Trump is openly trying to steal the midterms
By 
That’s what his demand that the November elections be “nationalized” actually means:
President Donald Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize the voting” in an interview that aired Monday, as his administration pushes to overhaul election ground rules ahead of the pivotal midterm races later this year.
“The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump told Dan Bongino, the former deputy director of the FBI, in a podcast appearance.
The president’s comments come less than a week after the FBI searched an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, which has long been a centerpiece of Trump’s baseless claims that his 2020 loss to Joe Biden was fraudulent. The search was related to a Justice Department effort to seize election records and search for alleged voter fraud in the county, CNN previously reported.
“We have states that are so crooked and they’re counting votes. We have states that I won, that show I didn’t win,” Trump said. “Now you’re going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots, you’re going to see some interesting things come out.”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Trump himself directed her to go to Atlanta for the controversial search. In a sign of his involvement and interest in the probe, Gabbard put the president on the phone with some of the FBI agents involved in the search, according to two sources familiar with the call, with one source saying the conversation consisted of a brief “pep talk.”
Elections are run by state and local officials, with the federal government playing only a limited role. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from attempting to revamp how elections are conducted.
Last year, he signed an executive order seeking to require voters to show proof of US citizenship when registering to vote in elections and prohibit states from counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. While it’s been partially blocked in federal court, non-citizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections.
On several occasions, Trump has pledged to change how the country votes, zeroing in on methods he falsely claims lead to fraudulent voting. In August, he said he was going to “lead a movement” to end mail-in ballots, and vowed to sign an executive order banning them, in addition to voting machines. He did not end up signing the order.
Anybody who claims to know how all this is going to play out is wrong: We’ve never been in a situation in which the president of the United States was openly a wannnabe dictator, while the rest of the system had not yet adjusted to this reality.
What we do know is that, as Krugman points out, Trump and MAGA will absolutely not accept a loss in the November elections. This is partially because these people are all corrupt scum to the center of their bones, and partially because they, and Trump in particular, live in a delusional dream world in which Trump and MAGA are overwhelmingly popular, so the only way they can lose elections is if the Left (this means Bill Kristol, AOC, and everybody inbetween) cheats. Yes it’s pure projection and insanity, but a tiny plurality of the idiot American public decided a year ago last November that a demented old man and his paranoid army of white supremacists, Christian nationalists, incel gamers, etc. should be put in charge of the federal government so here we are. And where is that exactly? Krugman:
The startling extremism of the Trump regime, even compared with other modern wannabe dictatorships, is obvious to the naked eye. But I always find quantification useful. So I was very pleased to see that the estimable John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has risen to the occasion, producing an index of democratic backsliding that lets us compare the trajectory of the United States under Trump with those of other nations we used to view as cautionary tales. (I’ve looked at how the index is constructed, and it’s reasonable.) We’re on a uniquely steep descent, at least for modern times:
It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Republicans are being punished at the polls: On Saturday a deep-red Texas Senate district that went Trump +17 in 2024 voted in a Democrat with a 15-point margin.
I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc. think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.
The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.
The second question is, how does this end? Most immediately, what will happen during and after the midterm elections? Everything points to a blue wave in November. Yet many people in MAGA simply can’t accept losing power — among other things, their actions over the past year mean that if they lose power, many of them will go to jail.
Trump is now calling for “nationalizing” the midterms, meaning to put voting and the counting of votes under his administration’s control. He can’t do that, but his demand is a clear sign that he will not accept the public’ s verdict in November.
So it’s just being realistic to say that MAGA will try, somehow, to prevent voters from having their say. Will ICE try to prevent blue districts from voting? If that fails, will they reject the results, in a midterm version of Jan. 6? Call me alarmist, but remember: The alarmists have been right, and the people telling us to calm down have been wrong, every step of the way.
Trump may try to cancel the November elections, if he can gin up any sort of violent resistance to MAGA thuggery via DHS/ICE. He may go the voter suppression/intimidation route instead. He may try another 1/6 after the election is a blue wave anyway. (“He” here should be understood to mean both Trump himself, as he spirals ever further into some sort of narcissistic fugue state, and his key enablers, who are doing whatever actual planning and strategizing is actually happening). But as Krugman emphasizes, what won’t happen is that the results of a “free and fair,” as the international monitors call it, election will simply be accepted by MAGA, after they lose. Trump is quite literally incapable of accepting the idea that he lost a contest of any kind, which is why he’s won 71 club golf championships in a row. And the lunatic MAGA base has internalized his furious malignant narcissism in this respect as in so many others.
As to what is to be done, the answer is that people need to be ready to resist, violently if necessary, the open theft of the 2026 election that will CERTAINLY be attempted, either before, during, or after the fact, or most likely some combination.
This is it. The United States is on the edge of devolving into a an actual dictatorship, but it isn’t there yet. We’re not going to get to wait until 2028: the next nine months are going to decide whether Trump becomes a dictator or not. Again, nobody knows exactly what is going to happen, because there are no prophecies, only inexact precedents. What we do know is that these people will not be driven from power without a fight, so prepare yourself to take part in whatever ways you can.
The future is unwritten.
. . . This from Jonathan Bernstein is a good summation:
1. Trump certainly wants to fully rig elections.
2. He has no actual plausible plan to do so.
3. We should absolutely take the threat very seriously and actively do what’s possible to protect elections and democracy.
4. What’s actually likely is success or failure at the margins; every bit counts.
H/T Knight of Nothing