Trump’s 19 Schemes to Subvert the Midterm Election

Interview with Justin Glawe, an independent journalist, editor of the American Doom newsletter and author of If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened, conducted by Scott Harris

Trumps 19 schemes midterm election coup

In an unprecedented campaign to interfere with and manipulate the outcome of the Nov. 3 midterm election, President Trump and the Republican party have launched literally dozens of executive orders, legislative initiatives and lawsuits with the goal of disenfranchising voters they view as supporters of the Democratic party—the latest being new restrictions on mail-in voting, an issue now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The overall strategy to control the outcome of the election and which party holds power in Congress, revolves around provably false claims of widespread election fraud.  Specific methods include aggressive partisan and racial gerrymandering; voter-roll purges; imposing restrictive proof-of-citizenship and voter-ID requirements; closing polling locations; withholding federal funds to force states to turn over voter data and change election procedures; as well as targeting election officials for prosecution.

Other actions openly discussed by the president include deploying ICE agents, Justice Department officials, or the U.S. military to intimidate voters at key polling places and/or seizing ballots, voting machines, and election records. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Justin Glawe, an independent journalist and editor of the American Doom newsletter. Here he discusses his recent Zeteo columns, written with Asawin Suebsaeng, that examine Trump’s 19 schemes to subvert the midterm election, and the Democrats’ plan to fight back.

JUSTIN GLAWE: I think the biggest probable threat is the seizure of ballots post-election or even on Election night in November. Trump wanted to do this back in 2020. He said in December that he wished he had done it in 2020. He was talking about voting machines, but it’s sort of the broader principle of the seizure of election equipment and records. And of course, in January, the FBI raided a Fulton County (Georgia) elections warehouse and took ballots from 2020. Of course, that’s a far different scenario than seizing ballots in an ongoing election, but I think that’s probably the highest potential threat because if they seize the ballots prior to certification, well, how do you certify an election that you can’t tally the votes for? In addition to that, the phrase “national emergency” has been thrown around a lot. People are worried about ICE or National Guard at the polls.

To me, that’s an important thing to be concerned about, but that’s kind of more of an intimidation tactic, whereas the seizure of ballots really affects the outcome of the election in a much more concrete way. There is no precedent in American history for the federal government seizing ballots from any election, whether it is past or ongoing. So when the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County back in January, that has never happened before in American history. And it certainly has never happened in an ongoing election.

SCOTT HARRIS: Justin, I did want to ask you about an article you wrote over at Zeteo, and it’s titled, “Trump Wants to Steal the Midterms,” but the Democrats actually have a plan to fight back. I wanted to ask you if you have faith in the Democrats’ plan to fight back and defend free and fair elections and concerns you might have about complacency within the Democratic party and the larger array of democracy defender groups who may not be fully aware of the threat that’s in the offing here for the November election.

JUSTIN GLAWE: I do have faith. I think they’re pretty well prepared. I think they’re in a really difficult situation because it’s sort of how can you be prepared for something that you don’t really know what it is? If you’re a football team, you can look at the team you’re playing, you can look at the game from the week before and kind of see how they ran their offense and prepare for it. Whereas with Trump and all of these threats to elections, you have to prepare 15 different defensive game plans to really be prepared for it. So I think they’re in a difficult situation. I think that democracy defender groups, the Democratic party are fairly well prepared.
And here’s a good example of that, and this has flown a little bit under the radar, but on Aug. 20, the Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration. It was a fairly routine sort of Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, but the context of the lawsuit is basically that the DNC believes that the Trump administration will likely try to seize ballots.
And so the information that they were trying to get from the DOJ and Homeland Security were records related to preparations to seize ballots under the Freedom of Information Act. Of course, both those agencies failed to comply with the law’s statutory deadlines and so the DNC sued. And really what the lawsuit is, is the DNC saying, “We think you’re going to seize ballots. Show us how you are actually not planning to do that.” And I think that is an example of how they are prepared for this. And that’s again, the worst-case scenario. So I do think they are prepared, but again, the difficulty is preparing for all these different scenarios.
And then the secondary difficulty is that all of this ends up in the courts. And so really what this is going to come down to is how does the judiciary respond in what will potentially be a constitutional crisis? Because the executive branch is not supposed to have any role in the administration and tabulation of elections. The Department of Justice has enforcement powers over election law, but at no point is the post office, for instance, supposed to be creating rules about mail-in ballots. At no point is the Justice Department supposed to be seizing records in an ongoing election like the ballots themselves.
And so this is again, like a lot of things in the Trump administration, going to come down to how does the judiciary respond? And do they respond in Trump’s favor or do they respond in the favor basically of democracy? So Democrats are in a tough spot and democracy defender groups are in a tough spot, but I think they’re taking things seriously and I think they’re as prepared as we can possibly expect them to be.
For more information, visit Justin Glawe’s American Doom Newsletter on Substack at american-doom.com.

Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Justin Glawe (19:33) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. To subscribe to our podcasts, email newsletters, our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack or social media, subscribe here.

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