Tag: midterm elections

Trump is desperate as midterms near

Donald Trump is increasingly desperate for a way to forestall the reckoning that he knows will begin when the 120th Congress is seated in about 11 months, and it appears that for him the solution is somehow to defuse the Republican-destroying grenade that is the midterm congressional elections coming up in November.

Despite the fervent desire of Trump and the efforts he is making, I expect that in January 2027, Democrats will be decisively in the majority in the House of Representatives. That Democratic majority will energetically undertake the task of holding President Trump and the rest of the executive branch accountable for administration policies and arbitrary presidential actions that have gone unchallenged under the Republican majority led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in the 119th Congress.

I think the president has long recognized that the voters of this country will quickly sicken of him once his chaotic policies start to cause them pain and even embarrassment, so, like most of the dictator-minded around the world, he sees elections simply as an entryway that must be barricaded behind him as soon as he is safely inside the citadel. He tried to wall himself inside in his first term, but he did not act quickly enough and was frustrated by what he called “the deep state” but what I call the blessed institutions of our democracy.

Having persuaded a majority of voters to give him a new term in office, he is wielding some of his old tricks and deploying new ones to try to neuter this year’s midterms, but these elections are going to be a really hard nut to crack. So, what are his old tricks? Basically lying brazenly about a nonexistent problem of substantial electoral fraud in certain states — majority-Democratic states, of course. This approach leads us to his new tricks: a multi-pronged assault on the system of congressional elections.

That assault began with Trump’s persuading the hardly reluctant majority-Republican legislature in Texas to execute an outside-the-schedule redrawing of that state’s congressional maps to make an additional five or so of Texas’ seats in the U.S. House predictably Republican. The president has encouraged legislatures in other red states to do the same, and some have completed that process or are attempting it. Naturally, legislatures in some blue states have responded to this mid-decade redrawing of congressional voting maps by doing or attempting the same maneuver in their jurisdictions. (Here is an easily read breakdown from the National Conference of State Legislatures on how that effort stands across the country.)

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026, viewed from Pennsylvania Avenue NW and with fresh snow coating the landscape. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

And Trump’s FBI on Jan. 28 searched the elections agency in Fulton County, Ga., and carted away information including ballots and other records pertaining to the 2020 presidential election. You may recall that after he lost Georgia to Joe Biden in that election, Trump tried to persuade Georgia’s secretary of state, a Republican, to “find” a specific number of votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. That official, Brad Raffensperger, quite correctly refused to commit a crime to help the president stay in office.

The raid executed last week by the FBI is part of the president’s persistent lying about the 2020 election. But with the midterms just nine months away, the FBI intervention has the real potential of interfering with the voting process in Fulton County, which is home to Atlanta and has the largest bloc of voters in the state of Georgia.

Further to that FBI raid, why was Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, present on the ground during the operation? She runs the agencies that are concerned with foreign intelligence, and the FBI is definitely not within her remit but falls under Attorney General Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice. And why did Gabbard patch Trump through on speaker phone to say encouraging words to FBI agents involved in the search of the elections office? Her presence and his direct interest are further indication to me that he is committed to monkeying with the midterm elections.

Two posters placed in the wealthy D.C. suburb of Chevy Chase, Md., by the nonpartisan Nuclear Threat Initiative were seen on Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026, to have been adulterated and incorporated into a tableau denouncing President Trump’s authoritarian bent and the aggressive enforcement posture of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and defending immigrants targeted by ICE. The president is largely reviled in D.C.’s liberal suburbs in Maryland and Northern Virginia.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Then there is Trump’s call in recent days for Republicans in Congress to “nationalize” the congressional elections. In our system, elections are administered by the states. The Constitution says in Article I Section 4 that it is to be so:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, …

As you can see, Section 4 also says that “the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” It is this provision that Trump apparently wishes to exploit to bring all elections for national office under the control of the federal government. With elections to Congress managed by a central federal authority, Trump and his crooked minions could simply declare whatever results were favorable to Trump. They could also disqualify inconvenient state or district results as being fraudulent. But, praise God, the framers of our Constitution had the nous to anticipate the emergence of someone like the Dear Leader. Thus, our voting system, jurisdictionally fractured by state, territory and district, is a shield against a single corrupting hand.

Remarkably, in response to Trump’s urging that congressional Republicans nationalize congressional elections in 15 states, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said a firm no.

“I’m supportive of only citizens voting and showing ID at polling places. I think that makes sense. … But I’m not in favor of federalizing elections, no. I think that’s a constitutional issue,” Thune told reporters, according to the publication The Hill.

This was a remarkably assertive piece of resistance to a Trump proposal by a congressional Republican leader, given that such folk have been largely asleep insofar as holding Trump to account during the entire first year of his second term. The fact is that states are highly possessive about the rights that the U.S. Constitution accords them, and the states’ individual right to organize their own elections is deeply cherished. So, I cannot see more than a handful of representatives and senators — if any at all — coming out in favor of Trump’s call for congressional elections to be federally run in a particular set of states. That idea is just a nonstarter. Ain’t gonna happen.

But the administration is employing multiple tools in its search for a way to meddle with the midterms and head off the Democratic Party rampage that is seen as imminent. For instance, as Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in a Jan. 27 essay, “(Attorney General Pam) Bondi’s Justice Department has demanded access to the voter records of 44 states and Washington, DC, and it has sued more than 20 states for not complying. Two courts have already ruled on the side of the states.”

And then there is, potentially, the military option.

We all know that Trump has conjured publicly with the idea of turning the regular U.S. military loose in majority-Democratic parts of the country. He has, in fact, deployed or has tried to deploy National Guard troops in various Democrat-heavy areas, including California and here in Washington, D.C. What began as a Guard deployment last summer to bolster law enforcement during a one-month crime emergency that the president declared in D.C. has become a troop presence on the streets of the nation’s capital that will stretch at least until after the midterm elections in November.

When you consider, in addition, that the White House security perimeter has been enlarged by the use of crowd-control fencing to include Lafayette Park adjacent to the White House grounds, one suspects that Trump and his nearest sycophants are hedging against a popular rising of the people this year in response to some anti-democratic provocation emanating from the White House.

National Guard troops wait to cross a street in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. Since the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard soldiers near the White House on Nov. 26, 2025, with one dying and the other left gravely injured, Guard troops patrolling D.C. in a deployment ordered by President Trump have adopted a far more alert stance when in a static position. As seen in this image reflected in a vehicle wing mirror, they face outward to be able to spot a threat approaching from any direction.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

I do not know how Donald Trump plans to interfere with the midterm elections, but the evidence of my eyes and ears tells me that he is furiously casting about for some way to stop the blue wave that is rolling toward Capitol Hill. That wave will wash away the compliant Congress that he has so far enjoyed in his second term and replace it with a legislature with backbone and a bad attitude toward him. This prospect fills him with dread. Because he is a walking, talking, certifiable lunatic, I do not rule out any rash act of self-preservation on his part.

Thus I say to all my fellow democracy-loving Americans: “Screw your courage to the sticking place.” Get your marching shoes ready! Our country might face a crisis this year from which only we, in the streets in our numbers, can extract it and set it back on the straight and narrow.

A do-or-die year for U.S. democracy

It is often said that this election or that election “is the most important of our lifetimes.” I make no such declaration about the congressional elections this year that mark the midpoint of Donald Trump’s second term in the U.S. presidency. What I will declare is that 2026 is a crucial year of action for the conspiracy whose aim is to destroy American democracy and establish white-supremacist authoritarianism. And 2026 is, therefore, also a crucial year for the movement to preserve American democracy and constitutional order.

It has been usual in this country for the winning presidential candidate to have coattails long and broad enough to carry a substantial portion of his party’s congressional candidates into office at the time of his own election. This pattern held true with Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2024. Also usual in this country is that the midterm elections bring a reversal of fortunes for the president’s party in Congress. That is widely expected to be the case in the midterm elections in November 2026.

Some, though — and I count myself among them — expect not merely a reversal of fortunes for the congressional GOP in November but an absolute demolition in favor of the Democratic Party and the country’s welfare. Beyond expecting this outcome, I earnestly desire it, for the good of the country. The anticipated rout is being correctly read as growing public distaste for Trump’s policies and actions in the presidency.

Denunciations of President Donald Trump and his administration are seen on street furniture with the U.S. Capitol — the home of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate — in the background on Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., on Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

The sealing of the country’s southern border against an indiscriminate influx of migrants from countries near and far is perhaps the president’s most useful and popular accomplishment, but Americans generally have been appalled by the Trump administration’s tactics in that other part of the immigration crackdown: the detention preparatory to removal of undocumented people from the country.

Trump and his officials have been shockingly dishonest in characterizing undocumented migrants as “the worst of the worst” to justify treating them like diseased animals. They are rounded up, chained, penned and hustled out of the country, even to far-distant jurisdictions to which they have no connection. And many brown-skinned U.S. citizens have been swept up in the government’s racist immigration dragnet and been abused alongside the falsely labeled “worst.”

Aside from stopping the unrestricted migrant inflow, little else about the Trump administration recommends it to the voting public, whereas that public finds that a good many of Trump’s actions and those of his administration are distasteful in the extreme. Trump has two primary missions: gratifying his bloated ego and grifting to fatten his family’s purse on one hand; and building the foundations of white-supremacist authoritarianism on the other hand.

The latter of those two primary missions is the one that presents an existential danger to the country’s existing governance structures. We merely have to look to the former apartheid South Africa, or to any of old Europe’s colonial societies, or to the United States in the slave era and then Jim Crow to see the contours of white-supremacist dictatorship that the far right in this country wishes to impose upon us.

So why is 2026 so important? It is important because of the midterm elections on Nov. 3. If we are so fortunate to have elections uncorrupted by Trump’s goons and abettors, a Democratic majority with a proper democratic spirit will be elected to the House of Representatives, a signal to Trump that when that majority is seated in January 2027, he will face congressional opposition and be held to account by Congress for the first time in his second term. (If we are truly lucky, we will have a Democratic-majority Senate as well.)

Up to now, the Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate have lain prostrate in fear before their corrupt emperor. In their cowardice before Trump, their only use has been to demonstrate to the country what sort of people ought not to be elected if the general desire is to have honest representation and a check upon the executive branch of our government.

The coming November elections constitute the greatest danger yet to the far right’s takeover project in Trump’s second term, so the coming months necessarily will reveal the mad schemes that the most desperate in the far-right faction will float or even try to effectuate to circumvent the will of the electorate. One of the far right’s regrets about Trump’s first term is that it did not act with sufficient speed and boldness (the Jan. 6 attack on Congress notwithstanding) to seize control of power in this country. That faction faces a ticking clock in the months between now and November to make an all-or-nothing lunge to grab the levers of power.

Will Trump and his acolytes try to use the National Guard or formations of the regular military to overturn the Constitution? Will the masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security be turned loose on voting centers in Democratic strongholds to interfere with the elections? Such tactics have been used in other countries; why not here? All that Trump has to do is say that he is deploying the National Guard — again — to address crime, and his foot will be upon the fateful threshold. Only a lack of the will to dare on the part of the fascist-minded in this country has so far spared us that scheme and its trauma on a national scale.

I cannot forecast how the forces of darkness will go about their plans in this year that is yet in its infancy. They have earnest and dreadful desires. But those desires face obstacles, not the least of which are we who love American democracy and the United States Constitution and will accept no other master over us. These coming months may form the year in which good and evil once again clash resoundingly over the direction and nature of this great and greatly beloved country. Stand ready, fellow democrats! Stay woke!