It’s only February, and the November elections are already in peril.
When I think back to the days and weeks before Jan. 6, 2021, one thing that’s clear is that many of us suffered from a failure of imagination. We knew President Trump’s lies and conspiracy mongering were dangerous, but it’s hard to think of a single person who predicted that a MAGA mob would storm the Capitol.
Very few people anticipated the sheer scale and scope of the effort to overturn the election or that an incredible 147 Republicans would vote not to certify Joe Biden’s clear and unambiguous presidential victory. We did not realize that they would go along with something that plainly corrupt and dangerous.
We must not make that mistake again.
And so I’m going to do something a little bit unusual. I’m going to ask you to imagine alongside me. But this is a different kind of imagination. It’s based on real events — things that are already occurring right in front of our eyes.
So here we go.
It’s Friday, Oct. 30, 2026, and the president’s approval rating is low, abysmally low. He hasn’t been able to reverse the gradual decline that began after his inauguration.
At the end of January his aggregate approval rating was 41.4 percent, and his disapproval rating was 55.7 percent. In June his approval dropped below 40 percent, and it hasn’t come back up.
Meanwhile, Democrats are leading the generic ballot by a wide margin, and Democratic voters are far more enthusiastic about going to the polls than Republicans. In a normal midterm election, this would mean that Democrats would easily take control of the House of Representatives. They could even win the Senate.
But this is not a normal election year.
Now, in October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which rapidly expanded throughout the year, is running large-scale operations in Democratic-controlled cities. Hundreds if not thousands more American citizens have been caught in the dragnet. So have thousands of lawful residents.
Citizens, lawful residents and undocumented immigrants alike have been shackled and transported to brutal detention facilities in Texas and Florida.
Despite repeated court orders holding that federal officials cannot stop, much less detain, anyone purely on the basis of perceived ethnicity, the stops are still happening on a daily basis in cities across the United States.
Not only has the administration defied hundreds of court orders, it also refuses to discipline rogue officers. A complex web of federal immunities and privileges further insulates these officers from both private lawsuits and state prosecutions.
As a result, nonwhite citizens are reluctant to go anywhere near ICE, and rumors of ICE conducting operations near polling stations spread like wildfire. Thousands upon thousands of citizens choose to stay home rather than risk arrest to vote.
During early voting, reports of citizens discovering they’re no longer on the voting rolls have multiplied. Most of them have Latin-, African- or Asian-sounding names. The voters named Smith or Jones have had no problems. But if you’re a Gonzalez or a Diallo, then you’ve been purged.
Meanwhile, the F.B.I. has raided several election offices in blue cities in swing states. Lawmakers in red states have moved to take over election administration in certain blue cities, citing the president’s raids and indictments as justification.
At the same time, his base has continued to radicalize. Democratic protests against the ICE deployments are viewed, in these quarters, as proof that Democrats want undocumented immigrants to vote — that they can’t win without them.
The president himself stokes their anxiety and their anger. His social media feeds are full of the wildest accusations, constantly repeating even the most specious conspiracy theories about the 2016 and 2020 elections. He keeps up his calls to arrest former President Barack Obama. He also calls for the arrest of Democratic governors and lawmakers.
He tells his base, the people who trust him more than any news source, that the Democratic Party is a criminal enterprise and that its members will destroy the country if they win the midterms.
Right-wing media is full of mug shots of heavily tattooed, scowling criminals that ICE has allegedly yanked from the streets. The banner on the television underneath their mug shots reads “Democrat voters.”
President Trump’s raids and indictments prove to them that they were right all along: The 2020 election was corrupt.
And when federal judges issue injunctions requiring federal law enforcement to stay away from polling places, that’s all the proof they need to raise the alarm.
“This election is rigged!” they shout. And they’re right. Just not in the way they think.
The horrifying thing about our current moment is that not a single aspect of the scenario above is far-fetched. In fact, some of it is already happening.
Not only did the F.B.I. raid a Georgia election center last week, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present. She’s a cabinet-level official responsible for coordinating the activities of American intelligence agencies, yet there she was, in Fulton County, Ga.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Gabbard has turned much of her attention to investigating the 2020 election, an election that withstood dozens of legal challenges. According to The Journal, she’s investigating possible foreign interference.
The search warrant itself contains a claim that there is probable cause to believe that there is property, data or information at the Fulton County election office that is “evidence of the commission of a criminal offense.”
In the days after the search, two Republican-appointed members of the state election board said that it was “on the radar as an avenue we could take” to seize control of elections in Fulton County. Ninety percent of Atlanta lies within the county.
Federal agents are seizing American citizens. There is an enormous amount of evidence that they are racially profiling their suspects and mistreating their detainees.
Even if federal agents don’t show up at polling places (the presence of armed federal agents at the polls is prohibited by federal criminal law), they raise the risk of travel even for American citizens who might look Hispanic by blanketing majority-Hispanic parts of a given city.
But criminal law is no impediment to Trump. He’ll just pardon the violent men and women who break federal law to keep him in power.
And if federal courts enjoin ICE activities, would anyone trust Trump to comply? As the Republican-appointed chief judge for the Federal District Court of Minnesota wrote last week, “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
Pam Bondi, the attorney general, sent Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota a letter promising to “bring an end to the chaos” in his state if he agreed to a list of demands, including granting Justice Department officials access to its voter rolls.
After the F.B.I. raided the Fulton County election center, Trump demanded Obama’s arrest on social media and threatened the prosecution of election workers. He claimed, among other things, that Italian military satellites had hacked the 2020 election and that Obama had “conspired with foreign powers, not one, not two, not three, but four times to overthrow the United States government in 2016.”
The Italian satellite theory is a jolting reminder that Trump will demand that his core supporters believe almost anything he says, no matter how wild or delusional.
As Jonathan Karl reported for ABC News, this theory “was brought to the White House by a woman who went by several aliases, including ‘The Heiress,’ and was known at the Pentagon for her claimed ties to Somali pirates.”
Rather than discarding the theory as obvious nonsense from an unreliable narrator, Karl says that “then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows directed both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense to look into the matter.”
Informed readers will know that this column is woefully incomplete. I can’t possibly compile all of Trump’s threats against American elections into a single column. Entire books have been written describing his plot to disrupt the 2020 election.
But one thing is quite clear: He is more dangerous now than he was then. His party controls the House and the Senate. In 2020, Democrats controlled the House.
Trump has filled his administration with cronies and true believers, and his attorney general is one of his chief enforcers. In 2020 Bill Barr, who was then the attorney general, resigned rather than continue to pursue Trump’s stolen election claims.
This time around, by contrast, Ed Martin, a Justice Department official, posted a picture of himself standing next to Sidney Powell, one of the chief legal architects of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. In 2023 she pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties. The president pardoned her in November.
And what was Martin’s message? “Good morning, America. How are ya’?”
During his first term, the Trump administration largely complied with federal court orders. In his second term, his administration is defying the courts at a frequency that boggles the mind. So even if Trump-appointed judges and justices repeat their courageous performance from 2020 and block any effort by the president to overturn the next election, it’s an open question whether the Trump administration will care.
A president who doesn’t care about the law, who commands an obedient Congress and is supported by a radicalized base of tens of millions of people who believe his lies, represents a threat to the next election. I fear that millions of citizens are still too complacent. They aren’t aware of the peril we face.
And as you take note of each of the incidents I mentioned, you may realize that Trump can unlawfully influence an election without explicitly rigging the count. By deterring his enemies from coming to the polls, he can engineer the outcomes he seeks.
In a future column, I’ll try to describe what can be done to stop him — aside from simply hoping and praying that his lawlessness has limits other than his own morality — but a nation won’t rouse itself if it doesn’t hear the alarm.
So consider this to be something like a fire drill. It’s an alarm, one of thousands that should be ringing across the country. MAGA’s acts of aggression are already intimidating. Trump isn’t just trying to “stop the steal” again; another kind of theft might already be underway.
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