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This Is Not Just a War on Iran. It Is a War on American Democracy.
Trump's military gamble in the Middle East isn't just reckless foreign policy. It could be the opening move in the end of American democracy as we know it.
Apr 06, 2026
When Donald Trump ordered military action against Iran, the response from much of the political commentariat followed a familiar script. Reckless, they said. Destabilizing. A dangerous distraction from domestic failures. A president lashing out. All of these characterizations may be true. But they miss what may be the far more consequential story, one that connects the bombs falling on Tehran to a calculated, if desperate, effort to make democratic accountability in the United States structurally impossible.
This is not hyperbole. This is what the evidence, taken together, begins to suggest.
To understand why, we need to step back from the fog of the immediate crisis and ask a harder question: what does Donald Trump actually need right now? Not rhetorically. Not ideologically. Politically and structurally, what does a president with cratering poll numbers, a midterm catastrophe on the horizon, and a plutocratic agenda that depends entirely on his continued hold on power actually require to survive?
The answer, it turns out, looks a great deal like what we are watching unfold.
Buying the One Constituency That Could Stop Him
Trump's political coalition has always rested on an unusual alliance. Fossil fuel companies were early and enthusiastic backers. Big Tech, or at least significant factions of it, increasingly joined the fold, drawn by promises of deregulation and the intoxicating proximity to state power that Silicon Valley's more authoritarian-curious wing has found so appealing and profitable. These were the interests Trump understood, catered to, and rewarded.
The military-industrial complex, once ambivalent about Trump, now has enormous skin in the game.
But one pillar of American elite power remained conspicuously cool to the whole enterprise: the military-industrial complex. This was, in part, by design. Trump ran as the anti-war candidate, the scourge of "forever wars," the prophet of "America First," the man who would bring the troops home and stop pouring national treasure into conflicts that enriched Beltway contractors while delivering nothing to the working-class communities that voted for him. It was a potent message. It was also, we now know, a temporary one.
Consider what has happened in just the past week. Trump's proposed $1.5 trillion defence budget for fiscal year 2027 represents the largest military spending request in modern American history, a 44 percent increase over the previous year. As the Washington Post reports, this would be the biggest Pentagon budget in US history. Economists at Fortune describe it as rivaling the wartime mobilization of World War II. Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke put it bluntly: "MAGA was told an untruth by Trump. No foreign wars, no adventurism… This is a massive militarization—completely the opposite of what he told his base."
This is not a defense policy. It is a transaction.
And how is this historic spending increase being paid for? By gutting Medicaid, food assistance, housing programs, climate research, K-12 education, and virtually every program that materially supports the lives of the people who voted for Trump. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates this expansion of the military budget will add more than $3.2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. The president himself acknowledged his priorities plainly at an Easter luncheon this week for Christian religious leaders and Cabinet members: "We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We're fighting wars."
This is not a defense policy. It is a transaction. It is the most expensive political consolidation in American history, aimed squarely at drawing the defense industry and the Pentagon into the corporate bloc that sustains this administration. The Iran war, whatever its strategic rationale, serves that consolidation perfectly. Wars need weapons. Weapons need contracts. Contracts need contractors. The military-industrial complex, once ambivalent about Trump, now has enormous skin in the game.
But there is a second and more chilling dimension to this realignment. The military is not just an economic constituency. It is, historically, the institution most capable of checking an executive that moves to seize unconstitutional power. Trump appears to understand this. Over two days last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, Army General David Hodne, and the chief of chaplains Major General William Green, all with immediate effect. George had been expected to serve until the summer of 2027. According to Axios, a US official described firing the Army's most senior general in the middle of a war as "insane." The general replacing George, Christopher LaNeve, was previously a personal aide to Hegseth himself.
It is... worth considering the possibility that removing independent-minded commanders serves purposes that go well beyond the prosecution of the current war.
These firings did not come from nowhere. Hegseth has now removed more than a dozen senior military leaders across multiple branches since taking office, including Joint Chiefs Chairman General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the Navy's top admiral, and the head of the Coast Guard. The pattern is unmistakable: experienced, independent commanders are being replaced by loyalists. This is not about military effectiveness. It is about ensuring that when the moment comes, the armed forces are led by people whose careers depend entirely on the man in the White House.
Senator Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, offered his assessment on Friday: "It's likely that experienced generals are telling Hegseth his Iran war plans are unworkable, disastrous, and deadly." That interpretation deserves to be taken seriously. Yet it is also worth considering the possibility that removing independent-minded commanders serves purposes that go well beyond the prosecution of the current war.
The Contradiction That Cannot Be Resolved
To understand why a broader power consolidation may be coming sooner than most people think, you have to understand the structural trap that Trumpism has always been caught in, a trap that is now visibly closing in around the administration and threatening its political survival.
Trump won his second term, as he won his first, by weaponizing legitimate grievances. The slow strangulation of working-class communities. Decades of wage stagnation. The punishing weight of rising costs in housing, healthcare, and food. He named these things loudly and unapologetically, when much of the Democratic establishment was still insisting that the fundamentals were sound. That naming had real political power. It brought him the votes of people who had seen their lives get harder through multiple administrations of both parties and had concluded that someone willing to say the unsayable was better than another round of managed decline.
It also created a structural problem that no amount of political talent can solve: the conditions Trump identified are not the product of bad leadership or globalist betrayal. They are the inevitable result of capitalism, specifically of four decades of neoliberal restructuring that concentrated wealth, hollowed out labor protections, financialized the economy, and made the cost of living an ever-growing crisis for the majority of Americans. Trump had neither the intention nor the ideological framework to change any of this. His economic program, built on tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation for corporations, and tariffs that function as a consumption tax on working people, does not address the underlying crisis. It accelerates it.
For a time, propaganda could paper over the gap between rhetoric and reality. The enemy was immigrants. The enemy was China. The enemy was the deep state, the fake news, the coastal elites. The culture war was stoked to a rolling boil to keep attention away from material conditions. But propaganda has a shelf life, and the Iran war has accelerated its expiry dramatically. Gas prices have broken four dollars a gallon for the first time in four years. Mortgage rates have risen for five consecutive weeks. Inflation expectations, already elevated, have worsened further.
Propaganda has a shelf life, and the Iran war has accelerated its expiry dramatically.
The polling numbers tell a story of collapse. Trump's approval rating on the economy has fallen to a new career low of 31 percent, according to CNN, with roughly two-thirds of Americans saying his policies have made economic conditions worse. His overall approval has dipped below 40 percent for the first time in his second term, with a net rating of minus 16.9. The University of Massachusetts Amherst poll put him as low as 33 percent overall, with researchers describing the numbers as "brutal" and noting drops of close to 20 points among men, working-class Americans, African Americans, moderates, and independents, the very groups whose support brought him back to the White House in 2024. For a politician who has always operated on the thinnest of margins, that number represents catastrophe.
The midterms loom, and they threaten to be devastating. Democrats have led the generic ballot in every single national poll taken since May 2025. The pattern, if it holds, points toward wave territory for Democrats by November. A significant takeover of the House or Senate would do more than slow Trump's legislative agenda. It would expose him to oversight, investigation, and the kind of accountability that his personal, family, and financial interests cannot survive. The MAGA project, which has always been as much about the enrichment of Trump and his inner circle as about any coherent political program, would face existential threat.
This is the contradiction that cannot be resolved through democratic competition. And that may be precisely why the response to it is ceasing to be democratic.
The Machinery of Electoral Sabotage
The moves are already underway, and they deserve to be named clearly, not as speculation, but as observable, documented fact.
The legislative effort to suppress voting began with the original SAVE Act in 2025 and has now evolved into the far more expansive SAVE America Act, which passed the House in February 2026. As the Center for American Progress documents, this legislation would require voters to present a passport or birth certificate in person to register to vote, disenfranchising potentially millions of citizens. Crucially, these Americans are disproportionately working-class people of color, married women who have changed their names, young people, and low-income voters. The bill would also implement extreme documentation requirements at polling places, restrict mail voting, and require all states to submit their voter registration rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. The Campaign Legal Center estimates that election officials could face criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for registering someone without the required documents, even if that person is a citizen.
The Brennan Center has stated the danger plainly: "The SAVE Act would stop millions of American citizens from voting. It would be the most restrictive voting bill ever passed by Congress. It is Trump's power grab in legislative garb." As the Senate stalls on the bill, Trump has insisted Republicans end the filibuster to force it through, while simultaneously pressuring Republican governors to enact state-level versions. Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah have already complied. In the meantime, Steve Bannon has said aloud what many have thought privately, that ICE deployments to airports in recent months have been a "test run to really perfect ICE's involvement in the 2026 midterm elections."
Then there is JD Vance. This week, Trump formally designated his vice president as the national "fraud czar," heading a federally constituted task force with nationwide jurisdiction. Trump specified that while Vance's focus would be "everywhere," it would "primarily" target California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine, New York, and other Democratic-led states. The move closely followed the swearing-in of a new Assistant Attorney General for National Fraud Enforcement who reports directly to Vance and the president. Whatever the stated rationale of combating healthcare and social services fraud, the political targeting is explicit. The administration is constructing federal law enforcement tools aimed with open precision at the states most likely to vote against it in November.
Taken individually, each of these moves can be rationalized away. Yet together, they describe something coherent and deeply alarming.
And then there is the firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bondi was removed from office this week, not because she was too independent or insufficiently loyal, but because Trump felt she had not moved aggressively enough to prosecute his political enemies. Federal judges had thrown out indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Career prosecutors had warned that cases against other Trump targets lacked sufficient evidence. Courts had held DOJ officials in contempt. The president, frustrated, concluded that Bondi had not delivered. As a former DOJ attorney told NPR, Bondi "took a sledgehammer to the Justice Department and its workforce," and yet she was still not compliant enough. Her replacement is expected to be even more willing to use the department as a personal instrument of political retribution.
Taken individually, each of these moves can be rationalized away. Yet together, they describe something coherent and deeply alarming. They describe a government methodically removing or degrading the mechanisms, judicial, electoral, military, prosecutorial, by which a democratic system constrains and, when necessary, removes leaders who have lost public support.
Why Iran, Why Now
Which brings us back to the war, and why it may not be separable from any of this.
Wars do things that are useful to leaders facing political collapse. They activate nationalism. They shift media attention. They generate a rally-around-the-flag dynamic that briefly suspends normal political gravity and makes ordinary voters feel, however fleetingly, that this is not the moment for partisan criticism. They make the argument, always available and always dangerous, that dissent is disloyalty, that the Commander-in-Chief must not be undermined while American forces are in the field and American lives are at stake.
They also, crucially, create conditions of emergency that can be used to justify the postponement or disruption of normal democratic procedures. We have seen this logic deployed before, in other countries, in other eras. The emergency that never quite ends. The election that needs to be delayed, just this once, for reasons of national security. The opposition party that finds itself accused not of political disagreement but of actively aiding the enemy. The president whose wartime authority, he insists, should not be constrained by normal constitutional limits.
We are not there yet. But the distance between where we are and where this logic leads has arguably never been shorter in modern American history.
The budget that funds the war was released simultaneously with the gutting of the domestic programs that might otherwise give Trump's voters a reason to keep faith with his project. The generals who might push back against both the war strategy and the broader authoritarian drift have been fired and replaced by loyalists. The attorney general who was not pursuing political enemies aggressively enough has been removed. The voting restrictions designed to reduce participation by those least likely to support the Republican Party are advancing at the state and federal level simultaneously. The vice president has been handed a law enforcement tool specifically calibrated to target Democratic states in an election year.
None of these things, by itself, constitutes definitive proof of an intention to cancel or subvert the 2026 midterm elections. But the pattern they form, when viewed as a whole, is not ambiguous. It is the pattern of a government that is preparing the ground, legally, institutionally, militarily, for the possibility that it will not accept an unfavorable electoral outcome.
The Coming War on Democracy
Critics of Trump have spent nearly a decade describing him as an existential threat to democracy. That characterization has sometimes felt abstract, a warning about norms, institutions, and long-term trajectories that serious people took seriously but that never quite seemed to crystallize into something immediate and irreversible.
It no longer feels abstract.
What appears to be taking shape is a deliberate, multi-front effort to construct the conditions under which electoral democracy in the United States can be formally or informally suspended, and to build, through the military budget, through institutional purges, through legal mechanisms, through the systematic targeting of opposition strongholds, the structural supports that would make such suspension survivable for those carrying it out.
The Iran war may be reckless. It may be destabilizing. It may ultimately prove to be a catastrophic foreign policy blunder with devastating consequences for the region and the global economy. All of that can be true. It probably is true.
What appears to be taking shape is a deliberate, multi-front effort to construct the conditions under which electoral democracy in the United States can be formally or informally suspended...
But it may also be something else simultaneously. It may be a cornerstone, laid deliberately, at precisely this political moment, in a project whose ultimate aim is not victory in the Middle East, but the elimination of the political threat that a free and fair American election now represents to the people currently in power. A government that has lost public confidence, that faces the prospect of a wave election, and that has spent more than a year systematically hollowing out the institutions that might constrain it, does not need to announce its intentions in order for those intentions to become clear.
History is full of democracies that ended not with a single dramatic coup, but with a long sequence of individually explicable steps that combined proved irreversible. Each step seemed manageable. Each step could be rationalized. Each step was followed by warnings from critics that were dismissed as alarmism, right up to the moment when the warnings turned out to have been, if anything, not alarmed enough.
The question is no longer whether American democracy is under sustained and serious threat. The evidence for that is overwhelming and on the record. The question is whether enough people, in Congress, in the courts, in civil society, and in the streets, recognize the full scope of what is happening, and whether they are willing to act on that recognition before the window to act closes. That window, history suggests, does not stay open forever.
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Supreme Court Appears Poised to Allow ‘Brazen Republican Effort to Disenfranchise Millions’ Ahead of Midterms
Mail-in voting "is relied upon by nearly one million Americans serving in the military abroad and nearly 50 million Americans living in the US," noted one expert.
Mar 23, 2026
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in a case in which Republicans are trying to ban states from accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day—a development that opponents warned could disenfranchise many of the roughly 50 million Americans who voted by mail in 2024.
Watson v. Republican National Committee challenges Mississippi's grace period for accepting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day. While most states require mailed ballots to arrive by that date, 14 states provide extra time ranging from days to weeks. Such grace periods allow the votes of people including US troops stationed overseas, Americans living abroad, disabled people, and others to be counted.
The case is partly driven by President Donald Trump's unfounded assertion that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud. Following Trump's 2020 election loss, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—created by the president in 2018—called the contest “the most secure in American history.” Trump promptly fired the head of the agency before leaving office.
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider a GOP effort to dramatically restrict mail-in voting Monday, when it hears oral arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
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— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) March 22, 2026 at 8:31 AM
Legal experts observing Monday's oral arguments said that some of the six Republican-appointed justices appeared sympathetic to arguments for restricting mail-in voting.
University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman said on Bluesky that Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas "sound like complete MAGA-pilled 'absentee voting/mail in voting is fraudulent' brains" who are "open to invalidating state laws allowing vote counting after Election Day—and perhaps more voting forms."
"They are doing what they often do in these cases with unhinged theories—invent far fetched hypos (could a state allow you to retract your vote, or say your vote is cast when you give your brother a ballot) to distract from what the case is about (is mail-in absentee voting going to be banned)," Litman added.
Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern said on Bluesky that Justice Samuel Alito "strongly implied that vote-by-mail, as practiced in most of the country today, is highly susceptible to fraud," adding that Gorsuch and Thomas "leaned in that direction as well," while Justices Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts "are harder to read."
"SO many questions from the Republican-appointed justices so far having little or nothing to do with the law—they're venting their evident frustrations about modern election laws that broadly authorize mail voting and fretting that they're spoiling elections with distrust and fraud," Stern continued. "Really bad!"
"It's also pretty clear that the Republican-appointed justices do not understand a great deal about how elections are actually administered," he added. "Their questions (and especially hypotheticals) are built on weird, paranoid fantasies that do not align with reality."
Others warned of the high likelihood of voter disenfranchisement should the justices limit mailed ballots.
“Watson v. RNC is a brazen Republican effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans seeking to vote in the midterm elections," said Court Accountability co-founder Lisa Graves. "Mail-in voting has been part of the American election system since the Civil War, and this method of voting is relied upon by nearly one million Americans serving in the military abroad and nearly 50 million Americans living in the US."
“Of course, the hyper-partisan Roberts Court is considering using the power of the nation’s highest court–again–to put its thumb on the scale of justice in ways sought by the Republican Party," Graves continued. "Three Trump appointees on the Supreme Court are poised to join three other Republican appointees to side with the radical ruling of a trio of operatives Trump appointed to the Fifth Circuit."
Last November, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans struck down a Mississippi law that allowed mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted as long as they arrive within five business days, setting up the Supreme Court showdown.
“Vote-by-mail is a secure and widely used way to participate in our elections," Stand Up America executive director Christina Harvey said Monday. "It’s a lifeline for military and overseas voters, voters with disabilities, elderly voters, and rural voters living far from their polling places. Nearly one-third of the votes cast in the 2024 election were cast by mail, proving just how essential this option has become."
“Watson v. RNC is part of a broader effort to dismantle voting options ahead of this year’s midterms," Harvey continued. "After pushing congressional Republicans to eliminate vote-by-mail and adopting [United States Postal Service] policy changes that could disqualify ballots sent on time, Donald Trump and his allies are asking the Supreme Court to finish the job."
"If the court rules in their favor, they’ll be making it easier for politicians to hold onto power without answering to voters," she added.
Critics allege that disenfranchisement is the point of policies like limiting mail-in voting or requiring voter ID. Republicans have implied—and even admitted outright—that these policies help Republicans win elections. During a 2020 interview, Trump said he opposed expanding mail-in voting, saying such a move would mean the country would "never have a Republican elected... again."
Last year, Trump signed the Orwellian-named “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” executive order, which critics argued would do just the opposite by making it more difficult for millions of voters to cast their ballots. Among other things, the decree pushes states to require proof of citizenship when voting—a policy that opponents warn disproportionately disenfranchises lower-income individuals, elderly, and adopted people without easy access to their birth certificates and those born at home in rural areas whose birth records were never officially filed.
Congressional Republicans are also pushing the SAVE Act and Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, the latter of which was described by one analyst as the “most dangerous attack on voting rights ever" proposed in Congress. The SAVE Act—which would require anyone registering to vote in federal elections to provide documentary proof of US citizenship—passed in the House last month.
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Understanding MAGA's Plot to Rig the Midterms and Destroy Democracy
Here is a list of the plot’s main elements to help you stay informed, connected, and, above all, engaged.
Mar 12, 2026
The ongoing Trumpian plot to rig the midterms and end democracy is getting crazier and more dangerous by the day. The plot is also becoming increasingly layered and will likely continue all the way to next January 3, when newly elected members of the Senate and every member of the House will be sworn into office.
Keeping abreast of all the twists and turns as the scheme unfolds can be exhausting and overwhelming, and that’s exactly how our narcissist-in-chief and his assorted obergruppenführers want you to feel. But don’t give in. The plot is inherently flawed and, although we can never be certain, it will ultimately fail in the face of the president’s plummeting poll numbers, the deepening affordability crisis, and the growing popular resistance movement.
In the meantime, here is a list of the plot’s main elements to help you stay informed, connected, and, above all, engaged.
Nationalizing Elections by Executive Order, Declaring a National Emergency, and Going to War
In a February 2 appearance on former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino’s podcast, President Donald Trump called on Republicans to “take over“ and “nationalize“ voting in at least 15 states. As if on cue, the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a conservative Washington, DC think tank, convened an “election integrity summit” on February 19. The confab was highlighted by a 30-person roundtable discussion on the need to persuade Trump to issue a new executive order that would give him unprecedented control over how federal elections are run.
There is nothing more dangerous than an autocrat afraid of losing power, and there is no autocrat on the world stage today more fearful and paranoid than Donald Trump.
A who’s who of high-profile election deniers attended the summit, including Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser; attorney Cleta Mitchell, who directs the aptly misnamed Election Integrity Network; and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Also in attendance, according to ProPublica, was Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer who is reinvestigating the 2020 election, along with other administration officials.Initially drafted in 2025 and currently being updated, the proposed order totals 17 pages. It would authorize Trump to declare an emergency under the National Emergencies Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to counter alleged foreign interference in elections by requiring strict voter ID procedures, accelerating voting roll purges, banning mail-in ballots, and getting rid of voting machines in favor of hand-counting all votes.
The order doesn’t specify which countries have meddled in our elections. But Trump has targeted China in the past, and is currently accusing Iran, complaining in a 1:35 am Truth Social rant on February 28 that Iran interfered in the “2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States.” This serves the dual purpose of adding another justification for the war and, as election lawyer Marc Elias has noted, another rationale for Trump’s midterm power grab.
Like the executive order on voting rights Trump issued in March 2025, the new proposed order should be overturned by the courts, but only after costly and protracted litigation. Under Article I of the Constitution, the states determine the “times, places, and manner of holding elections.” Congress can pass legislation to regulate state voting procedures, but the president has no independent authority to do so.
Still, there is considerable peril ahead. No court rulings can prevent red states from voluntarily complying with Trump’s demands and affecting down-ballot races that might favor Democrats. Thus far, at least 10 states, including Texas, have handed over their full voter files to the Department of Justice, and the DOJ has sued more than 20 states that have refused to do the same. Even worse, on January 28., the FBI seized voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, after Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rebuffed the administration’s records request. The specter of similar raids in noncomplying states looms as the midterms approach.
The SAVE Act and Its Successors
Realizing the limitations of unilateral executive action, Trump loyalists have introduced legislation to accomplish what his executive orders cannot.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act passed in the House on April 10 and is pending before the Senate. If enacted, it would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or some other documentary proof of citizenship in person every time they register or re-register to vote, and require each state to ensure that only US citizens are registered to vote and to remove noncitizens from their voter lists. It would also create a private right of action, after the fashion of the Texas antiabortion law, to allow disgruntled individuals to sue election officials who register voters without obtaining proof of citizenship and establish criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for election officials who violate the act.
Fortunately, the act has stalled in the Senate, blocked at least temporarily by the filibuster rule that requires a 60-vote majority to advance legislation. However, two new bills—an amended version of the SAVE Act and the Make Elections Great Again Act—have been introduced in the House with strong backing from Trump, who claimed in his recent State of the Union address that “cheating [by Democrats in elections] is rampant.” Should any of the bills reach the Resolute Desk, the courts will be hard-pressed to block them, although legal challenges will no doubt be filed. And in yet another Truth Social rant posted in the early hours of March 8, Trump threatened not to sign any legislation until the act passes the Senate.
Mid-Decade Gerrymandering
Every 10 years, after the census, the Constitution requires the states to redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts to reflect population changes in a process known as reapportionment, or redistricting. If done fairly, the process provides equal representation for all voters regardless of race, gender, or party affiliation, guided by the ideal of “one person, one vote.”
Sadly, the process is deeply flawed and often yields to gerrymandering. A portmanteau coined after the salamander-like image that resulted on a map of the voting districts created by Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry in 1812, gerrymandering today refers to the abusive practice of drawing electoral boundaries to give an advantage to a dominant party, group, or socioeconomic class.
Until now, states have typically redistricted only once per decade. But last July, under intense pressure from Trump, Texas broke the norm, drafting a new congressional map designed to give the GOP five additional House seats. Since then, other states have followed suit, touching off a mid-decade gerrymandering war that has spread to California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida, and soon to other states. On balance, the math slightly favors the Republicans. But the war could easily backfire as a new blue wave appears to be building, and more voters, even in red states, come to realize they have been duped by the con man from Queens.
Deploying ICE at the Polls
In a February 3 podcast, former White House strategist Steve Bannon called on Trump to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to polling sites to prevent noncitizens from voting. Echoing the president’s own oft-repeated conspiracy theory, Bannon said:
We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.
Asked about Bannon’s comments two days later, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November… but what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations.”
Leavitt’s remarks were anything but reassuring for an administration that thrives on deceit. It is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place. It would not be illegal, however, for ICE to deploy to blue state cities on Election Day in the general vicinity of polling places with the goal of intimidating newly naturalized citizens from voting. In fact, it would be astonishing if ICE stayed home.
January 3, 2027
If all other tactics and any lawsuits the GOP launches fail, Trump and his most die-hard adherents will have one last opportunity to stop the Democrats from taking over the House and possibly the Senate on January 3, 2027, when the next Congress is sworn in.
The 20th Amendment mandates that every new Congress convene at noon on January 3. The first session of each chamber is supposed to be purely ceremonial in nature, just like the joint session of Congress that convenes on January 6 to count Electoral College ballots after a presidential election. But as we saw on January 6, 2021, ceremony can quickly give way to chaos, and even outright insurrection. This is especially true when given a patina of legality, as the 2020 election deniers concocted the theory that Vice President Mike Pence had the discretion to reject swing-state electoral votes cast in favor of Joe Biden.
If anything, there is even more opportunity for disruption and potential chaos on January 3. Each chamber has its own rules for the swearing-in process. In the House, the members elect vote to select a new speaker, who is sworn into office by the dean of the House—the most senior (longest-serving) member, regardless of party. Once sworn in, the new speaker administers the oath to the members elect.
The American people, on the other hand, are waking up and rejecting the neofascist horrors their president is offering them and their children.
But what happens if the dean refuses to swear in a new speaker, alleging election fraud? The current dean of the House is Kentucky Republican Hal Rogers, an election denier who voted against the certification of the 2020 election. If Trump demands, would Rogers delay or decline to swear in a Democratic speaker? Would he defy the president?
In the Senate, each newly elected member is sworn in by the vice president of the United States, who serves as president of the Senate. What happens if JD Vance, following instructions from his boss, refuses to swear in a critical number of Democrats?
Each chamber has procedures for resolving election disputes, but they are rarely invoked, and it remains to be seen how Trump would exploit them.
There is nothing more dangerous than an autocrat afraid of losing power, and there is no autocrat on the world stage today more fearful and paranoid than Donald Trump. He is prepared to do anything he can to stave off defeat, but his age and incompetence have finally caught up with him, and his aura of invincibility has been pierced. The American people, on the other hand, are waking up and rejecting the neofascist horrors their president is offering them and their children. In the end, they will see to it that the plot to rig the midterms and end democracy fails.
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