Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026, Part I

First of four parts from PROOF on Substack, reprint with permission of author. 

A Dozen Ways Donald Trump Is Rigging the Midterms: An Exhaustive Report on a Premeditated Election-Theft Plot

(1) Donald Trump and his political appointees at the Pentagon have been secretly discussing sending the National Guard to polling places this November—and are lying about this plot. Even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, has falsely told Congress that a plan now in the works doesn’t exist at all.

Because it’s against federal statutes to send troops to polling places; and because the President of the United States has now gotten the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to lie to Congress about a conspiracy to intimidate voters en masse via a show of Big-Government force, this now-confirmed clandestine plot definitionally stands as one of the biggest scandals in the most scandal-riddled presidency in U.S. history.

(2) Donald Trump staged a nationally televised campaign rally to get his voters to swear—with hands raised in formal oath—to commit mass voter fraud in November.

This wasn’t a joke—and we know that because Donald Trump has urged his voters to cheat in every election he’s ever run in, even as he falsely accuses political opponents of engaging in and sponsoring mass voter fraud.

In 2020, Trump travelled to a key battleground state, North Carolina, to deliver a televised presser from an airport tarmac in which he told his voters to illegally vote twice.

When told he was inciting federal crimes, he doubled down at an event soon after.

These two incidents were mirror images of what Trump had done in a battleground state in 2016: told voters (this time in the battleground state of Ohio) that it was “okay” to commit felony voter fraud and vote twice if the vote was for him.

Once again, he doubled down mere days later, telling voters in battleground state Colorado during that they should illegally vote twice, first by mail and then in person.

Trump made sure both these 2016 events were televised—after all, his message was a national message intended for national distribution, not a mere state-specific gambit.

With the above events in mind, when, at an extraordinary—and extraordinarily poorly attended—“midterm RNC” Donald Trump demanded his party hold so he could give a televised address Trump instructed his voters to “cheat like hell” to win this fall, not one major-media outlet could credibly claim he was joking.

Why? Because his modus operandi in attempting to feloniously incite mass voter fraud and thereby rig federal elections in his favor is too exhaustively established to deny.

(3) At this same nationally televised, carefully orchestrated rally, Trump promised an illegal $5,000 bribe per U.S. adult for a pro-Republican Party midterm vote.

Put aside here that Trump’s promise was a false one; put aside that Trump has three times in the past—over DOGE, tariffs, and the ACA—made similar “rebate” or pay-off promises that he failed to keep; put aside that he has no authority to make or executive such a promise and knows this; put aside that the relevant body for such a rebate, the United States House of Representatives, has since made clear that the illicit promise Trump staged a midterm RNC to issue is a non-starter; put aside that Trump’s promise would cost $1.2 trillion, and therefore devastate the U.S. economy and budget after years of him claiming it’s Democrats who are irresponsible about the federal budget and our budget deficit (to the point that he and Elon Musk co-created DOGE under a promise to dramatically reduce government expenditures); the simple fact is that Donald Trump used federal airwaves (which he’s repeatedly said should never be used to transmit falsehoods) to commit a significant federal election crime.

But is it a crime?

Yes.

Unfortunately, some election experts, wrong-footed by the unprecedented nature of Trump’s crime, have since argued themselves into pretzels trying to suggest that what the president just did on national television could theoretically be legal.

But it’s not.

Is a candidate for office allowed to make promises that would enrich voters? Yes.

But Donald Trump isn’t a candidate for any office in 2026.

Is a politician who doesn’t currently hold elected office—someone who’s currently out of power—allowed to support a policy agenda that’d enrich voters? Yes, because that politician is making the case that voters should put his or her political party in power.

But Donald Trump and his political party already hold all political power in Washington.

The party Donald Trump leads controls all three of the federal executive, legislative, and judicial branches, meaning that Trump could give every American adult $5,000 right now if he wanted to do so. But he doesn’t wish to do so, because his midterm-RNC promise wasn’t and isn’t intended to convince voters to participate in a policy debate under the First Amendment but to keep the party in power where it is… through vote-buying.

In other words, there’s no colorable argument Trump can make that his promise is about drawing a legitimate policy distinctions between his party and his political opponents, as Trump isn’t framing tariff “rebates” as an actual policy item; rather, it’s a conditional offer that doesn’t exist outside the framework of buying midterm votes. We know this because (a) it’s not currently part of the Republican platform, formally or informally (which we know because the Republicans could advance it right now and refuse to do so), and (b) it will continue to not be part of the Republican platform unless voters take a predetermined action that fulfills their end of an illicit electoral contract.

So the only thing Trump can be said to be doing is trying to buy votes in an election he is not running in. Not only is that a materially different condition than any prior case that’s come before the United States Supreme Court—e.g., the oft-cited case Brown v. Hartlage—but it’s exactly what Title 18, Section 597 of the United States Code makes a crime punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment.

And Section 600 bars promising “any compensation or other benefit provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any act of Congress as a reward for support or opposition for any candidate or political party in an election.”

So Trump’s conduct is doubly illegal.

It’s clear from this well-established legal and political framework that our Congress explicitly didn’t want anyone doing what Trump has now done—which is why no one has ever done it before, and why no past Supreme Court case or historical precedent addresses the current situation (including a purported counter-example Republicans have touted: 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern promising to give Americans $1,000/year if he won the 1972 presidential election; the problem is that McGovern was himself a candidate, and an out-of-power challenger, and making a promise he framed in such a way that it wouldn’t require an act of Congress—all three of these established standards that Donald Trump’s unabashed, televised bribe fails).

(4) Trump is threatening to withhold lifesaving disaster aid from any state that doesn’t vote the way he wants in the 2026 midterms, making clear that producing tens or hundreds of dead American bodies for electoral gain isn’t beneath him.

Here again we see claims in major media attempting to imply that Mr. Trump’s public comments about deciding where to send disaster relief based on voting patterns was a “joke.” But in fact the evidence in this case is even stronger that he’s serious; that he’s using televised addresses to make statements like this because he knows voters are taking his threats seriously; and that he will in fact carry out his threats. And what’s the relevant evidence? That he’s consistently treated disaster relief as a mere partisan game.

Proof needn’t belabor the point: Trump has repeatedly actually done what some now say he’s only “joking” about doing. See here. And here. And here. Hell, the second Trump administration has even admitted in court that it’s doing this—and systematically, too.

So it’s not just that Trump is offering illegal carrots to red-state voters and implying that he’ll pardon election crimes by red-state voters, he’s manifestly punishing all blue-state voters in a way he wants them to notice. His clear aim is to gain votes via threats.

(5) Trump is running a vast criminal conspiracy to infiltrate state voting systems, extort elections officials, and disenfranchise voters—particularly nonwhite voters—en masse, with the awesome scope of this conspiracy approaching what America last saw in the Jim Crow era (as it targets communities with particularly oft-repeated surnames, a phenomenon often associated with formerly enslaved and immigrant communities).

If you think the above is hyperbole, you’re wrong.

DHS instructed hundreds of its federal agents to commit Identity Fraud and pretend to be voters in battleground states in order to illegally access voter data.

And yes, that’s a crime.

And yes, it appears that DHS was partly targeting citizens to wrongly kick them off voter rolls.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Trump is threatening mass civil lawsuits and mass arrests in thirty states he accuses of refusing to turn over data he’s in no way entitled to by law. His goal is to terrorize elections officials into either (a) quitting right before the midterms (causing chaos), (b) start appeasing his chaos-creating demands when numberless election-related tasks need to be focused on instead (causing chaos), or (c) spending all their time in court or depositions or DOJ interviews, and dealing with death threats from irate Trumpist radicals, and navigating a never-ending stream of bizarre communications from the federal government (once again, causing chaos). It’s the most prolonged federal attack on state election institutions, apparatuses, and personnel since the Jim Crow era—which was infamous for the same sort of plainly racially motivated voter “challenges.”

While many of the deranged demands being made by Trump’s personal-attorney-run DOJ are focused on 2024 election-data retention that it’s either impossible to honor or beyond Trump’s authority to demand—remember, it’s states that are responsible for their elections, not the feds—some of their most aggressive attacks on state elections officials are clearly designed to ensure they boot valid voters off the voting rolls. For instance, Trump and his team are threatening swift criminal prosecution and lengthy imprisonment if even one noncitizen somehow manages to vote in a given state, an event that foreseeably happens perhaps a handful of times in each U.S. election cycle (usually by accident) but at a volume that Trump’s own research teams have shown to be statistically irrelevant.

In effect, Trump is trying to transform his false claim that millions and millions of undocumented persons vote in every election—and always for Democrats, he darkly avers—into a wholly different premise: that if even one undocumented person casts a vote it’s proof of a massive, sprawling left-wing election conspiracy that demands an unprecedentedly draconian federal crackdown.

It’s the most insidious way of admitting you’ve been lying about the frequency of voter fraud this author can think of—made worse by the fact that if the last decade taught us anything it’s that much voter fraud is committed by Republicans… sometimes at his incitement. See here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. Or even here.

(6) Trump is daily committing federal election offenses in public by self-admittedly commandeering half a billion dollars in Super PAC election funds the law says he can’t have anything to do with—a crime he commits with impunity because there’s no federal agency that would dare to prosecute him and he knows it (in fact, even carefully engineered it with his loyalty-test-riddled far-right political appointments).

This is every bit as bad as it sounds.

By law, Trump can’t coordinate with Super PACs, direct their expenditures, treat their money as his, cause a donor to mistake whether donating to a Super PAC is the same thing as donating to Trump directly… yet Trump by his own admission is ignoring all of this.

As he recently said, shocking election attorneys across the nation, “I’m going to spend whatever amount of money necessary to try to help us [win the midterms]. And this is money from MAGA Inc. This is my money that I control.” (Emphasis supplied.)

Per usual, Trump then doubled down on his admission of criminal activity.

As the New York Times reports, “At another point, in an interview with Punchbowl News, Trump was asked about plans for ‘MAGA Inc., the super PAC that you, your allies, control.’ Trump jumped in. ‘Not my allies,’ he said. ‘I control it.’ Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, called Trump’s stated arrangement a ‘clear violation’ of the law. ‘As is often the case with Donald Trump, he says the quiet part very loudly,’ said Ghosh, who signed the complaint, which was filed this week. ‘This is a clear line he has transgressed.’”

And what Proof readers must understand is the scope of this crime.

The top five Republican mega-donors in the world—billionaires many times over who are among the wealthiest humans alive—spent $847 million to elect Donald Trump in 2024. With his illegal commandeering of just one Super PAC alone (and there’s every reason to think he’s commandeered many others, this is just the one we know about because it’s the one he’s been asked about), Trump has assumed direct and inviolable control over approximately half that astonishing figure: $400 million.

In other words, by fiat and sheer force of criminal will, Donald Trump, who refuses to spend his own money on his campaigns despite repeatedly assuring voters he’ll do so—even to the point of claiming his wholly illusory self-financing is proof he can’t be bought, which of course he has been more than any president in American history—has become the single largest (wholly fraudulent) political donor since America’s Founding.

That’s right: the biggest single (actually money-transferring) political mega-donor in U.S. history, up until now, was Elon Musk—who spent $291 million in 2023-2024 to ensure Trump would put him atop DOGE, a perch Musk used to fire everyone in the federal government who was investigating him—but that record has been obliterated by Trump, who has assumed control of $400 million in election-earmarked monies by simply stealing it (a federal election crime) in broad daylight.

And remember, no Democrat could have done this. Any Democrat who tried to would have been indicted. Trump can do this because he controls the FBI and DOJ, both of which are agencies run by his personal attorneys—men who answer only to him, not American voters or Congress or the United States Constitution or even the federal criminal code. And Trump would seek to imprison any American who tried to gain the same leg up in an election that he now has. It’s the very definition of cheating in an election.

(7) Never mind that the Supreme Court has, for now, blocked Trump from assuming absolute authority over U.S. elections via the United States Postal Service—and never mind that three (possibly four) far-right Justices are nevertheless saying that it may be legal for him to do so after the midterms—the fact remains that Mr. Trump’s assumption of corrupt political authority over USPS has already caused ballot chaos and provably disenfranchised voters.

Many casual news readers believe that the threat of Trump using USPS as a weapon against American elections is over ever since this Supreme Court ruling a week ago.

That’s a mistake.

Why? Because Trump spent all of his first term and the first 20 months of his second deliberately underfunding, administratively corrupting, and wreaking general havoc of all kinds inside the USPS, with his explicit aim being to (a) put its functions more under his control and that of his top political appointees, (b) reduce its efficacy as a public service, and (c) amend its internal policies to better disadvantage his opponents.

As the Associated Press reports, Trump’s actions caused thousands and thousands of valid ballots to be tossed in two primaries just this year, in Washington and Oregon.

Trump’s basic scheme is this: render the USPS so institutionally incompetent that, even if mail-in balloting remains legal, it becomes technically unfeasible because mail delivery service in America is suddenly incapable of executing a critical civic function (arguably the single most important function the it’s had since its inception, as it’s the only one tied directly to a right formally deemed “fundamental” in the Constitution).

America will never know how many hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of valid ballots never got cast or counted in the 2026 midterms because of this scheme by Trump and his cronies. It’s not merely a matter of ballots that would have arrived in time to be counted in 2020 or 2016 or 2012 or 2008 suddenly not arriving in time to be counted (and therefore trashed) in 2026, it is also a matter of numberless Americans who for whatever reason can only vote by mail deciding not to vote at all because they’ve lost confidence in USPS’s ability to deliver their ballots properly or on time.

(Proof doesn’t refer, here, to voters who know they’ll need to vote by mail far in advance of Election Day, and who can therefore mail a ballot in weeks in advance; many who vote by mail discover closer to Election Day that they won’t be able to vote in person for personal reasons, and it’s these innocent “late deciders” who may now choose just not to vote at all.)

Nor is the chaos Donald Trump has engineered for the 2026 midterms limited to mail-in balloting. When Americans lose confidence in a popular way of voting—about a third of us vote by mail, historically—they must switch to new voting methods with which they’re comparatively unfamiliar.

This means that many Americans will be voting in new ways for the first time in 2026, and if past is precedent that means many will make inadvertent mistakes and end up spoiling their own ballots or even ensuring that their votes never get received at all.

Drop-boxes will be used improperly; the wrong forms will be filled out during early voting hours; those who habitually vote by mail will try to vote in person and go to the wrong polling place during the wrong hours with the wrong ID (or some combination of these). Again, when a third of a country uses a specific method to vote and that method suddenly becomes spectacularly unreliable—and provably so, as we saw in Washington and Oregon, two blue states, just this year—the fallout is persistent, national, foreseeable, gratuitous, and in this case nefarious. Worst of all, it’s also nigh incalculable, so we can’t even say how many votes it may net the Republicans this year.

(8) This election is under attack by the Russians—which Donald Trump knew in advance would happen and which he carefully dismantled America’s election-protection infrastructure to facilitate.

Americans were never given any reason for Trump and his political appointees openly and aggressively dismantling every protection America has against foreign election interference.

As the Brennan Center reports, “The midterms are just months away, yet the Trump administration has spent the last year systematically slashing agency staff and scuttling initiatives responsible for detecting and disrupting foreign disinformation operations in American elections. Even as the administration has raised alarms about foreign disinformation amid the conflict in Iran, it has depleted its own ability to respond by dismantling centers that tracked foreign influence and hollowing out expertise on information warfare.”

What makes the above quote so telling is that it disarms the one explanation for its conduct we might have expected from this administration: the false claim that foreign election interference is a “hoax,” and therefore no protections against it are needed.

But as the Brennan Center correctly observes, this administration can’t make that claim because it’s repeatedly asserted—if always falsely and without evidence—that certain foreign countries are working in tandem with the Democratic Party to rig American elections. Among the countries Trump and his team have made this claim about are China, Iran, Ukraine, and Venezuela. So either he and his people know they’re lying about these election-related claims, which would of course be its own election—and election-rigging—scandal (because the Trumpists are putting the good name and authority of the DOJ and FBI and other federal entities they control behind them), or they truly believe these false claims… in which case dismantling Americans’ protections against foreign election interference can only be explained one way: that the Trump regime wants foreign election interference to succeed.

And if that’s really the case, it would only be because they believe that, on balance, it benefits them.

If you think that sounds dangerously close to Treason, it does. It is, after all, actively aiding and abetting hostile foreign nations that are attempting to achieve strategic dominance over the United States through clandestine espionage and cyber-warfare.

So what specifically has Trump done on this score? Here are some reported examples:

1. Cut the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) by 30%+ in 2025;
2. significantly scaled back the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the ODNI;
3. ended the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which was focused on “investigating foreign deception operations and sharing information with state and local officials and social media companies” (a force created by Republicans after the 2016 election, but which Trump was so keen to see gone that he had his personal lawyer Pam Bondi destroy it her very first day as Attorney General);
4. cut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) by a third, with the cuts disproportionately focused on detectors of foreign election interference;
5. closed the State Department’s “Global Engagement Center” successor, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Office, a “group established to coordinate responses to foreign propaganda and misinformation”;
6. ended all cooperation between CISA and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which “provide[d] resources for cybersecurity, like monitoring for threats and vulnerabilities to networks, to state and local governments”;
7. had the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division reassign “senior career attorneys responsible for voting-rights enforcement….[and had] the Justice Department withdraw from several voting-rights cases while redirecting the Voting Section toward voter-roll maintenance and suspected fraud”; and
8. removed “all remaining members of the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission.”

The combination of these studied degradations—and others more esoteric still—means that there’s virtually no one minding American elections anymore, at least at the federal level. That’s not to mention all the increased threats state officials have had to deal with because of Trump’s rhetoric positioning them as being at the center of a colossal fraud on the American people. Nor does it consider the general chaos that has resulted, at the state level, from the lack of any meaningful federal guidance or information-sharing. Nor does it include federal officials directly threatening state elections officials in phone calls, communiques, and meetings. Nor does it cover the hundreds of career civil servants tasked with safeguarding American elections who were drummed out of their roles during Trump’s first term because they refused to adopt his systemic lies about pro-Trump foreign election interference. (This excellent ProPublica investigative report takes readers through that particular saga.)

The sum total of all this is that the 2026 midterms are under the most sustained and coordinated attack by any entity ever—and the attacker is the Trump administration.

All this is happening even as new revelations from just three days confirm that the Kremlin has launched its biggest attack on U.S. elections since 2016. Its reported focus is “injecting chaos” into American electoral processes. As it happens, that’s exactly what Trump and his team are doing—which means that the midterms will easily be history’s most widely attacked and undermined American election cycle.

(9) Donald Trump’s unprecedentedly vast mid-decade redistricting push was nakedly a partisan scheme to rig the midterms—and he didn’t do anything at all to hide that.

In fact, he was explicit about it.

As the Independent just reported this past weekend, “For over a year, President Trump has been pressuring Republican-led states to redraw their congressional districts with the hope of gaining more seats in November’s midterm elections.”

The fact that this effort could now backfire, as it created several new “red” districts which can’t reliably be put in Trump’s column should a “blue wave” manifest, is of course immaterial. The effort itself was an election-rigging scheme; any Democratic response was merely an emergency reaction, so should there be unintended fallout from this conspiracy it’ll only be because Donald Trump is even more unpopular (32% approval) than analysts could’ve predicted—not because one iota of his redistricting ploy was nonpartisan, bipartisan, historically grounded, or objectively reasonable.

How many seats did Trump’s redistricting stand to gain him in November? See for yourself:

At its outset, Trump’s plot stood to potentially gain Republicans a staggering 19 House seats—that’s not a typo—while also protecting a twentieth seat (in Nebraska) from a likely Democratic takeover. Trump had no inkling, at the time, that there would or could be any meaningful response from the Democrats, who as a party have largely been pushing for nonpartisan redistricting commissions during the Trump era. And of course even when a response came, it wasn’t even close to being adequate to the task at hand, as Trumpist congressional seat-counters surely had foreseen. At most, Democrats might be able to claw back less than two-thirds of the seats Republicans stand to gain via their redistricting chicanery. Moreover, while some now say Trump’s plans could backfire, much of that chatter relates to how the 2030 U.S. Census is likely to go should Trump move ahead with plans to deliberately undercount certain states over their immigrant populations. Per a New York Times report, under one 2024 analysis Republican states could lose two seats, and blue states gain two seats, in 2030:

But there’s no evidence Donald Trump is thinking about 2030 yet. Not because he won’t necessarily live to see it given his health struggles, but because there’s no evidence that he expects American democracy to live to see it.

It doesn’t take sniper and assault-drone emplacements going up all across the nation’s capital to guesstimate what Donald Trump’s plans are for America by January 2029.

(10) The chief purveyor of election disinformation—one of the most powerful forms of election interference—continues to be Donald Trump, and in his eleventh year of this treacherous pursuit, he’s stepped up his efforts significantly.

It’s not merely that Trump’s DHS was caught lying about its own preposterous claims on supposedly compromised state voter rolls.

It’s not merely that Trump has selectively declassified, misframed, and fraudulently redacted American intelligence in nationally televised addresses to premeditatedly give the false impression of pro-Democratic Party election interference that never happened.

It’s not just that Trump daily calls virtually every pre-election poll in America wrong, corrupt, rigged, misleading, or some combination of these even as—behind closed doors only, of course—we know he’s admitted to aides that the polls are accurate and real.

What matters more than any of these actions individually, or hundreds of others like them individually or even collectively, is the impact they’re designed to have. Trump is very clearly trying to set the scene for MAGA voters to be so enraged at Democratic victories in the midterms that, after the fact, they’ll be willing to condone him taking extraordinary—and extraordinarily illegal—“remedial” actions to “protect” democracy.

If the Democrats do well in the midterms and Trump concocts a plot to not seat (or un-seat) one or more Democratic winners, or to block certification of certain elections, or to use some other eldritch means of tossing (or even disappearing) certain ballots en masse, or to demand partisan recounts that deliberately misrepresent their results, it’ll be tempting for Americans to presume that a third of more of Americans were willing to support or at least tolerate such outrages purely because they’re Trump cultists. But that formulation lets Trump off the hook; it implies that his natural charisma is so irresistible that his fans can’t help but let the little scamp be a bastard over and over.

But that’s not what’s happening.

All Americans are being systematically operated upon by federal entities and federal communication channels rejiggered, since 2016, to be mouthpieces for the specific sort of disinformation Donald Trump wants and needs to spread to stay in power.

Even those of us who know the nation is being lied to about our elections—everything from the frequency with which voter fraud is committed to who generally commits it and why, from whether voter fraud or voter suppression is a greater encumbrance on American elections, from who controls which elections to how Americans actually vote (and how secure our voting methods are)—can’t help but be semiconsciously affected by the conversations that swell around our elections that never did before. It simply won’t do for Trump critics to insist Trump hasn’t moved the Overton Window on U.S. elections; it has been moved, to the point that major media will cover claims it never would have before, independent voters will believe claims they never would have before, and even Trump critics will be willing to engage with false claims that years ago would have received (and deserved) nothing more than a laugh, smirk, or snicker.

And Donald Trump has already—and will again—weaponize this artificial sea change.

Everything that happens in the aftermath of a prospective blue wave in November, just like everything that happened in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election—including the January 6 insurrection—is the direct byproduct of a whole-of-government effort to discredit our democracy and prepare the ground for an American autocracy.

That effort isn’t just encompassing but persistent, expert, and nefarious. And it stands apart from the administrative terrorism Donald Trump has waged on our elections infrastructure (see supra) because it’s a psyop whose target is American voters’ minds.

(11) Donald Trump isn’t just systematically spreading dangerous and deranging disinformation as he commits internal acts of administrative terrorism, he’s also trying to shut down channels for voters to receive accurate election information as he does so.

Once, back in 2009, the Obama administration tried to prevent Fox News from attending a single obscure Treasury Department interview—who can say why, though it may have had something to do with that particular entity having spent years trying to get Obama murdered by lying about his birthplace, religion, political ideology, family, personal history, and policy agenda. In any case, some minor functionary must have thought they would be pleasing the president by setting the number of attendees at a small administration event low enough that Fox News couldn’t be present. The plan failed in a matter of minutes, as other news agencies (and “other” is doing a lot of work here, given that Fox News arguably isn’t a news agency at all) complained and the administration immediately backed off. Nothing of this sort ever happened again, and there was never any evidence President Obama was involved in this tempest-in-a-teapot at all.

That’s not what’s happening now. What’s happening now is Donald Trump has banned from the White House grounds three of the largest and most respected news outlets in the United States—CNN, Politico, and MSNOW (until recently, MSNBC)—because he dislikes the truths they’re telling about his administration. So whereas in 2009 a minor administration official wanted to disadvantage Fox News for a single minor event on the basis of its consistent lies about the administration (proven lies, at that), this is a President of the United States personally and publicly ordering a total ban of three news outlets for exactly the opposite reason: because they’re inarguably doing their jobs. While we can be heartened by the news that other news outlets have now refused to participate in pool TV coverage of the White House until this illegal, First Amendment-violative ban is lifted, longtime Proof readers will know that this latest Trump attack on the free press is just that: the latest battle in an ongoing assault (one that President Trump even just admitted, yes really, is about “banning the free press”).

{Above: Trump humiliates himself by holding an event during which he can’t be heard. He can’t be heard because the very free press he’s now attacking refused to show up to cover him.}

From suing news outlets to having FCC head Brendan Carr threaten to seize their broadcasting licenses, from advocating and blessing mergers only if they lead to far-right media consolidations to publicly seeking to direct the news coverage of media outlets and media mavens he believes “owe” him (debts he discusses publicly), from making private phone calls to station owners and editors to get them to alter or end coverage of certain events to making private phone calls to station owners and editors to get them to fire figures he deems too effective at criticizing him, Donald Trump has made trying to control the free press one of the four centerpieces of his second term along with starting wars, caging children, and acting as a ditzy interior-decorator-in-chief across the nation’s capital.

Here too it’s easy to see these actions as disjointed, mercurial, and more a product of Trump’s classic malignant narcissistic sociopathy than a concerted effort to control the flow of information in a country slowing transitioning into an autocracy. But the evidence confirms that Trump’s need to autocratically control all aspects of American life and be omnipresent in Americans’ homes whether they want him in their lives or not is almost always connected to election-related matters.

Why did Trump threaten to “cut off trade with countries that have surpluses with the U.S. unless the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates”—an astounding act of extortion that amounts to, “If I don’t get my way, I’ll drive this fucking country into a ditch”?

Because he believes lower interest rates will translate into Republican election gains.

Why did Trump’s “Department of War,” whose first official act was to lose almost immediately a war with the comparatively small nation of Iran, shriek at U.S. media outlets for reporting that it under cover of darkness dropped the official death toll in the already-lost Iran War by nearly a third (from 18 to 13)? Because that death toll has real electoral consequences for the president and his historically incompetent team of civilians playacting as warriors. And because, moreover, Trump and his team knew that that “18” figure was already both too high for political expendiency and a lie—as the real number is 26, double the number the Pentagon wants voters to see pre-midterms. (Of the 900 additional nonfatal casualties the administration says nothing at all, lest the war’s total casualty count—now 925+—hit four digits before November.)

(12) And then there’s what hasn’t happened yet, but may well either pre-election, on Election Day, or shortly thereafter: a manufactured international crisis that the president uses to fraudulently assert total control over the election and its results.

We have enough evidence of this already to include it on this list of confirmed phenomena.

First, we have the “Department of War” so indiscriminately using AI in military scenarios that it came within minutes of starting World War III with Beijing.

Yes, really. That just happened.

And in the same week, with the midterms just six weeks away. Trump told Fox News that he’s deciding whether or not to simply “blow up the entire nation” of Iran, an apparent nuclear threat that would likely, also, initiate World War III. It would also turn the United States into such an international pariah—as we would have just killed millions of innocents—that it’s hard to imagine the nation not entering into some sort of a state of emergency. Nations would close their borders to us; we might get exiled from NATO; our allies would become enemies or end all diplomatic ties with us… it would be the most severe diplomatic crisis in U.S. history, and it would destabilize America for decades.

But Trump isn’t done with finding ways to start World War III around the midterms.

In addition to the two routes above, he’s found a third: allow Russia to invade NATO countries by (a) announcing the sudden withdrawal of a third of U.S. troops from Europe, (b) at a time when our own and Allied intelligence is telling us that a Russian invasion of the Baltics may be imminent, (c) at a time NATO allies are darkly implying that some of them (notably, France and Poland) may already be in a hot “hyrid” war with Moscow, and (d) at a time the very generals Trump’s alcoholic, woman-abusing TV-pundit-cum-Pentagon-chief is firing en masse are telling Pete Hegseth and his draft-dodging boss that the USAF won’t be able to respond to a threat on a second front while it’s in Iran.

In other words, Trump has positioned America to be helpless if his friends in Russia invade yet another European country, if his friends in China invade Taiwan, or if his friends in Argentina foolishly go to war with our allies in England. And we’ve already seen that the United States Armed Forces are so stretched beyond their limits that when a ragtag Houthi militia in Yemen invaded parts of the critical Bab al-Mandab Strait—threatening to throw the entire world into a prolonged, apocalyptic energy crisis—President Trump did… well, absolutely nothing.

Why would a man who daily brags that he runs the most peerless, war-ready armed forces in human history be evacuating troops from Europe, letting scattered rebels seize the second-most important energy-trade waterway on Earth, using AI that’s untested and unready to gauge the presence of Chinese threats, and doing all this while arranging one of the largest “sales” ever (technically a gift) of U.S. weaponry to a genocidal Israeli regime amidst America’s own biggest weapons shortfall in decades?

Why, that is, is Donald Trump doing everything imaginable to weaken America’s military posture around the world?

Some might answer: because he’s at minimum an unwitting Russian asset and at most—and most historically unthinkable—a longstanding Russian agent named “Krasnov.”

But there’s a much simpler explanation here, and it’s one consistent with the entirety of Trump’s lifetime in politics and in discussing politics: Trump sees war as opportunity.

He saw Operation Desert Storm as an opportunity to steal Iraqi oil.

He saw the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro as a chance to steal Venezuelan oil.

He sees the Iran War as a chance to steal Iranian oil.

He sees the Russia-Ukraine War as a chance to take Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without “any security guarantees” for the war-torn nation’s he’s gleefully looting.

And at a time when he and his family have massive business ties with the Chinese, the president has frozen arms sales to Taiwan, doing so amidst the risk of China invading that country widening significantly—seemingly confirming that he’s placing doing deals he can do with the Chinese that would help his domestic political standing or personal bottom line above longterm commitments America has to Taiwan’s security.

Proof readers will recall that Trump failed to respond adequately to the COVID-19 threat for months in early 2020 because he was privately begging Xi Jinping to do a farm deal with America that he insisted would hand him the 2020 election on a platter.

In short, Trump sees World War III, or even just a widening regional conflict in the Middle East, as an imaginary mummery happening on a game board that doesn’t register to him as real or consequential. Like a dog who looks at your finger when you point somewhere rather than at the location you’re pointing to, Trump is so stuck in the moment—literally, wherever he’s physically standing—that yes, we can conclude that his history of treating war as a business opportunity is a permanent modus operandi.

In the weeks leading up to midterm elections he fears might be disastrous for his party, it’s not conspiracy-theorizing—it’s historicizing—to say Trump seeks a new crisis.

Conclusion

The list above isn’t an exhaustive one.

If past is precedent, there are election-rigging schemes major media hasn’t yet uncovered. And some schemes with obvious electoral consequences would likely be deemed too attenuated to be called “election-rigging”—even if, taken in full, they’re almost certainly a mindful part of such a larger, longterm operation.

Still other Trump outrages are too complex to bend to easy reduction in a list format. Proof could surely publish a single full-length report on how armed Trump agents roaming America’s streets and tackling citizens and noncitizens alike willy-nilly and with impunity is ultimately a voter-suppression tactic. Another such report could be written on how Trump’s premeditated coarsening of American political culture was in part designed to drive young people and occasional voters out of the political arena altogether—leaving it disproportionately composed of retirees from Trump’s own generation (and others that fixate on the past and/or view politics as lurid blood sport).

Trump’s repeated false claim that the Iran War will end right after the midterms—when Iran has already strongly implied that it will last at least until the end of the Trump presidency (unless, of course, Democrats win the midterms and force Trump out of a war that no one wants)—is akin to President Richard Nixon falsely implying he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam to secure the White House in 1968. Is that election-rigging? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s certainly a colossal fraud on voters.

That Kash Patel (FBI) and Markwayne Mullin (DHS) are leaving open the possibility of storming polling places if there are bomb threats—when during the last election cycle every such threat was a hoax, and every such threat targeted majority-minority urban precincts—is a gaping hole in Americans’ expectation that polling places will be free from Trumpist stormtroopers pretending to be engaged in law enforcement.

In the broadest sense, the sole mission of the Republican Party in this era is to so fetishize one-off anecdotal “outrages” that political campaigns become not about stress-testing policy platforms but parachuting in pre-packaged psy-ops over the masses. It’s a gambit that’s at a minimum election-degrading, if not election rigging. (Though the fact that this gambit is calibrated to exploit America’s institutional and market blindspots makes “rigging” feel thematically, if not semantically, more apt.)

Too many on the left and in the center of American politics—to the extent any center remains, or even could remain in the face of a bona fide fascist threat to end American democracy—deem it treacherous to that democracy to even discuss Trumpist election-rigging. The idea, presumably, is that telling the truth to voters depresses turnout; it’s an ideology ironically synchronous with Trump’s own.

Others more benignly opine that, in the several weeks before an election, any focus on structural obstacles necessarily distracts from urgent GOTV efforts (which require time, energy, and focus as well as material resources. But Proof sees this complaint too as misguided, as it ill prepares America for what’s coming after this election—which is sure to be far worse than what preceded it.

And, critically, what’s coming will be very bad no matter what the outcome of the election is.

If Democrats, despite being wildly outspent, somehow usher in a “blue wave,” it will be said by Trump to be proof that the election must in some de facto or de jure way be nullified. After all, he’ll say, how could Democrats outperform current polls (which point to a good election season but not a rout)? And how could a party be outspent eight to one in a Texas Senate race fueled by the Super PAC money Trump illegally commandeered and still win it? Or Trump will find one surprising win MAGA had during the 2026 midterms and use it as “proof” that that sort of win “can’t happen” alongside massive defeats elsewhere. He’ll point to crowd sizes at his rallies—which of course have been embarrassingly small, so he’ll point to his own past (false) claims about crowd sizes at his rallies. The very size of the Democrats’ win will be treated as not just evidence of leftist election-rigging but the very best evidence there could ever be.

Meanwhile, if the election results are close Trump and his political agents will pull out every conceivable stop to block the handful of Democratic politicians whose elevation to federal service in the next Congress would give Democrats majorities in one or both congressional chambers. Certifications will be blocked. Lawsuits will be filed. Fake election-rigging claims will be made to purportedly justify delayed seatings and congressional ethics investigations. Some fear that the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-LA), will fire the House clerk so that certain members of the new House can’t be seated (a ploy that likely wouldn’t do much for him long term, thankfully). It would be weeks and months of chaos involving mass MAGA protests, death threats against all involved, emergency Supreme Court injunctions, wild-eyed rhetoric from the White House about the “Communist menace,” exhortations from far-right media personalities to invoke the Insurrection Act, institute localized martial law, or worse.

It will, in very real terms, be war.

The only question is whether it will also be a violent one.

Meanwhile, if Democrats somehow manage to take over one or both houses of Congress—them taking just the House is considerably more likely than any other scenario—their immediate move to effectively shut down all operations of the federal executive branch, while also pursuing desperately needed impeachment proceedings, could be the very thing Trump uses as an excuse to permanently sever separation of powers and start ignoring not just Congress (which he already does daily) but SCOTUS.

In that scenario, the protests that would arise nationwide would be met with armed troops in every major city in America. Just one gun goes off—just one—and Trump has the civil war and militarization of American streets he wants.

Heck, it may take no more than a single injury to a soldier or guardsman for Trump to decide that the era of public protest in America is over.

None of this changes what lies before us. And none of this should dictate how any of us act. All Americans must vote. All Americans must be vigilant about threats to our collective and individual rights to vote. And all Americans must do their utmost to uphold rule of law, good citizenship, and civic self-education for as long as humanly possible in a collapsing republic. But even as the discussion of America’s decline will be quickly focused on emergency preparedness and emergency action in the event of a near-total, near-term collapse of order on many American streets—and/or in the many American government buildings that come under the sway of autocrats and their vile assigns—it’s vital that Americans have a baseline truth to work from.

And that baseline truth is this: Donald Trump has cheated in every election he’s ever run in; Donald Trump has sought illegal foreign election interference in every election he’s ever run in; there’s never been a single election in American history—and that includes 2024—in which a majority of those voting wanted Trump to be the President of the United States; no election conspiracy against Trump has ever been executed, and indeed no electoral injury has ever been done to him whatsoever; he’s an active insurrectionist and traitor to the United States who incited and orchestrated a failed coup attempt earlier this decade; and he’s currently working harder to end American democracy and destroy the integrity of the 2026 midterm elections than any U.S. pol has ever worked at anything.

We’ll never have any notion of what the results of the 2026 midterms would have been had they been a fully free and fair election, if our Supreme Court hadn’t gone rogue to tilt the scales in Trump’s favor, if a non-disbanded election integrity apparatus inside the federal government still existed to ward off the Russians’ present cyberattacks and propaganda; or if none of the dozen election-rigging schemes that Trump is presently pursuing had ever been launched.

And because the free and fair results of the upcoming election—the results that would hypothetically come in the absence of the gravest attack on an American election ever—are unknowable, and because no matter what happens in this election Trump will use it as an excuse to do everything he was going to do anyway, the one thing of value we as voters are left with is the knowledge that we and our way of life are under attack. It is that certainty that will ultimately fortify us in the dark days to come, not simply the results of individual campaigns. Why? Because in an era of fascist autocracy, winning elections isn’t going to be fungible currency much longer.

But the courage to stand up for what American democracy used to be certainly will be.