As Donald Trump moves forward with his daily attack on the nation’s democratic institutions, violates the Constitution and the rule of law, the twice-impeached president and his administration have launched a new phase in their plan to eliminate all checks and balances on executive power.
Trump’s plummeting approval ratings could pave the way for Democrats to win control of the House and Senate in 2026. In response, Trump and the Republican party are now attempting to rig the midterm election through an unprecedented scheme of mid-decade gerrymandering that began in Texas by racially redistricting the congressional map to give the GOP five additional seats. Other Republican-controlled states, including Indiana, Missouri, Ohio and Florida are likely to join in the gerrymandering plan. Trump has also issued unconstitutional executive orders attempting to dictate how local and state elections will be organized – such as his recent edict to eliminate all mail-in ballots and an earlier order requiring all voters to present proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate. All this as the president deploys the military to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., while threatening to occupy other minority majority U.S. cities.
A desperate Trump, fearful that a Democratic party-controlled House would block his authoritarian agenda and initiate articles of impeachment against him for a third time, could employ the U.S. military to intervene in the 2026 midterm election to prevent a GOP defeat. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Justin Glawe, an independent journalist and editor of the American Doom newsletter. Here he discusses these future threats examined in his recent article, “How Trump’s National Guard shock troops could seize voting machines,” and other concerns about the security of the 2026 congressional election.
JUSTIN GLAWE: That piece that I wrote is based on some, I think extremely overlooked, but really good reporting that came out in 2020 from Betsy Woodruff at Politico, where she got her hands on a never-issued executive order in which the Trump administration discussed seizing voting machines. I don’t think I did a good enough job in the article pointing out that that discussion and that plan, while it never came to fruition in the exact way that the executive order laid out, what did come to fruition was that some of the people involved with that executive order, people — like Sidney Powell, people like Mike Flynn who had these deep ties to the election denial movement — some of those folks did get their hands on voting machines in a place called Coffee County in Georgia. And it’s never been really fully clear what they did with that information.
Although I’ve learned over the years that information, which included a lot of data and information about how election systems work in Georgia was shared with sort of a murderer’s row of some of the worst election denier-type people that you would never want having their hands on that stuff. People like Mike Lindell and others. So while the military never did actually go in and seize voting machines, Trump’s people, for lack of a better term, eventually did get their hands on that equipment in Coffee County.
The reason that I tied the recent actions with National Guard, those deployments to that never-issued executive order, was for obvious reasons — that they discussed having the military seize voting machines in an effort to prove fraud that would allow Trump to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election. And the reason that I think the National Guard is important to look at is there seems to be a willingness to be using the Guard in ways that maybe other divisions of the military are not being employed.
The image of U.S. Army troops or U.S. Marines going into a voting center in my hometown or whatever to seize voting machines is almost too difficult to even conceive of. But these National Guard folks that are being deployed everywhere — to me, this seems like there’s less sort of checks and balances that would prevent something like that from happening.
SCOTT HARRIS: What have we witnessed over these past seven months of this second Trump regime that indicate that Donald Trump might go to great lengths, greater than he went during Jan. 6 in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection to prevent a change in control of the House or Senate if the Republicans should lose control of those bodies in next November’s election? And of course, there’s a real concern that a lot of actions being taken, such as mid-decade gerrymandering that we see in Texas, we’re going to probably see that unfold in other states.
Taking it all together, Justin, what are the indications do you think that it’s realistic to be concerned about Trump imposing some kind of blockade on the counting of the votes or manipulating the outcome of the election?
JUSTIN GLAWE: So many pieces of evidence. I could talk for an hour about all the pieces of evidence that allude to some very troubling scenarios going into the midterms next year, not the least of which are a handful of executive orders that Trump has issued regarding elections. Obviously, the big one is one that he issued essentially demanding that we do away with voting machines and that was directed at an obscure federal agency called the Election Assistance Commission.
But I would like to point out that this is not just a top-down thing that’s just coming from Trump or just coming from the White House. There’s a lot of stuff happening at the Justice Department right now that can essentially be thought of as pre-election interference. The Justice Department is going around to pretty much every single state and essentially what they’re trying to do is to compile a nationwide database of voters and their personal information.
And the Justice Department has not really said why they’re trying to do that and there’s lots of theories about what that is. There’s also a scenario in which elections will still be held, but in communities that are majority-minority, like you’ve pointed out, there could be a situation in which National Guard troops are all over black neighborhoods; that ICE agents and other law enforcement are all over Latino neighborhoods in essentially a widespread voter suppression effort with guns.
For more information, visit Justin Glawe’s American Doom Newsletter on Substack, or his articles on Rolling Stone.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Justin Glawe (18:18) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter to get updates to our “Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
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