Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026, Part III
Introduction
It’s too late in the day for American democracy for America to place any faith in polls.
Or even in history.
Yes, traditionally a president’s party does poorly in the midterms; yes, Donald Trump is historically unpopular; yes, he’s betrayed his voters—and his own campaign promises from the 2024 presidential campaign—on everything from foreign wars to data centers, tariffs to assurances he’d only seek to deport “the worst of the worst” undocumented persons—and we might even note that, for as unreliable as general-election polling has been in presidential-election years, it has been far more reliable during midterm elections.
But the fact remains that U.S. polling generally is in a woeful state. Why? Because few have landlines, few answer unsolicited texts or cell-phone calls, there’s an increasing tendency to lie to pollsters, the American electorate is increasingly mercurial and thus (at the margins, at least) more likely to change its mind post-polling, more Americans than ever before are independents, and it seems like lately computer-aided electorate modeling has gotten worse, not better.
All of which urges voters to conclude that voting is the only antidote to pre-election and Election Day anxiety; pollsters to hedge their bets in public statements, even when the data strongly points in one particular direction; and political journalists like this author to make one statement and one statement only about what’s likely to happen in the 2026 midterm elections: no one really knows, so just get out and vote.
But some things are clear.
Some historical comparisons are still reliable.
And with that in mind, we can say that the 2026 midterm elections are under greater threat of illicit theft than any elections in modern American history, and that we know beyond any doubt that the culprit in this would-be heist is Donald Trump and his longtime lackeys and lickspittles. Observing that this gang of ne’er-do-wells is intent on subverting—even ending—American democracy is not the same thing as lying down helplessly before their schemes. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: Proof is running a pre-election series of reports on the one hundred schemes Donald Trump is using to steal the 2026 midterms not to spread dismay or paranoia but to emphasize that no matter what happens, indeed even in the event of a blue tsunami as some pundits (not this one) are raucously predicting, it will remain the case that Trump and his political party-cum-cult should have gotten even fewer votes than they did, and their pro-democracy opponents more votes than they did, and that this would have happened had not the former launched the most treacherous attack on America’s democracy since…
…well, since the armed rebellion against the United States that Trump incited at the start of this decade.
While watching and then remembering the events of January 6 should be more than enough to confirm that the Republican Party in its current incarnation has zero interest in free and fair elections, or even democracy as a form of government—the pleasant pro-democratic sounds certain Republican politicians made in the hours after the failed, deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol gave way, please recall, to a nearly party-wide refusal to convict Mr. Trump of impeachable offenses and thus ensure he couldn’t terrorize America again, which is exactly why he could and did and now is.
But citing January 6 isn’t sufficient. Not for us now in 2026, and not for Americans who may read about this era in the future. Proof has often written that January 6 was merely the first day of a rolling “Trumpist” insurrection that never ended, and this view has since been substantiated, with mountains of reliable evidence, by the full-length Proof Series books Proof of Coup (2023) and Proof of Destruction (2025), as well as the pre-January 6 tome Proof of Corruption (2020), which exhaustively established just how much of the Trumpist scheme to end American democracy in January 2021 preceded the events of January 6. Indeed, much was visible to all even before that day.
And so it is with the November 3, 2026 midterm elections in America.
We don’t know how many bomb threats Republicans and foreign interlopers will call in to majority-minority precincts in 2026, as happened across the country in 2024.
We do not know how many voters will be wrongly purged from the voter rolls—except to be fairly certain it will be in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions—or how many people will be wrongly turned away from the polls once there because of illicit shenanigans by election-ratfuckery-trained Trumpist “volunteers” or observers.
We don’t know if the electrical grids will go down. We don’t know if Elon Musk will again do—or try to do—something nefarious with his space “lasers,” like he told his intimate romantic partner he had done on Election Day in 2024. We don’t know if the pro-Trump foreign election interference Trump has long welcomed from murderous autocratic friends abroad, which welcoming has resulted in it flooding the American zone for the sixth straight federal election of Trump’s always-already foreign-nation-compromised political career. Nor do we know whether Trump will steal ballots after the fact (as he told the New York Times earlier this year he wishes he had done in 2020) or if he will continue to deploy armed troops to block and/or hamper access to ballot drop-off sites (see infra).
Most of Trump’s election-theft, Election Fraud, Voter Fraud, and/or FARA-violative schemes don’t carry a clear “votes cost” tally alongside them, in any case. We can see what he’s doing, and know why, and ascertain whether it’s criminal and deserving of impeachment and imprisonment, but determining the final extent of the damage(s) is notoriously hard… perhaps even deliberately so.
But we can catalogue.
Because if the Democratic Party achieves historic gains, Trump will say it’s evidence of fraud by the Democrats.
And if the Democratic Party achieves modest gains—few enough that some litigation and post-election ratfuckery can keep Republicans in control of one or both houses of the United States Congress—Trump will say it’s evidence of fraud by the Democrats.
In fact, even if Republicans eke out a stunning victory, or perhaps even a historically large victory of such improbable proportions that, given the early-voting and approval-rating and electorate-composition data we have now it’s almost certain that someone somewhere did mess with the election—whether Musk via his boasted-of tech fuckery, Vladimir Putin with his long-denied military hacking and propaganda campaigns, or the Saudis and Emiratis and Israelis with their lavish illegal funding for otherwise seemingly above-board (if morally grotesque) disinformation campaigns—Trump will say “we would’ve won by more,” or words to that effect, had Democrats not “cheated.”
So whatever happens going forward, cataloguing the historic and infamous ways in which the Republican Party—yes, the Republicans and only the Republicans—tried to demolish America’s democratic processes both pre-election, mid-election, and post-election will be helpful to Americans now and Americans in the future. Americans of all future eras deserve to know exactly what was done to us and by whom it was done, especially under circumstances in which we already know what the rhetoric will say.
With this in mind, Proof here continues its accounting of the one hundred schemes Donald Trump and his allies are using to steal the 2026 midterm elections—the most vile betrayal of our democracy since the Civil War. Parts I and II are here and here.
And yes, there are a hundred.
Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026 (#23 Through #33)
(23) There are now videos of the National Guard troops Trump issued a permanent posting to standing in front of ballot drop-off locations in D.C., which is illegal.
The question at this point becomes if this is now—or whether it will soon be—happening elsewhere in the United States as well, including in places that Trump and his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth have either (a) already deployed the Guard under false pretenses, or (b) threatened to deploy the guard (invariably in “blue” majority-minority areas, almost always in blue or purple states).
(24) Trump has darkly promised an “October surprise” that he says will swing the election toward the Republicans and be orchestrated by an entity and person U.S. taxpayer monies pay for: Office of Management and Budget chief—and far-right radical (indeed, the co-author of the anti-American “Project 2025”)—Russ Vought.
Vought is a Christian nationalist who has been caught on hidden cameras revealing that his Christian nationalist Project was always a Trump scheme even when Trump was swearing to have no knowledge of it to voters in 2024. (Needless to say, Trump lied to voters in 2024 about whether he knew anything about the plan, was in support of the plan, or had met or spoken with anyone who had co-authored the plan because he understood that it was the single most radical, antisocial, categorically unpopular political manifesto since the declarations of secession by the Confederate States).
Reporting on Trump’s planned, taxpayer-funded partisan “October surprise” is here.
More recently, Mr. Trump’s references to this eleventh-hour surprise have become far creepier and more frequent, with the president saying—and no, I’m not making this up—that his “two big monsters” will do something that makes them “the biggest stars in America” in a week, and that the something they do will be so controversial and without prior precedent in American history that he (a) cannot say what it is, and (b) has been advised to not even speak about it in public. Whether this turns out to be a something-burger or a nothing-burger, the fact remains that it is spreading anxiety, confusion, and even terror in advance of the midterm elections.
If that seems hyperbolic, consider that Trump’s former deputy director of the FBI is now frantically warning all his podcast listeners to stockpile supplies for a potential near-term doomsday scenario, that it was less than a month ago that the Pentagon announced “FORTRESS AMERICA,” a doomsday-planning operation that—while medium-term, not near-term—nevertheless has even cautious observers wondering what’s coming down the pike that the so-called Department of War thinks its bases need to be urgently self-sufficient from all domestic energy and food sources at a time when no transnational war with a foreign nuclearized foe appears to be on the horizon but Trump is regularly “threatening” to invoke the Insurrection Act, and some of his top White House aides have fled civilian housing to live their lives on impregnable American military installations they almost never leave. Under such circumstances, the President of the United States telling voters that “two big monsters” are going to do something he can’t say just before the election that will change American forever is a form of terrorism. Quite simply, it meets all the definitions of terroristic threats.
(25) Whatever Trump is planning, it’s illegal enough that he doesn’t want and will not allow international election monitors on U.S. soil to observe it—the first time these monitors have been banned in decades.
In fact, the only formal election monitors the midterms will now have are those paid by Trump. And there will be 1,000 of them—almost all sent, apparently, to places in which the president thinks his party might perform poorly at the polls. In other words, American taxpayers are paying at least 1,000 DOJ attorneys to act as agents of the Republican Party, not the United States of America, during the midterm elections.
And the only persons willing to look out for America on Election Day—ironically, pro-democracy foreign observers well trained at spotting stolen elections—are barred from the country. The message in this is an unmistakable one for all Americans, especially after the recent Brazilian elections… in which a leftist candidate won, the whole world quickly identified the results as free and fair, Trump falsely claimed the election had been rigged, and then accepted the far-right, insurrectionist loser of the election to the United States as a fugitive from justice.
(26) Fears that ICE would be used as a taxpayer-funded voter suppression army have now been confirmed, as reporting establishes that ICE agents are now being trained—as part of their Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)—to ask suspects whether they have ever voted.
Voting is one of the “fundamental” rights enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, so ICE asking questions about suspects’ voting histories without having any reasonable suspicion that these suspects have done anything wrong on that score is clearly in the nature of a constitutional violation.
And it’s one intended to terrify its victims from voting in the future, even if they’re authorized to do so.
By taking suspects’ names and showing that they want to track their voting history, ICE is telling the people it is racially and ethnically profiling in extended, statist Big Government “constitutional events” that their voting is going to be monitored for possible future criminal investigations and even prosecutions.
This is a premeditated, systematized, taxpayer-funded scheme to scare from the polls voters Trump’s paramilitary armies have identified as likely Democratic supporters.
The Washington Post reports on all this here.
(27) The partisan voter surveillance effort American taxpayers are paying for is far more extensive than just ICE. Trump’s DHS is surveilling 150 citizen-run organizations—not a typo—and plotting infiltration of those organizations in the hope that (even if no misconduct is found) these organizations, which promote voter participation and are seen by Trump and his agents as left-leaning, disband… out of fear of the U.S. government.
We only know about this because of documents acquired by Democracy Forward and provided by that group to the New York Times.
Trump and his team were trying to keep this sprawling Big Government-cum-Big Brother scheme clandestine, as its stated goal is to both “disrupt” and “dismantle” 150 legal, citizen-run entities whose chief known achievement is getting people to vote who are legally authorized to do so.
See here for more.
(28) Not only is Trump’s campaign to have U.S. taxpayers pay for partisan, Christian nationalist-themed midterm adds larger than we ever knew—over $20 million was stolen from taxpayers to fund at least thirteen different ads—but Trump lied when he said he would start paying for the ads “himself.” He also lied when he said they would stop.
CNN details the basics. The Daily Beast documents how the ads are now religious in character, consistent with OMB capo Vought’s and Hegseth’s Christian nationalism, which sees no place in government or the American military for any non-Christian.
And we know Trump knows these ads are a problem, because he ostentatiously came out and said he would stop making taxpayers funded them—even as he refused to say he would reimburse the over $20 million he had already stolen from U.S. taxpayers.
But now it turns out even that was a lie. The illegal ads continue to run as “Paid for by the U.S. Government,” and they show no signs of stopping before the 2026 midterms.
(29) Trump’s scheme to make taxpayers fund partisan propaganda is significantly more encompassing than anything described above, however—as he’s now sending money to voters (at taxpayer expense for both the money and the mailings) that is accompanied by illegal partisan electioneering (a document paid for by taxpayers).
This was actually a two-part illegal scheme. Mr. Trump announced the first part of his illegal scheme here—
—and besides framing these “rebates” in explicitly partisan terms despite the funds from which the funds are being dispersed being of bipartisan creation, we know he went through with it.
But we also know that he wasn’t done (a) trying to pay off voters with (b) bipartisan monies he’s fraudulently—in what’s arguably an act of Election Fraud—framing as a partisan policy agenda.
Millions of Americans, including this author, received a mailing from Donald Trump that included a $500 Obamacare-related rebate along with illegal partisan propaganda:
Not surprisingly, all this is a lie.
While the background on all this is somewhat confusing—as Trump is well aware, and is trying to take advantage of—a million people are getting rebates because (a) Biden charged a premium to the insurance companies relating to HealthCare.gov; (b) all those companies unethically passed on 100% of their new cost(s) to consumers, and then, most importantly, (c) Trump’s own spending cuts on healthcare created a new situation that the Biden administration could’ot have foreseen, which is that its fund had more money than it needed to operate.
So Trump is using a problem he and the insurance companies created to try to blame Joe Biden for something Biden didn’t do. Then he’s compounding this moral outrage and ethical offense by turning his disinformation into illegal pre-election propaganda that—ironically—he’s making taxpayers pay for the printing of. In reality, Democrats didn’t tax anyone, didn’t overcharge anyone, and didn’t do anything wrong. But this mailer all of us Americans paid for is designed to make voters believe these three lies.
(30) The public good has never been so cynically manipulated for partisan reasons—and another place we’re seeing this pre-midterms is in another arena we’ve never seen such conduct before: fake policy proposals targeting battleground states in the weeks just prior to a federal election that neither Trump nor his presidential administration have any intention of advancing post-election; they’re all DOA.
It’s true that during State of the Union addresses presidents often delineate things they want to do even when they suspect they won’t be able to do them, but there’s a reason such addresses are post-election. Their agenda items aren’t explicitly geared (ethanol subsidies notwithstanding) toward citizens of a single state, and the politicians who issue such statements later feel compelled to at least make a public effort to get their priorities passed into law.
This isn’t that.
This is a systematized bribery campaign intended to buy votes in very specific U.S. jurisdictions in the 30 days prior to an election by falsely promising federal actions the president has just thought up on the spot—meaning that not only is there no money or political will behind them, but there isn’t even any legislative or executive planning or resources anywhere in sight. These are, nakedly so, attempted bribes of small subsets of the voting population at the very moment these people are voting.
It’s… bad. And thoroughly corrupt.
CNN earlier reported that among these fake policies are the following two:
“Trump announced [an] Iowa project on Monday at an Oval Office event featuring Senate candidate Rep. Ashley Hinson and many others. It was for a new $15 billion Mesabi Metallics steel plant in Lee County in eastern Iowa—one that could create thousands of jobs and make Iowa the second-largest steel-producing state in the United States.” Iowa is a battleground state in the midterms, with both a highly competitive Senate race and a highly competitive gubernatorial race, as well as several surprisingly close House races. That makes it one of the states Republicans are most closely focused on right now. So that makes the rest of CNN’s report on this claimed new plant especially horrifying: “When a reporter inquired about how definite the plans were, Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick assured they were effectively written in stone. ‘I think this deal is done. This deal is done,’ Lutnick said. ‘They’ve already worked it out. That’s why we’re all together with the president. The president doesn’t bring people together unless it’s a done deal. You guys know that already.’ Trump then jumped in, claiming: ‘They’ve already started building.’
That’s not true.”
- “On Wednesday [Trump announced] that South Korea would spend more than $50 billion on a struggling natural gas pipeline in Alaska. As with the Iowa announcement, Trump made this one at the White House next to the vulnerable GOP senator, Dan Sullivan. And as with the Iowa announcement, Trump and Lutnick treated this as a done deal. Trump said South Korea had agreed to invest large sums in the US to lower its tariffs, and ‘part of that money is going into this project’— the pipeline. ‘It’s the combination of your deal-making and your trade deal that allowed this to happen, and this is extraordinary,’ Lutnick told Trump. ‘This will change Alaska, and it will change geopolitics.’ Trump said politicians had been talking about the project for five decades but failed to deliver. He said it would be ‘one of the largest energy projects in American history.’ He said it would save Alaskans thousands in energy bills. Sullivan’s office called it a ‘historic $54 billion investment by South Korea.’ But by Thursday, South Korea disputed Trump’s claims.”
Two battleground states. Two massive announcements from the White House. Two events used by in-trouble Republicans appearing with Trump for supposedly major announcements. Two promises billed as historic and transformative.
And in both cases, it all turned out to be bullshit. South Korea says it will not be doing anything Trump claimed, and, as CNN reports, even Iowa GOP officials acknowledge that Trump was selling snake oil with respect to a new plant there.
All this must be put in perspective. Trump has not only said that he “loves” low-info Americans but that he prefers them, and this is exactly why: because he can get major media and far-right propagandists to cover announcements from the White House, and it doesn’t matter if the announcements are vile and premeditated disinformation because most of the people considering voting for him will only see the lie rather than the subsequent esoteric correction.
And because Trump is as fecund a liar as American politics has ever seen, there’s no end to this particular White House resource. Trump can parade every in-trouble GOP candidate in a battleground state through the Oval Office, each time detailing an entirely fake boon that state will receive when the said Republican is elected, and he doesn’t have to worry about this tissue of lies falling apart the second his event co-host leaves the White House because he has a huge far-right media apparatus that will ensure voters only hear the promise and not its near-instant evaporation post-event.
And Trump is now systematizing this anti-American disinformation psyop, engaging it over and over and over again. We can’t know how many millions of GOP voters in November think they’re voting for a “deal” Trump and his team told them was already signed—with construction already begun, no less—that not only wasn’t available only in the event of a Republican victory but wasn’t available at all. It was no more than a figment of Trump’s deranged imagination,,, and his party’s pre-election desperation.
(31) You could be forgiven for thinking that Trump is only illicitly paying his voters and illicitly trying to scare opposing-party voters and illicitly concocting fake deals to bribe his voters to entice positive media coverage, but in fact Mr. Trump has gone one step further and started doing something he’s spent a decade falsely claiming Democrats do: his agents are paying fake “protesters” to harass some high-visibility Democratic candidates.
If you’ve followed Trump’s political career closely, you know that his humiliation over having to pay “fans” to attend his June 2015 presidential campaign announcement was such a sticking point for his malignant narcissistic psychopathic psyche that he spent the next decade developing the MAGA Maxim (a maxim that holds that “every accusation is a confession”). And of course Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone was part of the political team that used paid “protesters” bussed in from out-of-state to intimidate the Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor to stop counting legally cast ballots (the Brooks Brothers Riot that stole the 2020 election for the GOP).
So this clearly isn’t a first for Trump, but it is something that seems to always be in some way connected to Trump or his underworld when it actually happens—even as it’s always associated by Trump fans with international Jewry (particularly George Soros and his son) when paying “protesters” or “supporters” is falsely alleged (and this antisemitism is explicitly encouraged by Trump at all his 2026 midterms rallies; he has even taken to detailing an imaginary federal investigation—to be clear, one that never happened—that “found” that Soros is paying “$250” per fake anti-Trump protester).
In other words, one of the longest-running types of Trumpist “election ratfuckery”—a term co-invented by one of Trump’s oldest political advisers, Roger Stone (yes, really)—involves paying people to pretend to be something they’re not for partisan gain, and yet Trump and his team habitually falsely pin the blame for their own schemes on Jews. Why? Because apparently, in their and their voters’ antisemitic view, it seems like the sort of underhanded, venal, society-destabilizing action a Jew would take.
And now here we are, weeks before the 2026 midterms, and a Christian-nationalist atheist, Trump—who pretends, unconvincingly, to be a Christian evangelical—is once again resorting to the same bag of tricks that he has always blamed on others:
Republican organizations being accused of offering money to “protesters” is a gambit we must attribute to Donald Trump not only because he’s the leader of the party that’s doing it, and because it’s a practice he personally has sought to normalize, but because his tendency to accuse Democrats of paying protesters is so ubiquitous in his rhetoric…
…that we can have no doubt that if Trump wanted to be morally consistent and openly outlaw a practice in his party that he claims to deem almost apocalyptically odious, he could do so today. He could do so today and be listened to today. Instead, we have this new reporting from Michigan indicating that a Trump-aligned PAC, America Next, is paying civilians to pretend to oppose Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Worse still, the supposed America Next directives weren’t just about booing El-Sayed but “disrupting” his rally and (caps in original) making it clear that “ABDUL IS NOT WELCOME IN THE SENATE,” which is exactly as Islamophobia-coded as you think it is.
America Next is an explicitly Trump-era PAC that, if it’s like every other conservative PAC Trump has ever spoken about publicly, is indirectly controlled by the president’s agenda—meaning that whether or not Trump is formally associated with it, he’s the leader of the political party it was created to support and therefore he can use either his public or his private pronouncements to influence how it acts and how it spends.
(32) The actions taken by America Next, and possibly some other right-wing PACs, underscore that even what seems like conventional pre-midterms activity often—at least this election cycle—is not. For instance, after spending years demonizing mail-in voting as the source of a sprawling, international, far-left political conspiracy to undermine America, Trump is suddenly telling MAGA voters to vote by mail. You’re right to suspect this is more nefarious than it seems at first blush.
Prior entires in this series on Trumpist election-rigging emphasized the ways Trump is trying to make mail-in voting extremely onerous if not risky or impossible, which might make you wonder why the New York Times is reporting that Trump is willing to have his voters vote in that fashion.
Well, Proof can tell you why.
As Proof has reported for years now, Donald Trump has never run in an election in which he didn’t publicly urge his voters to commit Voter Fraud—even as he’s spent much of his campaign time assuring audiences that Voter Fraud is exactly what his opponents, not him, are up to.
So even as most Americans agree that Trump’s attempts to make mail-in balloting impossible are bad enough, those who adhere to the MAGA Maxim-adjacent Trump Maxim (“There’s no bottom to what he’s willing to do”) will tell you that Trump is now doing something even more nefarious. Namely, he’s urging his supporters to vote by mail only so that he will have “banked” their mail-in votes when he subsequently does what he does during every election cycle and openly instructs them to vote twice.
This new gambit is potentially far more effective than Trump’s past-elections “vote twice” rhetoric. In the past, Trump (a) arguably issued those instructions too far out from Election Day, and/or (b) didn’t deliver his marching orders at a time his voters could still readily vote by mail. During the 2026 midterms cycle, however, Trump has found his “Goldilocks zone”: the point at which telling his voters to vote by mail will immediately convince them to do so, but also the point at which he’s being listened to closely enough on ballot-casting practices that he can (and surely will) amend his past order to MAGAs to now also vote in person… even if they’ve already voted by mail.
Sound preposterous? Paranoid? Hyperbolic?
Well, it should—because it absolutely would be if Donald Trump hadn’t urged his fans to commit the federal felony of Voter Fraud in every past election he’s participated in.
It’s worth remembering here that Donald Trump has spent a lifetime committing felonies and not getting arrested for them; advocating for the sort of felony conduct he himself is known to engage in (specifically, Bribery) to be legalized without having anyone conclude that this lobbying implies he’s too much of a felon or grifter to be elected to a position in which he can receive bribes; and was ultimately convicted of 34 Fraud felonies but faced no penalty whatsoever—none at all—for his crimes, so it’s no surprise that a lifelong malignant narcissistic psychopath would think little of urging tens of millions of Americans to commit felonies themselves.
Why? Because a narcissist presumes that their experience of the phenomenological world is either everyone’s (when it suits them) or no one else’s (when that suits them)…
…so if America has let Trump off the hook for hundreds and hundreds of felonies over his lifetime, he of course sees the commission of federal felonies as merely theoretical, without any weight or fear attached to it.
So for a person like that to then try to outlaw mail-in balloting, fail at outlawing mail-balloting, and thereafter reflect on years of urging his voters to commit Voter Fraud without facing any real consequences for that Incitement is as good as to say that he will come up with a new gambit that incorporates all of the foregoing components.
And that gambit is vote-banking. Get MAGAs to vote now so those votes are all locked in, then order them en masse to also vote in person—dramatically increasing MAGAs’ demonstrated voting power beyond the Constitution’s “one person, one vote” ethos.
(33) Amidst all this, one problem Trump is running into is that people no longer much want to be seen with him, requiring him to artificially inflate the pool of people who can attend and speak at political rallies, a mission the famously pro-Bribery POTUS has predictably used as an opportunity to leverage unscrupulous political appointees who owe him something.
And this is how best to understand the norm-destroying degradation Trump personal lawyers Todd Blanche and Kash Patel have overseen at the DOJ and FBI, respectively.
America now has taxpayer-funded public officials who are incontrovertibly supposed to be nonpartisan showing up to political rallies to lend the weight of nonpartisan institutions like the DOJ and FBI to Trump campaigns and other Republican rallies.
Thus Attorney General Todd Blanche repeatedly speaking at political rallies.
Thus—now—a new DOJ memo that dramatically expands the number of people linked to nonpartisan, taxpayer-funded institutions who can be press-ganged into partisan service by Trump. These are men and women Trump knows can’t or won’t say “no” to anything he asks of them, because they’re recent or current nominees whose nominations can be withdrawn or recent hires who can be summarily fired (as has been, e.g., every federal prosecutor who told the DOJ that its “grand conspiracy” case in Florida—which aimed to arrest Democratic politicians and career federal civil servants en masse—was bullshit).
In sum, a historically unpopular president who is commandeering taxpayer money up and down the line to fund partisan political schemes he has more than enough money to fund himself—personally, via his campaign war-chest, and/or through the PACs and Super PACs he directly and indirectly controls—is instead stealing from U.S. taxpayers, and worst of all doing so after spending the first year of his second term in office pushing “DOGE”… allegedly a crusade to end the waste, fraud, and/or abuse of taxpayer dollars.
Now the very same president has institutionalized waste, fraud, and abuse as long as it saves him money personally. Moreover, his new taxpayer-theft ploys weaponize non-partisan institutions at a time he’s publicly decrying “lawfare” as anti-American; pay non-political actors to be political at a time he’s claiming massive Democratic Party conspiracies to pay non-political actors to be political; and make it impossible for Americans to trust agencies like DOJ or the FBI at a time his entire political persona is predicated on scurrilous fear-baiting over the possible existence of a “Deep State” at those very agencies.
In other words, the new rules DOJ is writing to expand the use of taxpayer resources—human and financial—for partisan purposes is as hypocritical as any agenda any U.S. POTUS has pursued. Ever. It directly undermines every supposed moral principle that undergirding “Trumpism.” Indeed, it confirms that Trumpism is simply a euphemism for the personal, political, professional, and pecuniary self-interest of a single felon.