Donald Trump and maga Republicans continue January 6th treason with threats to sabotage the 2026 mid term elections

Every one of America’s 39,000 full-time journalists should be using their voice and platform to report on the possibility that this year’s elections could be stolen, subverted, or canceled by Donald Trump and his allies.

January 6th insurrectionists - treason❗

New York Magazine Intelligencer by Errol Lewis

It’s a mistake to treat November 3 as a normal contest between Republicans and Democrats when powerful forces are pursuing a much darker outcome. And nobody should rule out the use of extraordinary measures after the violent January 6, attack on the Capitol, which was intended to halt the certification of an election Trump clearly lost.

Trump has claimed for years that “elections are unfair and has been working to undermine our election system,” Michael Waldman, president of the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, recently told me. “We should never lose track of how extraordinary that is, to have the federal government and the president of the United States trying to undermine confidence in elections. The more noise, the more confusion, the more people think maybe I can’t vote because of this or that, the easier it might be, not just to keep people from voting, but to cast doubt on the results.”

Earlier this month, the New York Times editorial board captured this ominous moment in a blunt and welcome piece: “Trump Is Sabotaging the Midterms. The Supreme Court Must Stop Him.” 

In the editorial, it sounded the alarm over Trump’s executive order, issued in March, that would have required all states to submit their voter-registration rolls to the U.S. Postal Service, which would then attach a barcode to each voter’s information and make decisions about whether they were eligible to get an absentee or mail-in ballot. It was a brazen flouting of the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which specifies that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

“The country has built a system in which Americans can have confidence,” the Times board wrote. “Trump is trying to wreck it. The Supreme Court should protect it.” The high court appears to have agreed, striking down Trump’s order in a terse three-sentence opinion this week.

But a serious threat remains: As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan detailed in their best-selling book, Regime Change, top Trump officials have discussed scenarios in which widespread riots, protests, or other national disorder — provoked by ICE or other federal agencies — might provide an excuse to invoke the rarely used Insurrection Act, which allows for federal troops to be deployed in American communities. (The law was last invoked in 1992, in the wake of rioting in Los Angeles after the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King.)

“After January 6, 2021, you can’t rule anything out. And yes, there is a desire to use the Insurrection Act,” Haberman told me. “At this point, the Supreme Court has said that Trump’s National Guard deployments were unlawful to states that did not want it. That really only leaves them with active-duty troops to send in, with actual federal military, if they were going to do it. They’ve made no secret about how they’re trying to get control of voter rolls.”

In a possible dress rehearsal for post-midterms turmoil, the FBI seized 660 boxes of voting records in May from Fulton County in Georgia, where Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that voter fraud caused his loss of the state in the 2020 election. Why seize the records? “We don’t know what we don’t know. I am deeply concerned about interference,” Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s mayor and the Democratic candidate for governor, told NBC’s Blayne Alexander in August. “There’s been a constant erosion of access to the right to vote, from the removal of ballot boxes in Georgia to reducing the number of days that we can really vote in this state. So it’s been this gradual chipping away at the foundation of election integrity.”

We don’t know exactly what and where a possible attack on voting will take place. When asked by a member of Congress if the military is planning to mobilize around Election Day, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, gave a less than reassuring answer: “I have neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections,” he replied.

This week, at a contentious Senate hearing, FBI director Kash Patel would not rule out deploying FBI agents at polling sites. “Do you pledge that you will not in any way interfere in the will of the American people when they go to the polls in November❓” asked Senator Peter Welch of Vermont. “I pledge unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies,” Patel replied.

The good news is that a determined, bipartisan army of current and former elected officials, attorneys, and journalists have organized to defend against election interference. The States United Democracy Center is providing legal assistance to help local communities safeguard elections, including by running a website, ElectionDeniers.org, that identifies those who supported Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020, election and are currently running for office. “Our tracking tool helps define the democracy landscape, so that we can understand and counter dangerous efforts to change the rules of how elections are run and change the referees (the people who oversee our elections),” the organization’s website notes.

The Democracy Docket website is also an indispensable clearinghouse for updates on litigation designed to block election subversion. And Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine journalist who founded and runs the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University, is hosting a Democracy Summit for journalists to get up to speed on how to report on the midterms.

“Part of your work is actually convincing your bosses that we might be objective about a lot of things, but democracy cannot be one of them,” she recently told a group of young reporters during a workshop sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists. “When the Washington Post says ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ it is taking a side and saying our job as journalists is the protection of democracy. 

So, instead of framing these stories as about partisan politics and about racial politics, we have to frame them about democracy.”