You really should be worried about the midterms

If there's anything the American people have learned over the last 18 months, it's that you cannot be too paranoid. However, on one subject, we're being told over and over to calm down, not get too worried, and rest assured that the there's no way Donald Trump can screw this up.

The midterm elections, say the pundits, are not under threat because Trump has no legal authority over how elections are conducted.

"The National Emergencies Act does not mention elections as one of the powers that Congress has delegated to the president in the event of a national emergency. IEPA is the statue that was at issue in the tariff case where it doesn't mention tariffs or taxes and the Supreme Court struck it down. You know what else it doesn't mention, Katie? Elections."

How reassuring should that be? It took over 10 months between when Trump issued his illegal tariffs and when the Supreme Court struck them down — in a decision where three of the justices were not bothered at all by Trump's exceeding his power.

Anyone telling you that there's no way Trump can substantially interfere with, of even block, the midterm elections is simply lying to you. Because the difference between what Trump can do, and what Trump is legally allowed to do after the courts bat it around for months, is immeasurable.

We've watched the Department of Justice be systematically disassembled and rebuilt as an instrument of Trump's most pernicious whims. We've seen Trump hand the keys of government to the richest man on the planet so that Elon Musk could indulge his lifelong dreams of starving Black children. We've seen soldiers in our streets, Americans being murdered for protesting, and hundreds of thousands of arrests without warrants.

But sure, tell me this is a line Trump won't cross.

The FDA is running a traveling medicine show that pushes toxic nonsense while denying children vaccines and suppressing new treatments for cancer. The Congress is a feckless pool of cowards who dare not raise their voice, much less a vote, against their master. The military has been gutted of leaders who are either honorable or effective, and their ranks have been replaced with officers who have cheerfully bombed school children, unarmed ships, and drowning men.

Meanwhile, the most respected names in journalism have been either driven from the field or buckled under to billionaires more concerned about their latest stock market manipulation than anything that resembles a fact.

But somehow, raising concerns about the elections in November … Why that's simply going too far, old bean. Tut tut and balderdash. Trump has no authority to do anything about the elections!

Well ... maybe. It's understandable that every cog in the electoral machine wants to downplay this threat, because moving ahead with elections and ousting Republican Speaker Mike Johnson from his supporting role in this disaster is the surest step on the road back to democracy. But don't count on it.

Because every sign shows that Trump intends to declare a national emergency and either so interfere with the elections that it's impossible to determine a legitimate outcome, or refuse to recognize the results. Pretending that it's not happening will not make it go away.

Over the past week, Trump has began to talk loudly about "communism." The rising red tide is, according to Trump, the biggest threat the nation has ever faced.

“They use the word ‘Social Democrat’ because it sounds so nice, but it’s really communism you’re talking about. I think it’s the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding. That includes World War I, World War II, September 11. It includes the Pearl Harbor attack. … These are not social democrats, these are hardcore, godless communists. This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence, in my opinion, 250 years ago. This is a major threat to our country.”

Trump isn't saying this because he's seriously concerned about Zohran Mamdani opening government-backed groceries or which Democrat takes a seat in a guaranteed blue district of the Bronx. He's not saying it because he fears Trump voters in West Virginia or Mississippi are suddenly going to leap toward the DSA.

He's saying it because he wants to maintain the idea that the United States is under an "attack from within." One that fully justifies declaring a national emergency in which Trump takes control of elections. The worst threat ever justifies the strongest actions ever.

This isn't the only signal that Trump is sending of his impending effort to crush American democracy once and for all. There's a whole Christmas tree full of lights flashing to warn of what's ahead.

In February, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was spotted in Georgia at an unprecedented FBI raid on a Fulton County elections office. Trump did not shy away from the reason she was there.

“She’s working very hard on trying to keep the election safe. And she’s done a very good job,” Trump said. “And they, as you know, they got into the votes, you got a signed judge’s order in Georgia. And you’re going to see some interesting things happening.”

Gabbard confirmed that Trump sent her Fulton County "to secure our nation." She repeated this at a "worldwide threats" hearing in the Senate. Her office then took voting machines from Puerto Rico to search for "security vulnerabilities." This was only part of a widespread investigation in which the ODNI focused inward on elections.

However, a few months later, Trump blocked the release of a report prepared by Gabbard after her office apparently concluded that while several states used "outdated systems," the voting machines showed no evidence that "vulnerabilities with machines have resulted in votes changing."

Reportedly, ODNI made the results of their report clear to the White House several weeks earlier. The result was Gabbard being ousted from her role in May.

Gabbard was then replaced by acting DNI Bill Pulte, a meme stock investor so unqualified that even Trump's staunchest Republican allies quailed at the idea of placing him in the slot. Trump responded to complaints by nominating Jay Clayton to the role, but before the Senate could conduct its first hearing on the confirmation, Trump cancelled the hearing, maneuvering to keep the inexperienced Pulte in place as acting DNI. In announcing the cancellation, Trump stated that he would not work with the Senate until they passed his impassable "SAVE America Act" voter suppression bill.

Since Trump threw the confirmation process into chaos, Pulte has gone on to fire dozens of experienced intelligence officers, saying that he was ridding the intelligence community of those who he and Trump "believe are deep state.” This reportedly included several officials appointed under Gabbard who were involved in the evaluation of voting machines.

To keep Pulte in place, Trump was willing for allow a section of FISA law–the same section that allows intelligence agencies to collect communications from foreign sources–to lapse. That weakening of overseas intelligence might seem like something that should concern Trump, considering that a rough draft of an executive order released in February claimed that China had interfered in the 2020 election.

The draft order not only claims the power to ban mail-in ballots and specify acceptable voter identification, it includes language that would “empower the president to ban … voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference.” It would, in short, make conducting large scale elections extremely difficult and create a system in which it was impossible to account for missing ballots, voters unfairly turned away from the polls, or outright large scale fraud.

While Pulte is warming up the ODNI to make false claims of foreign interference in U.S. elections, FBI Director Kash Patel is throwing unbelievable resources into generating fresh allegations.

The FBI is surging resources into what it calls a “priority” investigation related to the 2020 election in Georgia, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter, in an extraordinary effort by the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency to find evidence supporting President Donald Trump’s darkest election fraud conspiracy theories.

The FBI has already had all the voting records in Fulton County for over six months. What can over 260 FBI agents do when there is no evidence of vote fraud, an ODNI report has already found no issues, and Rudy Giuliani's defamation of local election officials already cost him $148 million? Not much that has any basis in fact.

However, this will not stop Patel from making false claims about the evidence. After all, this is the same guy who claims Minnesota protestors were paid by unnamed groups and that the First Amendment doesn't allow people to share information about ICE.

Over at the Department of Justice, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has fired hundreds of attorneys and staffers as he restructures the agency. Like Pulte, Blanche has not faced Senate confirmation after being placed in his role following Trump's firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi in April.

In the midst of using the DOJ to prosecute Trump's perceived enemies, including going after former FBI Director James Comey for taking a picture of seashells, Blanche has repeatedly protected those who claimed the 2020 election was stolen. That includes threatening the D.C. bar association for their attempts to discipline coup supporter Jeffry Clark.

Blanche is currently scheduled to face his first confirmation hearing later this month. While he doesn't face the same level of inter-party opposition as Pulte, Blanche is still getting a lot of heat over his tax deal with Trump that included handing his boss the freedom to commit future crimes and a $1.8 billion "compensation fund" for to squander as he pleased.

Don't be surprised if Blanche's hearing is delayed.

Pulte is readying the ODNI to insist that foreign governments interfered in the 2020 election. Patel is preparing to drop a thick stack of false claims to back him up. Blanche is clearing the decks for 24/7 defense of Trump. All of this is just bracing for the storm ahead.

Meanwhile, Trump is leaning on states to implement more obstacles to voting or face a withdrawal of federal funds. Local election officials are being threatened with arrest if they don't cut back their voter rolls to Trump's specifications.

“The overall point is that Trump is trying to use whatever levers of power and persuasive power that he might have to try to interfere with how states and localities are going to conduct the 2026 election."

Again, as with the SAVE America Act, Trump doesn't care if these efforts are unsuccessful. What's important is that he A) scared people and B) kept his false claims of voter fraud in the news.

No one is making the ultimate goal more clear than Trump's longtime friend, Peter Ticktin. The Florida lawyer, a vocal 2020 election denier, claims that Venezuela helped steal the 2020 election.

According to Ticktin … the January capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro is the key to revealing what really went on in the shadows.

"He's gonna talk," he said of Maduro. "He's gonna sing like a canary. Maduro is one of the heads of the snake that caused all of this."

Maduro has been detained in a high-security, high-profile unit at the Metropolitan Detention Center since his capture six months ago. He is reportedly allowed out of his cell for only one hour each day and held in near-total isolation from any human contact. It's not hard to believe that the former Venezuelan dictator would confess to anything for the chance of being released or given better conditions.

He can always check in Trump's old friend Ghislaine Maxwell for tips on how to negotiate the best deal from Blanche.

Once Maduro has spilled the beans on his incredible ability to manipulate voting machines not connected to the internet, Ticktin says that Trump should impose that draft executive order making fair elections impossible. Ticktin helped to write that order.

As the polls continue to show Democrats very likely to take control of the House, even if the Platner debacle allows Republicans to cling to to the thinnest of margins in the Senate, Trump is more and more clearly signaling that interfering in this election is his top priority.

Last month, Trump refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill that Republicans had hoped to run on in November. While pundits were quick to see this as a missed opportunity, Trump made it clear once again that he has little concern about actually helping candidates this fall. He knows Republicans can't win if every American voter gets a chance to weigh in.

Instead, he used that moment to once again showcase his claims about the need for a federalized election, demonstrating what his "obsession" with the SAVE America Act, which has approximately 0% chance of passage.

After cancelling a signing ceremony, Trump claimed that the bipartisan bill to make housing more affordable was a "minor issue." He didn't do this because he thinks Americans don't care about this issue. He did it because he knows Republican candidates do care, and that by thwarting them on this, he can draw attention to his demands to allow him to hand pick the electorate.

The odds that Trump will sit back and allow the election to go forward without taking action are vanishingly small. He's already pushed the states into a historic mid-decade redistricting. His Supreme Court has already weakened the Voting Rights Act into non-existence.

But he knows it's not enough and, as The Hill reports, so does everyone else on Capitol Hill.

"Now doomsday speculation about the fall election is taking hold in conversations among insiders on Capitol Hill. Political players on both sides of the aisle casually speculate that Trump will press Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to refuse to seat Democrats who would form a new House majority."

Considering that Johnson took 50 days to swear in Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva, he's already demonstrated that he isn't above ripping up the Constitution for Trump.

And the Johnson move is the quiet move. The after-the-elections move. The one that doesn't involve ICE pressing each voter to prove their citizenship, or the DOJ and FBI looming over officials at polling stations looking for an excuse to conduct an arrest, or the Post Office refusing to deliver ballots in either direction.

Maybe all this gets in front of the Supreme Court months after the election. That's a big maybe. And maybe that court decides that Trump has overreached. Which is an even bigger maybe. And maybe Trump decides to back down and tell Johnson to seat Democrats after the court rules against him. Which ... is laughable.

On Friday, Trump removed the two Democratic members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission. A White House press release cited the recent Supreme Court decision giving Trump authority to fire people who are not “totally aligned” with his wishes. The commission was created by Congress in 2002 to assist states and localities with holding and securing elections. After the two Democratic appointees were fired, the two Republicans resigned in protest. Trump hasn’t bothered to name any replacements.

One thing is certain: Trump is putting all the pieces in place to conduct a war on the midterms. Pretending it's not happening will only get democracy killed.

And maybe not just democracy,