Seeking to change the rules
Five years ago, President Donald Trump pressured Republican county election officials, state lawmakers and members of Congress to find him votes after he lost his reelection bid. Now, he’s seeking to change the rules before ballots are cast.
Trump, openly fearful that a Congress controlled by Democrats could investigate him, impeach him and stymie his agenda, 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. Many of these endeavors go far beyond typical political persuasion, challenging long-established democratic norms.
Of course they do. Everything he does goes far beyond typical anything.
They include unprecedented demands that Republican state lawmakers redraw congressional districts beforethe constitutionally required 10-year schedule, the prosecution of political opponents, a push to toughenvoter registration rules and attempts to end the use of voting machines and mail ballots.
The administration has gutted the role of the nation’s cybersecurity agency in protecting elections; stocked the Justice Department, Homeland Security Department and FBI from top to bottomwith officials who have denied the legitimacyof the 2020 election; given a White House audience to people who, like the president, promote the lie that he won the 2020 election; sued over state and local election policies that Trump opposes; and called for a new census that excludes noncitizens. The 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 that culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
We’re gonna need a bigger supply of suicide pills.
Trump cast this year’s elections in existential terms in a speech to House Republicans this month, telling them that Democrats would impeach him if they win a majority. He teased the notion of canceling the elections but said he wouldn’t because he’d be accused of being a dictator if he did.
Trump can’t cancel elections and he lacks the authority to carry out some of his most far-reaching plans because local and state officials oversee elections, rather than the federal government. Trump has already ignored those constraints and signaled he will continue to do so, which means courts will probably have to determine what rules are in place for the midterm elections.
But will he pay any attention to what courts determine?
If I were a Republican, I might want him impeached, even if I didn’t say so. The Republicans of old would have insisted he leave office, like they did Nixon, because he is bringing their party into disrepute.
Instead, they see him as bringing the possibility of a permanent Republican majority, and that’s what they’ve wanted for a long time. It never occurs to them that a permanent Republican majority is meaningless in a dictatorship run by one man.