Last week, during an Oval Office Interview with Reuters, Donald Trump touted his accomplishments and suggested that they are so great that “we shouldn’t even have an election” in November. Not surprisingly, that comment made headlines.
But it is at best a distraction from the real threat: the United States will have elections this year, but they will not be free and fair.
Far more important than his musings about calling off the midterms was what the president told the New York Times in another Oval Office interview. As the Times noted, he said that “he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election.”
Talking about the capacity of the national guard to execute that plan, he explained: “I don’t know that they are sophisticated enough … I’m not sure that they’re sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats, and the way they cheat, to figure that out.”
As the Times observed, “Mr. Trump’s expression of regret … was ... a warning sign that he had not given up on the idea that voting machines were dangerous or that they could be seized in an effort to curb fraud.” We should take that warning seriously.
So far, the leaders of the Democratic party have not. They have focused on mobilizing to compete successfully in November, but have done little to ensure the election is not rigged through executive action, intimidation, or interference with vote counting.
In a 16 January podcast interview, Robert Kagan, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained why this is a mistake. Because of Donald Trump’s desire and need for complete domination, he cannot tolerate and will not allow a Republican defeat at the polls.
As Kagan put it: “There’s no chance in the world that Donald Trump is going to allow himself to lose in the 2026 elections, because that would be the end of his ability to wield total power. Unless they got up on the rooftop and said: ‘We are going to subvert the 2026 election,’ they could not be more obvious about what their intention is.”
The results of the off-year elections in 2025 sent a clear signal of what is in store for the president and his party if the midterms are free and fair. That’s why, as the Washington Post reported on 12 January, he “is using every tool he can find to try to influence the 2026 midterm elections and, if his party loses, sow doubt in their validity”.
The administration’s “wide-ranging efforts seek to expand on some of the strategies he and his advisers and allies used to try to reverse the 2020 results”. Moreover, Trump and his allies are much better prepared to rig the 2026 election or discredit the results than they were in 2020.
The playbook was laid out in Project 2025. Let’s recall a few of its proposals.
One was to transfer the responsibility for investigating and prosecuting election crimes to the Department of Justice’s criminal division. Liza Gordon-Rogers, a research associate at the Center for Science and Democracy, argues that his shift would “significantly jeopardize the United States’ multi-racial democracy by changing the focus from interference with voting rights to criminalizing the act of voting itself”.
Project 2025 also called for the federal government to withdraw from arrangements that in the past have helped election officials do their jobs. It recommended what Gordon-Rogers calls “substantive cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has provided essential cyber and physical security support to election offices across the country to make sure our elections are secure”.
Beyond that, if the Project 2025 recommendations are acted on, that would mean, as the Brennan Center for Justice notes, “the outright weaponization of federal power to retaliate against election officials for decisions that federal officials don’t like”.
Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer and frequent Trump target, gets it right when he says that the administration has taken the Project 2025 plan to heart. In addition, he observes, “the 2026 midterms will be easier for Trump to steal than the 2020 election. To start, there is no Electoral College to contend with and no need to pressure state legislatures.”
“Trump and his team,” Elias adds, “are more experienced, more confident, and more ruthless. Sadly, our election systems are weaker than ever, having suffered never-ending attacks from election deniers since 2020.”
“The cards,” he continues, “are already falling into place.” Elias highlights the justice department’s ongoing efforts to gather vast amounts of “highly sensitive voting data” on voters across the US.
And he reminds us of Trump’s claim that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
That sounds like something one of the autocrats Trump admires would say. Authoritarian leaders manipulate voter-registration lists, create a climate of fear to discourage certain voters from voting, and control vote tabulation.
In 2022, the New York Times detailed what one of them, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, did “to shape the contours” of a forthcoming election “more to his liking”. Among those things, he undertook, in effect, an enormous gerrymandering of Hungarian electoral districts.
Sound familiar?
Orban also enacted new rules about the use of mail-in ballots, one of Trump’s favorite targets. And he “legalized the registration of voters outside of their home districts – a common practice, until now criminal, that is known as ‘voter tourism’”. This allows him to get his supporters to vote in places where their support will be most useful.
Don’t be surprised if you hear about something like this from Trump.
At the end of the day, the president may be attracted to the idea of rigging the 2026 election not just out of a fear that he will not be able to work his will but because, as scholars suggest, electoral manipulation is a signal to critical audiences (including “bureaucracy, potential defectors within the elite, or powerful stakeholders within civil society”) of his “strength“ and “invincibility”.
Whatever Trump’s motivations, Democrats are making a mistake by underestimating the likelihood that, for all the artful campaigning and the many unpopular things they can pin on Republicans, none of that will matter. They, and all the rest of us, must mobilize to avoid that result.
We have no time to waste.
Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty
