Trump Is Telling You Exactly How He Plans to Steal the Midterms. Are You Listening?
Donald Trump sat for an interview with Newsmax’s Wayne Allen Root just after midnight Tuesday, and Root handed him the playbook. You have the right, Root said, to declare a national security emergency before November. Force through photo ID. Force through proof of citizenship. Crush mail-in voting. Trump didn’t flinch. “Let me just say stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.”
That is not a denial. That is a man testing whether the country will let him get away with it.
Let’s be clear about what is already happening, because the emergency declaration is only the crescendo. ProPublica reporter Jen Fifield has documented the systematic dismantling of every federal guardrail built to protect elections after 2017. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had more than 30 people working on election security across the country. Every one of them has been reassigned. The National Security Council’s election security group. Gone. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Gutted. The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section. Hollowed out. The people who spent years making sure foreign governments couldn’t hack our voting machines and making sure local election officials had backup when threats arrived? Fired or scattered.
And in their place, a group of political appointees who never accepted the 2020 results, calling themselves “Team America,” now works across DHS and DOJ to carry out Trump’s executive orders on elections. Their mission is not security. Their mission is suppression.
Trump has already issued executive orders to create federal lists of “eligible” citizens and to instruct the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to people on those lists. He is “suggesting strongly” to congressional Republicans that they block every piece of legislation, the budget, anything, unless the SAVE Act with its voter ID and citizenship requirements is attached. He calls mail-in voting “mail-in cheating” and declares it “part of Homeland Security,” as if requesting an absentee ballot is an act of terrorism.
The White House (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsMeanwhile, ICE agents were spotted at polling places in Texas during May primaries and in California in June. Democrats have spent close to a year filing Freedom of Information Act requests with DHS to learn what authority sent them there. DHS responded by sending press clippings. Not memos. Not policies. Clippings. The stonewall is the answer.
This is not a secret cabal operating in shadows. This is structural. It is happening in daylight, through executive orders, through agency reassignments, through the deliberate starvation of election infrastructure. Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, laid it out on The Atlantic’s David Frum Show: the administration is building the legal and bureaucratic machinery to undermine or outright steal the 2026 midterms, and the systems meant to stop it are being dismantled in real time.
And while all of this unfolds, the National Park Service announced it will no longer offer free entry on Martin Luther King Jr. Day or Juneteenth. Instead, free entry comes on June 14, which the Park Service website now describes as “Flag Day/President Trump’s birthday.” The United States has never marked a living president’s birthday as a national occasion. FIFA invented a Peace Prize and handed Trump a gaudy desktop trophy with a neck medal. A giant banner of his face hangs from the Department of Labor building near the Capitol.
These are not distractions from the election takeover. They are the same project. A man who rewrites the calendar to celebrate himself, who accepts invented honors from corrupt institutions, who hangs his portrait on federal buildings like a caudillo, is not going to voluntarily preside over a free and fair election that he might lose.
So here is what must happen, and it cannot wait. Congress must subpoena every DHS memo on ICE at polling places. Every election official in every state must refuse to implement executive orders that conflict with state election law. Civil rights organizations must file injunctions now, not in October. And every person who has ever knocked on a door, phone-banked a weekend, or driven someone to the polls needs to understand that the fight in November is not just about who wins. It is about whether the vote is allowed to happen at all.
Trump told you what he is considering. “Stranger things have happened.” Take him at his word.