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

A Proof reader of Part I of this series commented below that report, “This is scary on an unprecedented level.”

And it was. The report exhaustively outlined twelve unprecedented ways that Donald Trump is rigging the 2026 midterm elections.

But for as scary and without precedent as that Proof report and its contents were, this author and many readers suspected that it detailed only a fraction of the story. It was clear—even when that report was published on September 21—that a Part II, Part III, and maybe even parts beyond that would eventually become necessary, even urgent.

Why? Because no president or political party has done more to try to rig a federal election than Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing right now in 2026, a fact made all the more grotesque by the fact that it’s these same entities who have spent the last decade crying wolf about supposed election theft as a justification for their own election crimes.

But this isn’t the first election Republicans have tried to steal. Or second. Or fourth.

In 2000, bussed-in Republican operatives led by Trump friends including Roger Stone staged a fake riot—the so-called Brooks Brothers Riot—to stop all vote-counting in Florida just as Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was about to pull ahead in the state.

A plainly right-leaning Supreme Court then implicitly blessed that riot as dispositive by insisting that vote-counting in the state of Florida stop, though (a) there was time to complete it, and (b) it was the role of the Florida Supreme Court, not SCOTUS, to determine and when and whether Florida state election laws had been violated. To aid the Republican theft of the election the Court had to develop a new definition of the Fourteenth Amendment that it immediately opined would never ever be applied again.

In 2004, as discussed in much greater detail below—so it won’t be belabored here—an Ohio elected official linked to far-right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (and his wife Ginni Thomas, who informally ran White House personnel decisions for Mr. Trump in his first term) orchestrated a conspiracy to disenfranchise just enough Black and poor and college-aged Ohioans that that’s likely what gave the Republican George W. Bush victory in the election by a mere 50,000-vote swing in the Buckeye State. It goes without saying that just as there was no punishment, and indeed much reward, for Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s rigging of state election protocols for Mr. Bush in Florida in 2000—Republicans soon gifted her with a seat in Congress to better underscore the party’s dedication to premeditated election-rigging—Ohio’s Kenneth Blackwell was granted ever more and more power in the Thomases’ circle once it was clear that he would steal the franchise from hundreds of thousands of his fellow Black Americans.

In 2016, scores of unreported collusive contacts between the Trump campaign—run by a Kremlin agent Trump well knew was a Kremlin agent when he hired him, Paul Manafort—dovetailed beautifully with the Kremlin’s own micro-targeting operations, a “British” micro-targeting operation devised by a Russian and overseen by Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, and a foreign policy quid pro quo involving proposed Trump Organization business in Russia negotiated by Trump fixer Michael Cohen at Trump’s explicit behest. The collusion, most of it never investigated by Robert Mueller (for all that Trump fans pretended it had been) was so comically obvious that it saw Manafort handing over proprietary campaign polling data to a known Kremlin agent in Manafort’s personal and professional circle, Konstantin Kilimnik, in Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s favorite New York City cigar bar; not just one Donald Trump son but two (Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner) meet alongside Mr. Manafort with multiple Kremlin agents in Donald Trump’s own house; and Trump’s eldest son Don trying (as did Trump adviser Roger Stone) to coordinate secretly with the Kremlin-asset WikiLeaks operation—a clearinghouse for the criminally stolen Democratic files Donald Trump had on national television successfully urged his Kremlin friends to try to get access to.

All this strategic dovetailing may well have turned the tide in a tight election.

In 2024, Trump ran for president while a private citizen, making it virtually impossible to track all the promises he made to would-be foreign election interferers to try to get them to help him. Suffice to say that we know this much: Donald Trump stole highly classified documents from the American people across months and months of federal criminal conspiring in late 2020 and early 2021, and his own subsequent statements—which focused on his right to sell such materials as he claims former GOP president Richard Nixon did—make clear that he intended to distribute those classified materials, which include his secret plans for a future war in Iran, to the highest bidder.

The point here is a fairly simple one: since 1988—when George W. Bush’s father beat Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, who’d been leading him for almost the entire election season—by agreeing to air what at the time was the most racist television ad the American electorate had ever seen, the Willie Horton Ad, the Republican Party has had no demonstrated ability to win a popular vote in the United States. The Willie Horton Ad was created by the business partner of Trump pal Roger Stone, Lee Atwater, and Trump friend Roger Ailes, confirming that the nihilistic and diabolical thinking of Trump and his circle has infected American life for decades.

Indeed, for 38 years now the GOP—and now MAGA—playbook has been to suppress the vote, conspire with foreign agents, spread mass disinformation, wrongly purge citizens from voter rolls, call in bomb threats, stage violent riots and rebellions, and engage in other more esoteric but equally illicit conduct that easily meets at least the ordinary definition of treason in order to win elections. Democrats may well pander cynically to their base, and may rightly work diligently to especially ensure that their base is able to vote easily, but only Republicans have become known more for feckless “election ratfuckery” than even attempting to develop a policy agenda American voters are interested in.

These are historical facts—not partisan spin. And they’re the backdrop for this report.

Ten More Ways Trump and His Agents Are Rigging the Coming Elections

(1) Trump and his agents are actively planning to institute martial law to either disrupt the midterm elections before they happen or—even more likely—seize voting machines as soon as the voting is over so that the results of the midterms are impossible to know.

For years Americans have watched, amazed, as Trump repeatedly bypasses experts to seek out the counsel of those he knows in advance will agree with his crackpot ideas.

In his first term, Trump regularly listened to and accepted Russian intel over the U.S. Intelligence Community if and when the former—as of course it was premeditatedly designed to to—flattered his vanity. As discussed in the Proof Series, he rejected every attempt by the U.S. Secret Service to restrict him to using only secured cell phones and then, fed up, he eventually replaced the leadership of the USSS, even the head of his own detail, with agents who’d let him threaten national security with impunity.

This trend is evident across Trump’s entire career in and out of elected office. When prosecutors told him the Central Park Five were innocent, he decided he knew better; he angrily questioned the military decisions of presidential administrations without access to (or even any apparent interest in) the intelligence those leaders had access to that he didn’t; and he’s deemed actual doctors wrong about everything from vaccines to COVID-19, troubled pregnancies to the intellectual toxicity of Robert Kennedy Jr.

But no narcissistic malignant sociopathic obsession of Trump’s has gone as far as his wholly pretend false belief that he won the 2020 presidential election. And yes, to be clear, the belief is both pretend and false—inasmuch as private confidants of Trump have made clear that, in private, he’s repeatedly acknowledged that he lost the 2020 election. Which of course he did, inarguably. But gratuitously pretending to believe he won in 2020 has become central to his political brand, and to play out this mummery he’s dismissed the sober advice and hard evidence of everyone from William Barr to the legions of staffers he lost after he incited an armed insurrection in January 2021.

But now things are getting considerably more dangerous.

Trump threatened federal aid to Colorado until it released from prison early one of the most dangerous active insurrectionists and convicted felons in America, Tina Peters—whose crimes threatened exponentially more than any one, ten, or hundred street crimes—and immediately made her part of his private cadre of election-rigging advisers.

He did the same with David Levin, a convicted elections cybercriminal Trump just put in charge of monitoring elections.

Attorney Peter Ticktin gets Trump’s attention more than any lawyer who works in his administration, even a dangerous “yes man” like T. Elliot Gaiser. Why? Because It’s Ticktin who featured at the insurrectionist “Storm Summit” (a QAnon reference) in Las Vegas earlier this year, and it’s Ticktin who helped Trump file a scurrilous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton in 2022 openly dreams of a “hot” civil war in which American soldiers kill anti-Trump critics en masse.

As The Atlantic now reports, in explaining how Peters and Ticktin and their ilk have become President Trump’s top advisers on the question of whether to summarily end the American experiment by canceling or invalidating federal elections by force,

Ticktin says that Trump could do something soon to take over elections. “He’s the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it,” Ticktin told us this month before taking the stage at an election-skeptic conference in Las Vegas.

The way Ticktin sees it, there are three possible outcomes this fall. The first—a smooth election—won’t happen in his view because, he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries.

The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating.

The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3. “Either martial law, or step aside,” he told us about Trump’s choices in the last scenario.

When we asked about the prospect of riots if Trump tries to overturn the election results, Ticktin said he was not concerned. “Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are,” he said.

(2) For the first time in American history, American taxpayers are involuntarily funding a partisan political campaign by having a President of the United States steal their money to pay for it.

The audacity of what the White House has just started doing cannot be overstated.

Watch the ad below, and then consider the following: (1) you paid for it; (2) it falsely justified stealing your taxpayer money to pay for it by claiming to be nonpartisan; (3) it’s reminiscent of Communist propaganda reels in North Korea (as it has nothing to do with America and everything to do with fetishizing an authoritarian leader to the point of slavish cult formation), and (4) it’s being released—and played over and over again—in the weeks leading up to the midterms election because it’s unmistakably a partisan campaign ad (indeed, it’s just one of now three pro-Trump campaign ads that taxpayers have been coerced into paying for; the one below, incredibly, is the same one Trump released as a campaign ad in 2024, with the sole exception that he removed the six seconds of the ad that made that clear on the assumption voters would be far too stupid to notice or care).

As the CBS News report above avers, there’s almost too much to unpack in all this:

1. These three ads may well constitute federal felonies;
2. there may be more coming;
3. Trump has already stolen at least $1 million from taxpayers to pay for them;
4. Trump has over $100 million in campaign funds—not to mention his own $7 billion in wealth and $400 million in illegally commandeered Super PAC funds (see Part I of this series)—that he could use to fund these partisan campaign ads, but he’s elected to steal public monies anyway;
5. none of these ads are linked to any government program, making them ineligible to be construed as “PSAs” like the White House, caught red-handed, now claims them to be; and
6. to add insult to injury, the White House justified stealing taxpayer money to pay for these partisan campaign ads by opining that taxpayers had forgotten how to “love their country”—a clear echo of how violent domestic abusers justify their conduct (“you made me do this to you”) that’s genuinely chilling, all the more so because Trump is in every shot of the ad above (so its repeated refrain, “love me,” is clearly about him and not America (though it’s not clear he sees a difference).

Worst of all, this can’t be stopped—and Trump knows it.

With Republicans in charge of the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, and with just five weeks until the midterms, there’s no time or political power available to stop this theft of taxpayer monies aimed at illegally swinging an election. So the ads will continue, and proliferate, and—best of all for Trump and the Republican Party—they don’t cost them a single dime. Which shouldn’t even be a factor for the GOP at this point, given that it has considerably more cash on hand than its political opponents do.

That’s right—Trump and his party are stealing money from hard-working Americans that the party doesn’t even need.

And they’re doing this in the middle of an economic downturn.

So for the first time ever, a federal budget has been commandeered by a political party to pay for a partisan political campaign—yet another step on the road toward far-right authoritarianism (in which conduct of this sort is commonplace). And in addition to growing outrage in GOP circles over this misappropriation of taxpayer monies (itself a shocking development, given that the same GOP stalwarts were fine with Trump being accused of dozens of sex crimes over thirty years), a chorus of legal experts now confirms that what Trump is doing, across now three commercials, is a federal crime.

(3) Trump and his ICE agents waged a quiet campaign of terror for the entirety of Summer 2026, arresting 143,000 people in 92 days—1,554 arrests per day—and the evidence makes clear that this staggeringly ramped-up ICE campaign was related to the election… not the Trump administration’s 2024-promised immigration agenda.

It isn’t just that, as the 2026 midterm campaign cycle began, Trump’s ICE ramped up removal operations to their highest level yet. It’s not just that these operations couldn’t be geared to pleasing midterm voters, as (a) they’re in violation of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to only deport “the worst of the worst” (the overwhelming majority of arrests made this summer were for civil immigration violations, and involved men and women with no criminal record at all, let alone a record of violence), and (b) only 38% of voters now prefer the GOP agenda on immigration in any case.

So what makes this summer’s historic betrayal of Trump’s past presidential campaign promises in the face of massive, bipartisan opposition to its particulars relevant to the midterms—and for that matter, what explains why these operations are happening at all when they’re not what’s wanted by nearly anyone or what was promised to anyone—is that, as the New York Times reports, they’re scaring the hell out of nonwhite citizens.

Those American businesses that were hit with ICE raids this summer, almost all of these raids performatively public and unnecessarily violent, report that they see an immediate reduction in patronage by not just “immigrants” but all Latinos.

And the Times reports some of the locations Trump targeted are near “polling places.”

The intended authoritarian message is obvious: with Trump’s support among Latinos cratering (it’s now down to an astonishing 26%, and even some Latino Republican politicians are starting to abandon his policy agenda), the time has come for MAGA to remove the Latino-friendly mask it wore during the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle—characterized by the aforementioned false campaign promises—and reveal itself as the white Christofascist movement it’s always been.

And the mask isn’t coming off just because it can, but because launching the most violent and racist domestic relocation program since Japanese-American internment during WWII is intended to scare even nonwhite citizens from polling places this fall.

The worst part? If past is precedent, this scheme will work.

Worse still, we’ll never know how well. We can’t know how many nonwhite citizen voters—a voting bloc ardently opposed to Trump—will avoid the midterms altogether for fear of being premeditatedly harassed, expansively investigated (e.g. with respect to other members of their household, who may not be documented and could come under fresh scrutiny if ICE agents are at 2026 polling places taking down names), or even wrongly arrested.

What’s so nefarious about all this—on top of everything else about it—is the gleeful gaslighting that accompanies it. We now find paid MAGA influencers on social media daily cooing, in relation to these removal operations, “I voted for this!”

Except the truth is they didn’t. Because what’s happening now is explicitly not what Trump said to get elected in 2024—and the purpose of his agents’ and influencers’ misdirection on this score is to rewrite history.

What actually happened was this: Trump lied to Latinos in 2024 so he could get their vote, and then, once he’d gotten it and been returned to power, he spent two years doing all he could to scare them from the polls. And he did this in part because he knew that he’d lied to and betrayed them and that his Latino support would thus crater.

(4) Trump and his agents have provably terrorized state elections officials with false allegations of a massive voting conspiracy that are intended to cause a disruption in the midterms. And we now have strong evidence that this ploy is working like a charm.

In battleground state Nevada—one way to spot a Trumpist election-rigging scheme is that it always targets a state with multiple competitive federal or gubernatorial races—Trump’s DHS at first falsely alleged that state officials had allowed 15,000 improperly registered immigrants on its voter rolls, then (when caught in that lie) amended its accusation, which came with threats of new federal investigations and prosecutions, to just 18 wrongly registered persons.

And then, when caught in that lie, it changed its tune yet again to accept that the actual number…

…was zero.

Not ten, twenty, or fifty. Zero.

But these months of false allegations had their desired effect: they forced Nevada officials to spend countless hours in the lead-up to a major national election trying to disprove a false allegation rather than getting prepared for a vote in which millions of Nevadans (many of them newly legally registered) will participate.

Already under-resourced, state election teams simply don’t have the bandwidth to prepare for an election and fend off unprecedentedly bad-faith federal criminal allegations at the same time. And the second Trump administration well knows this, as it’s now seen firsthand how ploys of this sort quickly depress Democratic turnout.

How do we know that? Because in concert with the news that Trump and his team spent months lying to, harassing, and illicitly threatening officials in Nevada, we just learned that one Republican-led state—which has likewise seen major artificial turmoil within its state-elections apparatus—responded to this turmoil by simply… not registering new voters in a way that could be devastating to the Democratic candidates in Texas’s several hotly contested midterm races.

When state elections officials are overworked and/or distracted by needless silliness, bad things happen. In Texas, voter registrations that are nearly a year old still have yet to be acted upon, which has a substantially greater impact than one might imagine.

It’s not just that these voters—who did everything right, only to be denied new voter registrations by the Republican state officials who allowed a year-long backlog—may not show up to the polls because they remain (wrongly) unregistered. It’s not just that these voters are disproportionately likely to be in Democratic voting blocs: the young, first-time voters, and new citizens. It’s that if some of these folks do show up to the polls either wrongly believing they’re already registered or simply demanding to vote without the proper paperwork having been completed by state officials, that tumult will cause long voting lines in the precincts disproportionately affected by this GOP-caused disarray.

And which precincts will be predominantly affected? Urban precincts, majority-minority precincts, college towns, and precincts with large numbers of new citizens.

Is this weaponized incompetence? Quite possibly. But more importantly, it’s a good reminder that whenever anything—for instance, see supra, false criminal allegations by the Trump administration—keeps state elections officials from their proper work, almost all of the fallout from this falls on voters who are more likely to be Democrats and live in Democratic-leaning precincts. And again, Team Trump well knows this.

(5) Trump and his personal lawyers at DOJ are orchestrating what they admit is the “biggest DOJ election-observer” scheme in American history—and it sure seems to have as its mandate causing mayhem across the country during midterms voting.

How do we know this? First, because CNN reports that the effort is unprecedentedly large at a time no evidence establishes any need for such a scale—meaning that the scale itself (30% or more larger than anything President Joe Biden did) is proof that it’s a response not to real circumstances but to false allegations of mass voter fraud by the man who controls DOJ and is the personal client of its leader Todd Blanche. Beyond this, there are the following additional facts:

1. Some of the individuals chosen to enact this scheme have been charged with pro-Trump election crimes;
2. many of the individuals chosen to enact this scheme are 2020 election deniers;
3. some of those chosen were involved in creating mayhem during the primaries in Wyoming this year (with it being Wyoming Republicans who complained about their conduct); and
4. this massive DOJ scheme dovetails with a new RNC scheme to “train new ‘special monitors’ to scrutinize voting machines—recording serial numbers, inspecting security seals, and photographing results tapes,” which means the number of new partisan inspectors at polling places could easily be double anything that America has seen before.

While CNN claims that there’s currently “no evidence that the monitoring efforts will disrupt polling places” because they aren’t likely to “prevent anyone from voting in November,” this misapprehension of the purpose of what Trump, DOJ, and the GOP are doing is a continuation of decades of such major-media obtuseness. Simply put, the purpose of drafting armies of far-right “observers” who are at once hyperpartisan, unqualified, acting in bad faith, and trained to enact onerous new oversight on state elections volunteers on Election Day is not primarily to disqualify even a single voter…

…but to lengthen voting lines in Democratic-leaning voting precincts by hours.

This has been the Republican Party modus operandi in federal elections for over two decades now, and somehow major-media never acknowledges it or even seems to pick up on it.

In 2004, President George W. Bush won re-election by a swing of just 50,000 votes in Ohio; but for that margin, the President of the United States sworn in on January 20, 2005 would’ve been decorated American soldier and U.S. senator John Kerry (D-MA).

So how did Bush win Ohio? The answer’s simple: J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State—and a good friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his far-right activist, openly pro-Christofascist wife Virginia “Ginni” Thomas—spent the six months before the presidential election in Ohio removing voting machines from majority-minority Ohio precincts and putting them into majority-white precincts that didn’t need them. The result? Ten-hour voting lines in college towns and majority-minority urban precincts around the state.

That’s not a typo: ten-hour voting lines.

Wait, sorry, that is a typo… as some lines in Ohio in 2004 were as long as 22 hours.

Twenty-two hours.

The election in Ohio—and thus the presidency—was so clearly stolen in 2004 via systematic, premeditated voter suppression (getting predominantly poor people to leave voting lines in droves because they can’t afford to spend hours and hours voting) that it led to the “Boxer Rebellion,” the first bicameral election challenge in America in so many decades that the Nation called it “one of the most high-profile dissents in the history of the Senate.”

And what did Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (D-OH) jointly alleged on national television? That Republicans had rigged the Ohio vote in advance by organizing a conspiracy to violate voting rights en masse—and that the conspiracy involved creating exactly the Election Day turmoil that lengthens voting lines.

The best part is that those who opposed the Boxer Rebellion couldn’t and didn’t make any argument that the voter suppression hadn’t happened. They couldn’t; all America had seen the voting lines in Ohio in real time, and had marked that most of the people in those lines were Black and/or college students living in urban areas/college towns.

What Republicans relied upon, instead, was a very different question: whether anyone could prove in a court of law that the machine-moving scheme had been malicious and dispositive. In other words, they challenged Democrats to count how many people had left their voting lines in disgust, to ascertain how many of these line-leavers were Democrats planning to vote for Kerry, to ascertain whether all these people had left because of the long voting lines caused by too few voting machines or some other reason, to uncover (in just the hour or so Sen. Boxer and Rep. Tubbs had to work with) internal documents in Ohio revealing the nefarious purpose behind the scheme, and…

…well, you get the point. They knew Democrats had no way to accumulate such data except anecdotally—perhaps not even at all under the time constraints at hand—which is another way of saying Republicans had no fear whatsoever of these charges.

The one thing the 2004 Boxer Rebellion in the U.S. Senate did do was to make it much harder for Republicans to use one particular election-rigging ploy again. Just as the 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot in Florida—in which Republicans stopped legal vote-counting and thereby stole an election though violence—made it harder for Republicans to ever again riot to win an election (though they did try to do so, of course, in 2021, hoping enough time had passed to give their go-to gambit another shot) or al Qaeda couldn’t again expect to fly planes into buildings after the September 11th attacks, partisan officials moving voting machines around pre-election would come under far greater scrutiny in the years ahead (which is why the knew far-right gambit is to claim that no one should be using these machines, and they should all be seized by Big Government).

But the broader idea of generating an unprovable volume of voter suppression through artificially long lines isn’t an idea the Republican Party has ever abandoned. And why should it? When it announces that it will be increasing the number of likely election disruptors by up to 200% in the absence of any reason whatsoever to do so, and when it does this knowing that election disruptions cause long lines and long lines cause mass voter suppression, and when as part of this scheme it targets only the places it falsely says voter fraud occurs—wouldn’t you know it? large urban areas and college towns—it can easily get a Trump-donor-controlled network like CNN to opine that there’s no harm in this because these partisan poll-crashers won’t directly “prevent anyone from voting in November.”

But indirectly? That is, in the same way that stole a presidential election not long ago?

Sure.

They’ll certainly prevent many Democrats from voting. We just can’t say how many.

(6) By an apparent 6-3 vote—all of the Supreme Court’s far-right Justices against the other three—the Court has given its favorite son Donald Trump clearance to use a “voter audit” (voter-roll purge) vetting mechanism that all parties agree is often inaccurate, has often wrongly disenfranchised voters, and is sufficiently new in its usage at the state level that its effect on the midterms is dangerously unknowable.

If I told you that Donald Trump was demanding to use a voter-roll vetting mechanism that’s had up to an 81% error rate in some locales, would you consider his insistence to be made in good faith, or a fairly naked election-rigging scheme?

Well, the bad news is that the answer almost any rational American would give regarding anything with a potential 81% error rate—that it shouldn’t be anywhere near American elections, especially not with its consequential introduction coming just five weeks in advance of a major national vote—isn’t the answer the farthest-right Supreme Court in modern American political history has arrived at.

As a result, we can be reasonably certain that somewhere between a few thousand and hundreds of thousands of legal U.S. voters will be disenfranchised this November, with past precedent suggesting that once again the largest bloc of disenfranchised voters will be nonwhite voters with common last names (e.g. “García” or “Hernández” in the Latino community, and “Williams” or “Johnson” in the Black community).

If the phrase “election integrity” had ever meant, to Trumpist Republicans, ensuring that everyone who is eligible to vote is able to do so—a natural reading of the word “integrity,” assuming the person using the word had any—not only would the Court not have allowed what it’s allowed by a 6-3 partisan ruling but this issue wouldn’t even have come before the Court at all. The Trump Administration would never have sought to expand the so-called “SAVE database” using forms of voter identification that have proven faulty (by way of being systematically over-proscriptive) over and over again.

But as we’ve seen, this is part of a pattern of conduct by the Republican Party that’s by now so longstanding that it can only be referred to as premeditated election-rigging: systematic, prolonged, deliberately draconian attempts to suppress ballots in national elections, with each attempt specifically targeting every Democratic voting bloc while also falsely claiming ideological neutrality.

Nor is there any Democratic Party counterexample or counterweight to these actions.

The sort of conduct by the Democrats that would qualify as even vaguely analagous to what the Republicans have done throughout the twenty-first century would instantly be deemed so horrific that it’s a sad confession of the nature of American society that these latter schemes aren’t widely seen as nightmarishly dystopian. What could we compare to using voting-machine “whack-a-mole” as a means of deliberately creating ten-plus-hour voting lines in majority-black precincts in Cuyahoga County in 2004?

Exploiting the physical infirmities of the elderly by making it excruciatingly physically painful for rural senior citizens to vote?

Targeting military ballots for mass destruction?

Devising schemes to eliminate Cuban votes in Florida or Hasidic votes in New York City?

Setting critical election deadlines and early-voting periods for exclusively those times when Evangelical Christians are known to be “praying” inside their corporate mega-churches?

If there were any evidence of any of the above, it’s likely America would have fallen into a hot civil war years ago. But because those targeted by the Republican Party for over a century now are explicitly those with highly contingent statuses and political power—young people, new citizens, the poor, and nonwhite voters—both U.S. major media and mainstream American political discourse has treated 22-hour voting lines in Ohio in 2004 as a mere “aw shucks” moment for American democracy rather than evidence that a presidential election was stolen in broad daylight by election criminals employing premeditated mass voter suppression. So Republican political operatives have been bussed in from out-of-state to start a riot outside the Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor’s Office to shut down counting because it was then putting Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore ahead in both the state and the nation?

Aw, shucks—must have just been some concerned citizens.

And because that’s what media and many Americans said in 2000, January 6 happened two decades later. When America refuses to treat election crimes as crimes, they recur.

(7) Trump may have secretly stolen up to $13 billion in Venezuelan oil money. Since we have no idea where that money is or what’s been done with it and because Trump has a history of election fraud, it’s reasonable to assume that some portion of this stolen wealth is not merely being hidden from taxpayers and possibly pocketed by Trump and/or his allies, but is being used to illicitly fund election campaigns, ads, officials, communications, or other clandestine midterm-cycle elections operations.

Keep in mind this staggering statistic as you consider the above: major-media reports indicate that Republicans may have more than a half a billion-dollar cash-on-hand advantage over Democrats at a time when “big money dominates political campaigns to a degree not seen in decades.” In politics in the 2020s, party prosperity is destiny.

Even Republicans have been boasting about their “historic financial firepower” this election season and insisting that it’ll be a difference-maker.

It’s against this backdrop that, as discussed in Part I of this series, Donald Trump has illegally commandeered nearly half a billion dollars in Super PAC assets instead of opening his own wallet—which has grown by so many billions due to him cashing in on his presidency that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) recently did the math necessary to conclude that “Trump has been making more than a million dollars/hour” as POTUS.

That’s right—MAGAs crow about Trump “giving up” his $400,000 annual salary for the sake of the nation and modeling selflessness for the next generation…

…even as he corruptly trades in on his insider knowledge to make $1 million per hour.

See this stunning Bloomberg graphic:

The point here is that (a) Donald Trump is willing to commandeer money illegally at the Super PAC and (see supra) the taxpayer-monies levels; (b) he’s willing to corruptly enrich himself via his own domestic and foreign policies (see his AI, crypto, energy, and sports betting policies and more) but seems especially invested in doing so in ways that advance his political party’s fortunes without costing him any money; and (c) the result of this and other factors—such as his bribing Big Tech scions with favorable regulatory treatment in exchange for political donations—is that the Democrats are getting bodied in the all-important pre-election fundraising battle. But also that (a), (b), and (c) specifically give American voters reason to think Trump would use Venezuelan “spoils” for his own political purposes.

All this is part of another broader trend Trump has authored: the end of fundraising as we used to understand it. Indeed, is what’s happening in D.C. really just “fundraising” anymore? Is that how Trump and the GOP have structured their resource-acquisition protocols in advance of the midterms?

Not really.

Trump sells pardons, sells domestic policy, sells government hires—Elon Musk’s $290 million in pro-Trump political donations 2024 bought him the firing of every inspector general investigating him and the hiring of his friend Jared Isaacman at NASA, among much else, including Musk’s own position at DOGE—and Trump then commandeers illegally whatever isn’t nailed down. This isn’t a man, or a political party, that “asks” for money; it transacts for it in ways that were long considered impeachable Bribery.

So it’s in this context that Donald Trump refuses to talk about the fact that he’s stolen $13 billion (“billion” with a “b”) from Venezuela after sponsoring a Communist coup there—yes, that’s the right way to put it; Trump dethroned a Communist unwilling to gift him Venezuela’s gold and oil in favor of another Communist, Delcy Rodríguez, who hates democracy as much as Nicolás Maduro does but is also willing to sell out her country to maintain her own hold on power—and in addition to the new elections Trump promised not arriving (now or maybe ever) all that money he took is also…

…well, gone.

Just gone.

And we’re long past the point at which this or any journalist should be pretending, in light of this information, that that money is anywhere but in a location only Trump can access it—and without any checks to ensure he can’t use it in a way that enriches him or benefits him politically.

Indeed, the only question at this point is whether he secreted all of it in offshore shell corporations, handed it out to his rich friends, bribed foreign business partners (and potential business partners) with it, or is withdrawing some portion of it for illicit use during the midterms.

(8) Trump is in the midst of the largest policy attack on U.S. elections in history—and all of it is a fraud.

As the New York Times reports,

Trump earlier this year threatened not to sign any legislation until Congress passed a voter identification bill that would severely curtail mail-in voting.

His administration has demanded that states change the way they conduct elections or risk losing tens of millions of dollars in federal terrorism-prevention funds.

And his Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to get them to turn over their voter rolls.

Yet at every turn, the supposed facts and evidence undergirding these policy shifts has proven to be (see supra) exaggerated, misframed, or, much more commonly, made up.

The recent visit by Chinese Communist Party leader and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to the United States—curiously, exactly the sort of visit Trump excoriated the nation’s first Black president for (by way of falsely framing Barack Obama as some sort of crypto-Communist)—offered yet another stark example of this, per the Times:

In a prime-time address just two months ago, President Trump accused China of “sinister election meddling” in the 2020 presidential contest he lost.

The allegation formed the core of Trump’s effort in the speech to portray the U.S. election system as effectively broken and cast doubt on the electoral process.

But when he finally came face to face this week with China’s president, Xi Jinping, any public hint of that concern disappeared, replaced by an ebullience that bordered on gushing.

“President Xi and I have forged a friendship, a truly great friendship actually,” Trump said as he welcomed Xi to the White House. Trump added in a social media post that Xi looked “strong, vibrant, and fit—better than ever.”

So everything Trump said in his public address this summer was mere bloviating in service of an attempt to get the SAVE America Act passed—a desecration of the U.S. voting framework so preposterous that even House Republicans didn’t seriously try to save it.

Worse than this, of course, Trump’s fawning over—and oddly insistent touching of—Xi was also an attempt to cover up the fact that in 2020 it was Trump who repeatedly—in public and in private—begged the Chinese Communist Party to illegally help him defeat Joe Biden, as confirmed by his own National Security Advisor John Bolton (in his book The Room Where It Happened) and countless citations in the Proof Series (in the 2020 bestseller Proof of Corruption, for instance).

But it gets worse.

Just weeks after American F-35s fell into Chinese Communist Party hands due to Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth’s negligence—keeping in mind that the former has the aforementioned bizarre history, fully outlined in the Proof Series, of deliberately discounting national security issues when dealing with U.S. enemies he wants to do Trump Organization business with like Russia and China—we learned that when Xi came to D.C., Trump derangedly offered to sell the Communists weapons.

Yes, really.

(And yes, doing so would be illegal.)

This strongly suggests that Trump has again begged the CCP for illicit election aid in the form of election interference, as there can be no other plausible scenario in which an American president would offer to sell weapons to America’s enemies. Indeed, this conduct is matched only by Trump ignoring the dangers of a deadly global pandemic in late 2019 because he wanted a trade deal with the CCP to juice his election odds.

(9) Something strange is happening inside Mr. Trump’s “grand conspiracy” federal criminal investigation—the groundless nuclear lawfare he launched to try to find a justification for demanding a third term, invalidating the midterm election results, spreading insurrectionist hatred among his voting base pre-midterms, or all three. And what’s happening appears to underscore how scary this unprecedented ploy is.

The lead prosecutor (Joe diGenova) has resigned.

The deputy prosecutor (Kurt Olsen) has resigned.

The deputy FBI director assigned to the case has resigned.

All three of these men are radicals with insurrectionist leanings. They’re on the far right of MAGA. They’re neither conservatives nor even Republicans. All have spent years developing a well-deserved reputation for moral and ethical unscrupulousness.

And now, just a month before the midterm elections, they’ve seen something inside this Trump-run investigation that so terrifies them—to be clear, it’s the thought of being involved with what Trump is doing that terrifies them—that they’re all jumping ship. And they’re doing so even though they’re (a) Trumpists, (b) MAGA fanatics, (c) know they’re quitting at a moment that’s politically disastrous to Trump and MAGA.

So what have they seen?

What do they know?

Most importantly, what do they know is coming?

Well, we have a hint on that. Joe diGenova, whose long history of election ratfuckery is nearly as darkly august as Roger Stone’s, revealed that he jumped ship because he was being ordered to move too fast to indict major Democratic figures pre-midterms.

In short, he made clear, even while expressing continued support for the president, that he was being told—by fellow Trump personal lawyer Todd Blanche at a minimum—that he had to put Trump’s political hopes ahead of sound criminal investigatory procedure and proceed with indictments even if evidence sufficient to justify them hadn’t yet shown itself.

And what is Blanche, for his part, now doing? By all appearances, reneging on public promises he made to Congress by apparently inviting further litigation by January 6 insurrectionists—litigation he can use to (a) do an end-around on his commitment to not resurrect the January 6 Compensation Fund, and (b) reframe January 6 as part of a giant left-wing conspiracy of the sort he demanded Joe diGenova fraudulently allege.

Needless to say, all this, given its timing, is election-rigging conduct—and even if Mr. Blanche shocks the nation by ardently fighting these new baseless civil lawsuits rather than eagerly giving the convicted criminals who brought them a payday, questions will still be asked about not just the timing of these four new lawsuits but the fact that all were filed by an attorney whose lone career high-point came recently… when he inexplicably inserted himself into “the landmark case against President Trump, in which he helped get the $500 million dollar judgment [against Trump] overturned….[by] submitting an Amicus Curiae brief on behalf of the American Center for Law and Justice to demonstrate that everyone deserves a fair and impartial justice system, whether you’re the President or not.” It’s hard not to think that that filing got him on the radar screen of men within the second Trump administration who are very pleased with the fact that he’s bringing these lawsuits in the weeks before an election.

Meanwhile, the real election conspiracy is of course Trump’s. And just as he and his team want America to be focused on supposed leftist January 6 shenanigans and new indictments against Democratic leaders prior to the midterms, they certainly do not want America to be in any way attentive to the election crimes they committed earlier this decade or, more to the point, the redux of those crimes they’re planning this year. Especially now that Trump has made clear that he wishes he’d illegally seized election ballots after the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
 

It’s with that in mind that we now learn from Marc Elias at Democracy Docket that

[i]n August, Democrats sued the Trump administration for any records detailing plans to seize ballots, voting machines or other election materials during the 2026 midterms.

Over a month later, the Department of Justice has yet to formally respond to the suit. In fact, in a recent filing, the department told a federal judge it needed over a month more—until just a week before Election Day—to answer.

DOJ attorneys claim the request was filed in good faith. But lawyers for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) allege that the department may be attempting to run out the clock, potentially to avoid disclosing possible preparation to interfere in elections this November.

So Blanche is pressuring and perhaps even pushing out prosecutors and investigators who won’t fast-track partisan lawfare; potentially encouraging civil lawsuits against the U.S. government backchannel to keep ardent January 6 conspiracy theories on the nation’s front burner; yet when he has to respond to valid lawsuits—to do his job, in other words—he’s missing in action.

Missing in action on the FOIA requests referenced above, and of course missing in action in the Epstein Files case recently filed by journalist Katie Phang—a truly astounding case that’s seen Blanche admit to breaking the law to keep the Epstein Files a secret (or at least the 3.5 million unreleased documents in them) pre-midterms.

So we’re seeing DOJ weaponized as an election-rigging instrument as never before.

(10) The 90 days immediately before a federal election are a “no-go” zone for federal prosecutions, as most Americans know. It’s settled DOJ precedent. Which is why it’s so horrifying that not only did Trump wait until America entered this no-go zone to launch his sprawling federal criminal investigative and prosecutorial apparatus to target supposed non-citizen voters, but (a) his timing ensured that allegations could be made publicly that wouldn’t have to be proven in court pre-midterms, and (b) the mere fact of these allegations could scare voters from the polls who fear that they too may be falsely targeted for prosecution because of the color of their skin, naturalization status, or another legally impermissible basis to harass a law-abiding citizen-voter.

It was less than a week ago that Reuters revealed the size and scope of this outrageous and norm-exploding pre-election conspiracy. Its contours are staggering:

• The 32 federal criminal prosecutions Donald Trump has brought during the “no-go” period for such prosecutions represents 13% of all such prosecutions ever brought in the 30 years the statute now being employed has been extant (and among these prosecutions are seven orchestrated by Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton, who Trump not only endorsed but is giving more money—eight figures in cash—than any single Republican candidate running in the 2026 midterms);
• Trump’s personal lawyer Todd Blanche has made it a “Tier 1 Attorney General Priority” to bring such federal criminal prosecutions during the no-go period, obliterating FBI and DOJ norms that have survived for decades across presidential administrations of both of the two major American political parties;
• DOJ has dispatched “hundreds” of agents to “all fifty states” to pursue this unprecedented election-interfering operation, ensuring that its excesses will make the news in every voting jurisdiction in America (and thus have a clearly racially motivated, unconstitutional chilling effect on the voting “franchise” that Trump and his lawyers intend);
• even though DOJ knows (emphasis supplied) that “more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens [were added] to the nation’s voter rolls [by state officials] since 2000 because of software glitches and clerical errors”—meaning through no fault of any voter or non-voter outside the government—and that because of this “prior to Trump’s second term federal prosecutions for alleged noncitizen voting were extremely uncommon [because] many defendants were lawful permanent residents” who’d done nothing wrong (e.g., Reuters recently found “states may have added [noncitizens to voter rolls without telling them] while processing their driver’s license and state ID applications”), Trump and his lawyers have still pursued exactly this sort of low-odds investigation and prosecution, with Reuters noting that false positives have been “a trend that’s continued in the recent [no-go zone] cases”;
• the administration has a staggering “1,600 investigations” that are “open” on this score, an apparent attempt to create the appearance of a problem that doesn’t actually exist, i.e. non-citizens casting ballots en masse, such that it could be falsely used to justify extraordinary Trump executive actions before, during, or after the midterm elections; and
• “[a government] official speaking on the condition of anonymity said the pace of prosecutions would likely increase in the weeks leading up to the November 3 midterms….[as] the spate of recent cases is part of a long-running attempt by the Trump administration to demonstrate that voting by non-US citizens poses a major threat to the security of elections, despite studies showing the practice is rare. Trump and his supporters say it is part of an organized conspiracy led by Democrats who hope to retake Congress” (emphasis supplied).

This last point is key, as what we appear to be watching is a coordinated effort to create a fake paper trail that would allow the president, post-election, to claim that a joint operation involving DOJ, DHS, and the FBI has indeed managed to uncover an “organized conspiracy led by Democrats” to try to steal Congress. This is just the sort of wholly invented election-related conspiracy Trump was urged to use martial law or the Insurrection Act to thwart in a wild White House meeting in mid-December 2020…

…a scheme that he says he now wishes he had pursued.

So there’s every reason to see the norm-busting above as nefarious—not just partisan.

Conclusion

As Proof wrote at the end of Part I of this series, none of what is written here should be taken as a sign that voting is useless or that Democrats will underperform this fall.

The point is entirely the opposite: everyone in America should vote, and if everyone does, it’s very likely that the Democratic Party will perform well—taking at least the House and possibly the Senate while increasing measurably its share of governorships.

But it’s also the case that, without electronically flipping a single vote—putting aside all the private statements by Republicans’ top mega-donor, Elon Musk, implying that he did just that to help Trump regain the presidency in 2024—Republicans can be said to have “rigged” the midterm elections. Some presume, perversely, that an election can only be said to have been “rigged” if the rigging is successful at producing a preset outcome, but that’s not true. Rigging a system means illicitly twisting its operations to make them unfairly favorable to you, but it does not require ultimate success in any Election Day so burdened. For instance, the current effort by Trump friend Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right, pro-genocide political party Likud to use the fact that Israelis living abroad must vote in person in Israel to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Israeli voters who are living abroad, want to vote in the upcoming Israeli elections for prime minister, and are presumed to (at least on balance) lean anti-Likud—Trump’s pal wants to literally ground these voters’ flights home—is at once further proof that the State of Israel is an autocracy rather than a democracy and evidence of vile election-rigging even if Netanyahu wins re-election this fall. It’s the wrongful rejiggering of an election system that counts as election-rigging, not proof of any vote-switching or a specific final vote tally.

So too in America. This Proof series is establishing that we’ll never know what a free and fair midterm election in the United States in 2026 would have looked like because Donald Trump and his agents are engaged in an unprecedented web of shady election-rigging schemes that all tilt the vote in their favor. Does this mean they’ll win every race? Hold both chambers of Congress no matter who turns out this fall? Of course not. It simply means that whatever the outcome, it will be measurably more to Trump’s benefit than an actually free and fair election would have been. And this is provable.

It’s provable via the twenty-two gambits this Proof series has now detailed, and of course the many even more esoteric ones the series has thus far skipped over—from increasing evidence of Republican-politician associations with figures calling for the assassination of Democratic candidates and officials (see here and here, the latter of which details actions by a Trump supporter who New Hampshire GOP gubernatorial candidate Kelly Ayotte has posed for a photograph with) to the Trump administration admitting, but only in a court filing it hoped few would notice, that it will deliberately be using a wildly unreliable method (passport dates) for 2026 voter citizenship checks.

This Proof series also aims to underline something most Proof readers already know, but none in America should ever forget: that every false claim of voter fraud and/or miscellaneous election shenanigans by Trump and his political team is intended to rig the conversation about election-rigging in advance so that Democrats who justly claim Trump and his team are involved in election ratfuckery appear to be engaged in little more than a puerile tit-for-tat.

By way of analogy, when the boy cries wolf over and over and over again, he makes it extremely difficult for his village to ever trust anyone crying wolf—whether or not a new Good Samaritan crying wolf has any history of deceit on the subject themselves.