The Three Key Elements of Trump's Bid to Hijack the Midterm Elections

The president is bringing unprecedented political, legal and military pressure to bear on Democrats, but he doesn’t need to win outright in 2026. Just creating chaos may be enough.

“For my friends everything,” the late Peruvian despot Óscar Benavides famously said. “For my enemies – the law.”

The dictator dictum attributed to Benavides, a prototypical South American strongman, serves as useful shorthand in understanding how Donald Trump has transformed U.S. democracy within eight months of his second term as president.

Disdaining and undercutting fundamental tenets of liberal democracy, which have governed the nation for nearly 250 years – the rule of law, separation of powers, limits on the power of the state, for starters – Trump with breathtaking speed has joined the U.S. in a global march towards authoritarianism and autocracy, according to hundreds of scholars and political scientists who study the matter.

Unlike every other president, Trump does not even make a pretense of claiming that his presidency represents all Americans.

While sucking up to Vladimir Putin and other U.S. enemies around the world, he meanwhile gloats and glories in attacking what he calls “the enemy within” – i.e. his political foes, Democrats and blue states whose leaders and voters oppose him.

Now Trump’s “us vs. them” regime has taken aim at perhaps democracy’s most precious principle: free and fair elections.

The stakes are huge. Next year’s crucial congressional elections, midway through his four-year term, represent the first, and perhaps the last, chance for Democrats to break the stranglehold of power Trump’s MAGA Republicans hold on the national government.

Historically, the president’s party loses seats in the House of Representatives, often enough to swing control back to the out-party; in normal times, Trump’s low ratings (40 percent approval in last month’s Gallup poll) would make that more likely.

These are not normal times.

Sixty Tuesdays before the Nov. 3, 2026 election, Trump and his political advisers already have embarked on a three-pronged game plan to ensure that doesn’t happen.

From his perspective, the best outcome of the plan is Republicans maintaining a reed-thin majority in the 435-member House – now just three seats. But their interlocking strategy also could succeed simply by muddying the water -- creating widespread confusion, or chaos, surrounding the election, leading to long disputes over who really won (shout-out 2020), that perhaps involve the military in enforcing a verdict.

These are the key elements:

Gerrymandering. On July 15, Trump triggered a national political war over re-drawing the maps that define congressional districts. His call for the Republican governor and legislators in Texas to reconfigure the state was unusual, not only because it came only five years after the normal, once-a-decade redistricting that follows a new U.S. Census, but also because he said the quiet part out loud: Trump brazenly demanded the GOP take five seats away from Democrats, enough to be determinative amid the narrow partisan split in the House and the nation.

In a surprise, California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded with his own ploy, pushing the Democrat-dominated Legislature in Sacramento to call a special election with one and only one question put to voters: Proposition 50 would suspend current House districts, drawn by the state’s non-partisan redistricting commission, for the clear, partisan benefit of Democrats, positioning them to win five seats now held by Republicans.

The twin events set off a political cascade, as red state politicians eager to curry favor with Trump – in Missouri, Indiana and Florida – have begun early redistricting efforts of their own. While Republicans move energetically to game the system, Democrats elsewhere in the nation have moved more slowly, if at all.

Federal control of elections. It’s been a settled issue since the Constitution was adopted (Article 1, Section 4) that elections are conducted by the states – not the federal government.

Now Trump, in a series of executive orders and unhinged rants on his Truth Social platform, is threatening that principle, claiming federal control of the midterms (along with vows to end mail-in voting and require proof of citizenship at the polls from every voter, among other things). Chillingly, he recently wrote:

“Remember, 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. (insane caps in original – ed.).

Although this effort is of dubious legality, like much of what Trump tries to do, red state politicians again are scurrying to get in line with his demands.

Military troops to Democratic cities. Trump’s dubious dispatch of National Guard troops, first to Los Angeles and then to Washington D.C., along with threats to do the same in other Democratic states, sets a precedent for militarizing domestic police operations, along a pathway of normalizing such previously extraordinary action.

Democratic governors, from Newsom to JB Pritzker of Illinois and Wes Moore in Maryland, are sounding the alarm about the possibility of Trump sending troops to “protect” voting in whichever districts in whatever key states might appear to be decisive in the battle for House control.

Threats and intimidation, to depress turnout, coupled with the possibility of military action, perhaps in escalatory response to local anti-Trump demonstrations, all would contribute to an atmosphere of confusion, disorder, and chaos beneficial to Trump.

“This is not about fighting crime,” Pritzker said in a recent speech countering Trump’s threat to send troops to Chicago under the pretext of crime-fighting.

“This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals,” Pritzker added, connecting the dots. “This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.”

Bottom line. The nine-week campaign over Prop. 50 on the Nov. 4 special election ballot represents the first critical skirmish in the fight over the midterms. On Tuesday, Gavin and the Yes-on-50 committee released its first ad, presenting a direct, if nebulous argument for the ballot measure.

It might be more effective if boiled down further: Stop Trump.