is it. We have elected officials saying nothing and doing nothing. The pattern is not subtle. Deploy federal agents to Democratic cities. Use aggressive tactics until something goes wrong. Call the resulting chaos a crisis. Threaten military force. Establish the precedent. Repeat.

The operation in Maine followed the same playbook. On January 20, Homeland Security launched Operation Catch of the Day, targeting 1,400 people in a state with 1.4 million residents. The focus was Portland and Lewiston, cities with Somali American communities. A DHS spokesperson said Governor Mills and her fellow politicians have made it abundantly clear they would rather side with criminal aliens than law abiding American citizens. Mills, a Democrat, had announced she would run for Senate against Susan Collins in 2026. Trump had recently called Somali Americans a lot of very low IQ people. The operation lasted eight days before Collins announced it was ending. A CNN analysis called the decision to target Maine puzzling given Collins' critical role in maintaining Senate control. It was not puzzling. It was a shot across Mills' bow. It was a demonstration of what happens to Democratic governors who challenge Trump.

Similar operations hit Massachusetts, Chicago, Michigan. All targeted Democratic governors or mayors. All in states with competitive 2026 races. These are not law enforcement operations. They are political operations designed to create chaos, test how far federal power can override state and local authority, and establish precedents for military involvement in domestic affairs before the election. The administration is beta testing authoritarianism, and too many Americans think it cannot happen here even while it is happening here.

Between now and November, Trump will keep pressuring states to redraw congressional maps, knowing courts are slow. He will escalate his lies about election fraud and noncitizen voting while his Justice Department investigates ActBlue and ignores WinRed. He will keep dismantling election security. He will rotate federal agents through Democratic cities, maintaining pressure without repeating Minneapolis. As November approaches, he will declare some emergency. Immigration. Crime. Foreign interference. Domestic terrorism. The specific excuse matters less than the framework. Once there is an emergency, he will argue that extraordinary measures are necessary to protect the integrity of federal elections. National Guard at polling places in Democratic areas. Access to voting machines. Challenges to mail in ballots. Pressure on Republican state legislatures to refuse certification.

Picture November. Control of the House is not called on election night. California is still counting mail in ballots. Trump alleges fraud, claims noncitizens voted, screams about post election vote dumps. He pressures Speaker Mike Johnson, who voted against certifying electoral votes in 2020, not to seat Democrats in disputed races. North Carolina Republicans already showed how this works. Two weeks after the 2024 election, with no public notice, they stripped the incoming Democratic governor of power over election boards and gave it to a Republican auditor with no election experience. That is the template.

If results show Democrats winning, Trump will claim fraud and refuse to accept it. He has already said he won the 2020 election. He told the New York Times he should have seized voting machines back then. The difference now is that he has spent a year establishing precedents for federal override of state authority, deploying military forces domestically, and calling political opponents terrorists. The infrastructure for stealing an election is being built in front of us while we watch.

What can stop this? State election officials refusing to hand over voter data and preparing legal challenges now. Democratic secretaries of state are doing this work. Minnesota's Steve Simon told CNN the likelihood of federal intervention has reached a level akin to a natural disaster. At a conference in Virginia, election administrators gamed out what to do if armed troops show up at polling places. State attorneys general ready to seek immediate court orders. Courts willing to act fast, as they did when the Supreme Court blocked Trump from deploying Guard troops to Illinois. Senate Democrats under Schumer have teams of lawyers looking at every scenario. State legislatures passing laws to keep federal immigration agents out of schools and hospitals without warrants. Governors refusing to provide Guard troops for domestic deployments. Pro democracy lawyers with lawsuits drafted and ready.

Most critically, Americans need to understand now what is coming so they are not caught off guard in November. Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center said there are countermeasures that can work, but only if people are prepared. Every day of delay makes resistance harder.

So why is the response so weak? Congressional Democrats like Schumer and Jeffries describe Trump's actions as authoritarian overreach but will not connect them to a coherent plan to steal the election. A memo from the Democratic consulting firm Blue Rose Research advised the party to shift focus away from troop deployments to tariffs and Medicaid cuts. This is political malpractice. This is consultants who learned their trade in a country that no longer exists advising Democrats to pretend the emergency is not happening because the messaging is hard. Democrats worry about appearing weak on crime and immigration, as if looking tough will matter when there is no fair election to win.

The broader problem is exhaustion. The sheer volume of Trump's norm breaking overwhelms people's capacity to process it. Steve Bannon said their strategy is to push until they hit resistance, and they have not hit resistance. Democrats have failed to create a message that connects deportation raids, election security cuts, National Guard deployments, and threats to cancel elections into what they obviously are: preparation for a coup. Political scientist Austin Sarat warned that Democrats are making a mistake by underestimating the likelihood that their campaigning will not matter if Trump steals the election. Dmitri Mehlhorn told The Atlantic that Democrats are completely unprepared. A Pew survey found 74 percent of Democrats say their elected officials are doing only a fair or poor job pushing back against Trump. The base knows. The leadership does not seem to care.

The party is also broke. The Democratic National Committee entered 2026 with roughly 16 million dollars in debt while the Republican National Committee has nearly 100 million in cash and owes nothing. Messy primaries in Maine, Michigan, Texas, and Iowa have divided resources. The party is less popular than Trump even though Trump's approval is historically low. Some progressive Democrats are calling to abolish ICE or immediately impeach Trump, which might feel good but does nothing to win the swing districts that will determine the House.

There is a fundamental asymmetry. Republicans fear their MAGA base. Democrats fear the Republican base. Nobody seems to fear the Democratic base, which is told election after election to wait, be patient, do not push too hard, now is not the time. Democrats refuse to cross lines even in appearance. This group of Republicans does not recognize lines. The media makes it worse. Fox minimizes every Republican scandal. Other outlets treat both sides as equivalent, as if Democrats refusing to confirm an unqualified judge is the same as Republicans preparing to reject election results. Voters who consume mainstream news see a distorted picture in which Trump's authoritarianism gets normalized because reporting it accurately sounds too alarming.

The stakes are not just which party controls Congress, though that matters enormously. If Democrats flip three House seats, they get subpoena power, they can block Trump's agenda, they can impeach him again. If they flip four Senate seats, they control confirmations. Those are the immediate stakes Trump understands, which is why he keeps saying Democrats will impeach him if they win.

The deeper stakes are whether this remains a country where elections determine who holds power. Every precedent Trump sets for interfering with elections makes the next interference easier. If he deploys troops to polling places, even if courts stop him, he will have shattered Americans' belief that voting is safe and private and free from intimidation. If he pressures Congress not to seat Democrats, he will have shown that election results are negotiable. If he uses emergency powers to override states, he will have broken the federal system that has operated for over two centuries. The dismantling of election security means future elections will be more vulnerable to Russia, China, and anyone else who wants to meddle. The normalization of federal agents operating in American cities against the will of local officials moves us toward a kind of governance that used to be unthinkable. The weaponization of law enforcement against political opponents corrodes the rule of law that makes constitutional government possible.

Trump said we should not even have an election in November. He showed us in Minneapolis and Maine that he will use federal power against American citizens. He surrounded himself with people planning to use emergency powers. Cleta Mitchell is still walking around free, still advising him, still preparing. The cowards in Congress who know better say nothing because they are afraid of mean tweets and primary challengers. The grifters around Trump are getting rich and do not care what happens to the country. The news media covers each outrage for a day and moves on because that is what the algorithm rewards. The voters who put him back in office either wanted this or convinced themselves it would not happen to them. And the Democrats, the one institution that should be sounding the alarm every single day, are worried about their messaging.

I do not know if we will have a real election in November. I know Trump does not want one. I know he is building the apparatus to prevent one or to overturn the results if he loses. I know the people who should be stopping him are not. The question is not whether he will try. The question is whether there is anyone left in this country willing to stop him. Right now, looking at the cowardice and the greed and the stupidity and the exhaustion, I am not sure there is.