GoKawiilPresident Donald Trump’s rhetorical war on elections has seemed to only get more serious with time.
Over the past couple of months, he’s told podcaster turned FBI deputy director turned podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans “should take over the voting” in 15 places and “ought to nationalize the voting.” He told Reuters that “when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.” And he told NBC he will only accept the midterm results “if the elections are honest.” On Truth Social, he slammed the Supreme Court because “they wouldn’t even call out The Rigged Presidential Election of 2020.”
Members of Trump’s administration and Republican lawmakers have quickly dismissed criticism. When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was asked about Trump’s comment about nationalizing elections, he claimed without evidence that election results in “blue states” like California “just look on [their] face to be fraudulent.”
Now, with Trump laser-focused on an anti-voting bill called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America, which would disenfranchise millions of Americans, what was already clear has become glaringly obvious: The Trump administration appears to be threatening the midterm elections. Trump isn’t even hiding the real reason why he wants the SAVE bill signed into law: “[Democrats] know if we get this, they probably won't win an election for 50 years, maybe longer.”
As polls show that the Republican party could lose the House and the Senate, Trump and his allies are quite openly engaged in a concerted and widespread effort to undermine trust in elections and, seemingly, to lay the foundations for baseless claims of rigged midterm elections in November.
Trump’s campaign has included the weaponization of the Department of Justice and the FBI, the undermining of laws designed to protect voters, the redrawing of voting maps to disenfranchise minorities, the installation of election deniers in key positions of power within the government, and the emboldening of election officials at all levels across the country to pursue an anti-voting agenda with impunity.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of the ways the Trump administration is already targeting this year’s midterm elections:
The SAVE America Act
Many of the ways the Trump administration is working to undermine trust in November’s elections have been distilled into a single piece of legislation.
The SAVE Act is the Republican response to the conspiracy theory that millions of noncitizens are flooding polling stations every election. Although that claim that immigrants were voting was shared widely ahead of the 2024 presidential election, all the available evidence suggests that noncitizen voting accounts for a vanishingly small fraction of a percent of the votes cast, with one estimate in 2017 from the Brennan Center of a dozen states putting the figure at 0.0001 percent. (Apply that figure to the number of people who voted in 2024 and you get just over 15,000 votes—orders of magnitude below what conspiracy theorists claim.)
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