Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026, Part IV
The fate of America is on the line in the 2026 midterm elections; everyone should vote to preserve democracy. But as America goes to the polls, Donald Trump has put the election under historic attack.
Introduction
You can find earlier reports in this new Proof series here: Part I; Part II; Part III.
A full introduction to this pre-election report series can be found here.
It’s a mark of how conclusively and categorically the “election ratfuckery” in 2026 has originated on the Republican side of the American political aisle that even a single instance of such misconduct on the Democratic side has landed in American political discourse like a MOAB—almost as if a blue drop in a bucket of red is some indication of… well, anything meaningful.
And yet.
Proof opposes all election ratfuckery, even in—actually, perhaps especially in—this era of burgeoning fascist authoritarianism. Democracy isn’t going to be saved by abruptly abandoning it when we need to be honoring it most. If pro-democracy forces’ core platform and agenda isn’t popular enough to win in free and fair elections, America doesn’t deserve democracy anymore, and shouldn’t remain a beneficiary of its graces.
With that in mind, Proof notes that a report in the New York Times reveals that the political operation of former Alaska congresswoman Mary Peltola (D-AK) allegedly recruited a man with the name “Dan Sullivan” to join the Alaska Senate race—a race in which the GOP incumbent is named Dan Sullivan. If this indeed happened, it was wrong and shouldn’t have happened. Full stop. It represents a contemptible attempt to confuse voters, even if there’s little evidence (especially in view of the inevitable public education campaign the Republican incumbent has now been running for months) that this gambit will actually alter many votes. In fact, it’s the very inefficiency of this scheme, along with its grotesque moral toxicity, that surely should have militated against its use from the start; “Sullivan” is guaranteed to get precious few votes given his obscurity and the incumbent’s existing motivated voter based—and it’s likely that many of the votes the ersatz Sullivan gets will have been induced by the neophyte candidate’s own idiosyncratic ideas about governance… which means that really any alternative to Peltola and Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) might have gotten those ballots.
That this sort of gamesmanship is technically legal is meaningless. It’s corrupt and corrupting, as it corrupts all it touches no matter what the letter of the law says. We Democrats and left-leaning independents mean what we say when we say that we believe in our democracy; it’s not a bumper sticker to be abandoned the moment it becomes inconvenient (as has happened with every supposed “principle” the MAGA adherents claim to hold).
Nor does it matter that Republicans have played this same trick under their own steam, and that in fact the Democrats probably got the idea for it from a MAGA politician. Nor does it matter that Alaska’s paper-of-record, the Anchorage Daily News, did a deep dive on all this chicanery and found that, well, it’s pretty standard, really.
And if in fact the Peltola staffers didn’t pay the “new” Sullivan—as the former State Senator from Donald Trump’s backyard, Frank Artiles, infamously did—it means that not only did they mimic the MAGA Artiles but also learned how to conduct this sort of ploy legally. But again, voters aren’t inspired to vote for candidates or parties simply because those people and institutions take the same view of electoral politics as a cautious mafioso; a healthy democracy isn’t a frantic race to the bottom of the barrel.
The breaking news about Peltola’s campaign came after the last entry in this report series, which is why that entry’s introduction could accurately say that it’s only MAGA Republicans who are engaged in systemic election ratfuckery. And to be candid, that’s likely still true, as it appears the Peltola scheme was a homespun gambit in a non-contiguous U.S. state that remains closer to a “Wild West” than any other U.S. state or territory. There was nothing “systemic” about what’s alleged to have happened here.
And in fact it was just days ago—see infra—that no less a MAGA Republican leader than Donald Trump himself went to Alaska to state on national television that criming is part of Alaska’s very way of life (in that particular case, Trump was speaking of a vast right-wing conspiracy to criminally violate federal law for a potential six-figure medium-term profit, his implication being that Alaskans don’t and shouldn’t deem themselves subject to the same laws as the citizens of the contiguous 48 U.S. states).
But even Trump, the man who’ll complain about the Peltola campaign’s malfeasance the most, can’t erase the moral stain of it—not even with all his grotesque, grasping, almost unthinkably pathological hypocrisy.
Yet neither can he—or we—see in it any sort of trend.
Election ratfuckery in the 2026 midterms has been, and remains, a clearly Republican phenomenon, most categorically with respect to the sort of systematized election interference that takes advantage of massive federal government resources.
A few Peltola staffers making phone calls to rural Alaska villages in search of men with one of the most common names in the State of Alaska isn’t that.
So with all that said, this series now continues its exploration of Donald Trump’s 100 known schemes to try to steal the 2026 midterm elections on—or after—November 3.
Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026 (#34 Through #48)
(34) The “DOJ Election-Year Sensitivity Policy” (Justice Manual § 9-85.500, “Actions That May Have An Impact on An Election), commonly referred to as Main Justice’s “60-Day Rule,” hasn’t just been breached, abrogated, or ignored by the Donald Trump personal defense attorney—Todd Blanche—now running the Department. It’s been permanently obliterated. Violations of the policy weren’t just systematically encouraged but pursued with every resource at DOJ’s disposal. And Trump has made clear that he’s directing the Department’s flagrant misconduct personally.
It is impossible to count the violations at this point. Former FBI director James Comey indicted over the Trump-Russia investigation—which damaged Trump’s political brand—on the last day ever DOJ could possibly do so under the statute of limitations for the imaginary federal crime alleged by Trump and his agents. (Comey is or was a Republican, but since his firing by Trump in an effort by the then-first-term president to hide his collusion with the Kremlin, Comey has made clear what he thinks of Trump and those who do his bidding). A high-ranking Democratic elected official in Virginia, State Sen. L. Louise Lucas, was charged with numerous federal offenses, along with her daughters, even as NBC News notes that “[Senator Lucas is] a frequent critic of President Donald Trump….[and] one of the most powerful Democrats in [Virginia].” Worse still, Senator Lucas has relatives who are on the ballot in the midterms. NBC writes, “The Justice Department’s move, just 12 days before a midterm election, is unusual, as federal authorities have typically avoided taking overt investigative steps against political figures so close to an election. Lucas is not up for re-election this year but has ties to prominent Democrats who are on the ballot.”
Then there’s the failed indictment of former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, whose prosecution Trump had hoped to use pre-election to establish that claims about his incitement of an armed rebellion on January 6, 2021 are false. Grand jurors were so disgusted by the lack of meaningful evidence that they refused to issue an indictment—a slap in the face of DOJ that was virtually unheard of before the second Trump administration.
A Democratic member of the House January 6 Committee, former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), just had his home raided. One of his Democratic donors got the same surprise.
Sitting Democratic representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) just saw her home raided, too—forcing her to move her family for security reasons just days before the midterm vote.
The list goes on and on.
DOJ was just chewed out by a federal judge for gross negligence in their rush to bring new indictments against former FBI agents Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, two public servants whose suffering Trump wants to use to highlight what he claims was media and law enforcement election-tampering in 2020 to hide Hunter Biden’s laptop from the voting public.
DOJ is issuing slews of fraud indictments in healthcare-related cases in purple states, hoping to distract from Trump’s own 34 Fraud convictions, pin Democratic officials in these states as complicit with massive fraud schemes—often perpetrated, per Trump’s selective prosecution(s), by women and non-whites (traditional Democratic-leaning voting constituencies)—and create the impression of the most corrupt presidential administration in America being tough on crime. And it is, if we’re only talking about crimes allegedly committed by those Trump thinks it politically expedient to demonize.
No wonder Time magazine calls these latter two indictments “very suspicious.”
(35) Melania Trump hates politics. And she hates Washington. There are only a few foreign locales she’s willing to travel to; she’s mostly a homebody. After decades in the U.S. on an immigrant visa she didn’t properly earn, she somehow speaks English worse than she did when she arrived. She rarely appears in public. Her only political agenda has been making certain parts of the White House terrifyingly, even obtusely aesthetically gross and sponsoring an anti-bullying campaign that somehow approves of her historically infamous bully of a husband. All of which explains why voters could be forgiven for wondering why, just days before the most important election of her husband’s life—the one that determines if there’ll be a real federal investigation of the Epstein Files that Melania’s name and personal history are all over—she’s suddenly taking credit for brokering a deal in the Russia-Ukraine War.
That’s right, a deal. A peace deal. One that could be a feather in the Republicans’ cap come Election Day.
Well, stop wondering what explains this otherwise utterly inexplicable development.
Melania’s “peace” deal is exactly what it appears to be: another attempt by Vladimir Putin to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections, this time through a former Soviet--bloc model whose dad Viktor Knav was for years and years a major, Kremlin-linked Communist leader (yes, really) and who was introduced to her now-president husband by the most infamous Russian intelligence agent of any of our lifetimes, sex trafficker and serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Melania may not much care what happens to Donald Trump in the future—though her infamously byzantine prenup probably requires her to care to some degree, both for her own financial sake and that of her son, Barron—but it’s clear that as much as anyone in America, her own personal future could be determined by what happens on November 3.
We already have Republican elected officials from Trump and Melania’s home state willing to look into whether Melania should be deported, and we have congressional bodies revealing that Melania has lied about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We have 2.5 million documents from the Epstein Files still being hidden by her husband, none of which surely have anything at all positive to say about her own shady history in the Kremlin’s sphere of political influence in Eastern Europe or 1990s New York City.
So with all that in mind, suddenly the world has gotten… Melania Trump, diplomat.
It’s a role she couldn’t have been deeded without the say-so of her husband’s ally, Putin, who America’s intelligence services confirm is doing all he can to interfere in the 2026 midterms. A woman close to Trump suddenly getting Putin’s blessing at a crucial moment in 2026 carries with it echoes of Trump business partner and Kremlin agent Felix Sater managing to get Ivanka Trump into Putin’s chair—literally—back in 2006.
(36) The most corrupt, oversight-free, clandestine criminal pardon operation in U.S. political history is working overtime, which has the simultaneous effect of putting several grateful Trump and Republican and MAGA mega-donors back on the board in time to help fund the midterms, falsely feeding into the Trumpist narrative of D.C. Democrats having used “lawfare” to fraudulently charge and incarcerate Republicans—a narrative Trump loves because he can use it at 2026 midterms rallies to bring everything back, once again, to his own supposed victimhood—and ensure that those who might use this pre-election moment to reveal dark secrets about Trump or his top agents think twice about it because perhaps they too, one day, could get some sort of presidential perk (whether a pardon or some other form of venal executive order).
Because pardons are inherently political—and inherently controversial—we mostly see them at the end of presidential terms or, failing that, in large blocs centered on a new administration policy rollout (e.g., some criminal justice reform strategy that makes an entire category of federal crime suddenly seem less grave than previously).
But that’s not what’s happening right now.
Days before a major national election, Trump is throwing open cell doors left and right and pardoning anyone he can get his hands on whose pardon could be deemed a symbolic boost to Republicans’ pre-election spirits. Keeping in mind that pardons have often been the undoing of entire presidential legacies—think Bill Clinton and Marc Rich, or Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, or for that matter Trump and Steve Bannon (Trump’s obscene pardon of Bannon being the very last act of his first term)—seeing such an important presidential authority used as a Las Vegas-style election chit is legitimately unsettling to America’s constitutional order.
How grotesque is what’s going on? Trump actually pardoned two men at a political rally in Alaska just a few days ago. The men, whose crimes would—if popularized—significantly hasten the collapse of Earth’s climate and the demise of the species, were all but treated as heroes by Trump for subverting environmental regulations for profit.
CBS News called the clemency “unusually public” while noting that the utterly unrepentant criminals had made tens of thousands of dollars breaking federal law.
Trump didn’t just pardon them, though; he absolved them. He said they should never have been charged and alleged that federal law enforcement agents upholding federal law constituted “a vicious[ ] target[ing] [of] the Alaskan way of life.”
Sound bad? It gets worse.
Trump used an October rally in Texas to complain about one of his own past pardons, revealing that he had issued it in 2025 to a Democratic congressman solely because he believed that congressman would flip parties if he got presidential largesse. If that sounds to you like Trump at once (a) admitting to the impeachable offense of Bribery, (b) admitting to the federal crime of Bribery, (c) broadcasting just weeks before a huge federal election that he will do favors for anyone who switches parties to help him, and (d) confusing the awesome scope of presidential authority with a schoolyard boast designed to attract voters enamored with supposed “alpha males,” you’re right. It is all of those things.
Putting aside that the volume of Trump’s pardons has been infamous and historic—not just because he pardoned over 1,500 active insurrectionists but because he does not go through the Pardon Office, require contrition, and is said to be selling pardons for millions a pop—it’s noteworthy that since the midterm elections cycle started he has focused on doling on pardons to residents of midterm battleground states. Really, the tendency is obvious and prolonged, with the citizens of Alaska, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia getting special treatment.
Only a handful of presidential pardons have gone to the residents of any other state.
(37) Trump and his agents have orchestrated a nationwide plot to invalidate what they perceive to be Democratic-leaning ballot tranches before they are counted.
You read that right. Before they’ve been counted.
Anyone who follows federal elections knows that when a ballot has been put into a “provisional” or otherwise segregated status, the chances of it ever being counted plummet to nearly zero. A rule of thumb in federal elections is that—while voters should cast provisional ballots if that’s the only option left to them—doing so is only a step or two above throwing the said ballot into a garbage can.
So it matters that Trump unsuccessfully sued to have 20,000 ballots in California put aside simply based on his say-so—specifically, his agents’ contention that a voter list they purchased from California (presumably, with American taxpayer money) “proved” that these 20,000 ballots contained some number of registered non-citizens…
…even though they couldn’t point to even 30, and in America we don’t invalidate the constitutional rights of thousands of citizens to try to catch a handful of malfeasors (a term that might be a stretch in this case, as DOJ merely noted that there were 28 individuals on this list of 20,000 voters who had been convicted of voting crimes in the past, not that these people were planning to do so again, had taken any action themselves to remain on the voter rolls, were planning to vote Democratic if they did vote, or indeed had done anything wrong at all besides having their names appear on a list the Trump administration couldn’t even assure a court was current or accurate).
And it therefore matters that Trump is now targeting another blue state—Washington—with the same failed legal gambit. It is clear, now, and clearly horrifying to see, that the current presidential administration would rather that hundreds or thousands of votes be thrown in the trash than have even a single illegal vote be cast… as long as the votes to be thrown in the trash are presumed to be Democratic-leaning. Moreover, it’s clear that this anti-American, unconstitutional, democracy-contemptuous ideology makes no distinction between hardened election criminals (if there indeed are any outside this administration) and people who illegally vote by accident, who illegally vote but negligently rather than intentionally, who are confused by local laws (which sometimes let non-citizens vote in certain local elections but not other ones), who do not read English well or know the law and therefore might inadvertently have been misled into believing they can vote, and so on. In any case, as Trump well knows from his own desperate and failed attempts to find widespread voter fraud in America, the worst-case scenario each election cycle is that a few dozen people vote who shouldn’t, usually by accident, which across a nation of 330 million isn’t nearly enough to affect anything.
(38) We already know, from Proof of Coup (2023), that Trump and his 2016 campaign CEO Steve Bannon spent years coordinating with Brazil’s Bolsonaro [Crime] Family, including in the period of time the Family was plotting the overthrow of Brazil’s democracy. Indeed, Eduardo Bolsonaro—a son of imprisoned would-be dictator Jair Bolsonaro—met with Trump and members of his family multiple times during the week the Capitol was attacked in January 2001, and attended insurrection-planning meetings. But the recent revelation that the other key member of the Trump-Vance administration, J.D. Vance, may have been secretly and illegally funding Eduardo’s brother Flávio’s 2026 campaign to end Brazil’s democracy and free his criminal dad underscores a fact no one wants to discuss: the argument Trump and his lawyers made to justify the January 6 Rebellion centered on claims that America’s elections infrastructure had been terminally compromised for years by Brazil’s sworn geopolitical enemy, Venezuela. Supposed evidence for this supposed transnational plot—a plot whose purported existence Trump and his team intended to use as a justification for collapsing America’s democracy—was allegedly transmitted to team Trump through Brazilian intelligence agents controlled by the Bolsonaro Family or by Venezuelan agents more loyal to a leftist Venezuelan government’s Brazilian enemies than their own country.
That the purported evidence Trump personal lawyer Sidney Powell tried to pass off as genuine to U.S. voters in November 2020 included unsigned affidavits allegedly from Venezuelan military officials—even as they would, if real, create a justification for the United States invading Venezuela, something Trump has wanted to do for years and finally did do in 2025 in a series of shocking war crimes—strongly suggests that the actual origin of the “Venezuelan affidavits” was either Brazilian intelligence or men inside Venezuela being paid by Brazilian intelligence. And who was running Brazil’s intelligence agencies at the time? A man who was a co-defendant in a corruption case with, you guessed it, Eduardo Bolsonaro (the latter of whom has since fled to Texas).
In other words, as Proof of Coup details, a second attempt to collapse America’s fragile democracy—a “January 6, 2.0”—would almost certainly again rely on false claims that originate in South America and fraudulently allege that America’s voting machines are being rigged from there. And it would be nearly certain that such false claims would originate, more specifically, from an insurrectionist social and political circle in that part of the world that Donald Trump and his vice president and their leading agents (e.g., Steve Bannon, Jason Miller) have be trying to cultivate relationships with.
It’s with all this in mind that we must analyze the breaking news that Trump has now decided to harbor Flávio Bolsonaro in the United States as a Fugitive from Justice. The Bolsonaro scion (in the forced absence of his father) stands accused of almost every political crime you can possibly imagine, though none that Trump and Vance aren’t also suspected of here in the United States.
Donald Trump’s decision to harbor a Brazilian insurrectionist and fugitive not only underscores his contempt for free and fair democratic elections, for international law, and specifically for the operations of Brazil’s democracy, but it ensures that any past or ongoing Trump-Bolsonaro or Vance-Bolsonaro conspiracies—the latter being, arguably, just as dangerous to the MAGA cause in the medium term as the former—will remain hidden.
It’s therefore impossible to see Vance’s work with Rockbridge or Trump’s harboring of a fugitive as anything but landmark moments in an ongoing Trumpist insurrection.
(39) Imagine a sprawling public-private (i.e., government-Big Tech) election-year conspiracy aimed at deliberately breaking emerging tech that millions of Americans use daily in a bid to advance Donald Trump’s partisan political narrative. Now imagine that Trump, using taxpayer dollars, funded this conspiracy, and that the conspiracy strikes at the heart of Trump’s entire political persona—and the odds of his political party remaining in power in Washington. Well, you don’t have to wonder, because that’s exactly what’s happening right now with widely used AI chatbots.
It’s not just that Donald Trump has repeatedly thrown lavish dinners for tech execs at taxpayer expense. It’s not just that these same people are funding Trump’s political pet projects—like his grotesque, unnecessary, systematically lied-about ballroom-cum-doomsday bunker—in an apparently illegal exchange for giant government contracts.
It’s not just that Trump has gutted the regulations these men want gone, fired the IGs these men wanted fired, and repeatedly received suspicious benefits from their services.
It’s also clear, now, that these men are breaking their own consumer products to please Trump.
The new revelation is that Google’s AI consumer product now refuses to correctly answer questions about the 2020 presidential election because doing so would establish that Trump and his entire political party have lied about that election—including as part of their ex ante, midstream, and ex post justifications for the bloody events of January 6—and voters being told this would consequently undercut many Republican political narratives in 2026. Trumpist claims about election “security,”
”lawfare,” voter fraud, foreign collusion by the Democratic Party, and much more would fall apart like wet tissue paper if the AI chatbots millions of Americans use daily supplied factual information to their users (including the ones paying for these services, sometimes at great expense). So now these products are simply… broken.
We have become so immune to news of Big Tech working on a clandestine basis to keep its Trumpist gravy train in Washington going that we forget that all of this is (a) illegal, (b) undemocratic, (c) as corrupt as anything that’s happened since Watergate.
(40) Mr. Trump is promising obscene “cash bounties” to anyone who will parrot his 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and/or 2026 election conspiracies in advance of the midterms.
Donald Trump’s thoroughly corrupt, wholly unprecedented $1 million cash bounty for allegations of Voter Fraud implicitly seeks to recruit far-right radicals to the cause of providing a purported justification for invalidating 2026 midterm election results.
As with Mr. Trump’s recently announced bounty for so-called “fraud” whistleblowers, the president has denominated himself the sole decider of which bounty-seekers will be recognized and which will not be, which allegations will be investigated and which will not be, and which eventual payout requests should be honored or not. What this means is that American taxpayers are now footing the bill for yet another slush fund controlled exclusively by Trump and intended exclusively for the advancement of his own ambitions.
There’s no chance whatsoever that an American citizen raising clear evidence of far-right Voter Fraud will even be acknowledged by this administration, let alone listened to and compensated for inspiring a future federal criminal investigation. After all, Trump himself has regularly, in public, urged both mass far-right Voter Fraud and illegal foreign election interference. Is he going to punish those who take him up on his federally criminal Incitements?
Moreover, because Trump alone decides when and how a given allegation is given the imprimatur of the federal government—he says only successful prosecutions will be compensated, but given that almost none of the prosecutions he’s attempted to direct and oversee as president so far have been successful, it’s considerably more likely that he’ll start highly publicly compensating bounty-seekers for the stories they tell rather than the investigations they trigger or convictions they make possible—what’s really happened here is that the sitting President of the United States has found a new way to institutionalize democracy-destabilizing conspiracy theories.
Whereas before Donald Trump had to blithely repeat internet rumors as fact to try to convince his voters that mass voter fraud existed in the United States (when even his own past investigations have confirmed it does not), now he can use the formerly good name of the DOJ and FBI, and legal tender (contributed by American taxpayers) that the federal government controls, to lend significant cultural capital and institutional credence to people who may simply be radical quacks.
Indeed, if past is precedent, some of those quacks we pay for their “evidence” may even end up being found to be Trump agents. The idea of America funding its own internal anti-constitutional rebellion is beyond abhorrent. But it’s what’s happening.
(41) Taxpayers are also funding the rollout of a Trump Organization media operation called “Trump TV” that has (a) gone live just in time for the midterm election season and (b) was partly promoted via Trump’s illegal banning of three major media outlets from the People’s House—an act that not only has now been blocked by a federal judge but was clearly intended as marketing copy for a private Trump business scheme.
Welcome to Trump TV. You pay for it, but the Trump Organization—a private firm—holds the rights to it and will spend decades and decades in the future profiting off it.
As the New York Times reports,
Trump TV is a livestreaming service showing Trump speeches and events at taxpayer expense on the White House website. But just before midnight on September 24, three days after Trump TV went live, Trump’s private business filed a $1,400 application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to assert ownership of the name.
“The applicant has a bona fide intention to use the mark in commerce,” the application stated.
Josh Gerben, a Washington trademark attorney who first noticed and called attention to the application, said such a trademark could allow Trump’s business to require the government to agree to a licensing deal to keep using the name.
It could also allow the president to essentially take what is currently a government operation with him after he leaves office.
“They’re reaping the benefits from all the taxpayer funds that are being used to create and run that channel,” he said. “Obviously, politics has changed a lot in however many years. But I’m 45 years old and I can’t imagine any president before Trump getting away with this without being eviscerated in the media.”
While this is an older story—from a couple months ago, at the beginning of the 2026 midterm cycle—it’s also very much a developing one, as it underscores some of the mercenary thinking behind Trump’s unconstitutional attempts to ban major media from covering him.
Trump TV was devised as a federally funded media project that promised to give its viewers unfiltered Trump propaganda—as Trump’s consistent false claim again CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, the outlets he’s trying to ban from the People’s House, has been that they misrepresent him; they do not—and in service of that aim Trump has now spent hours and hours of media time continuing to decry major media as “fake news” and implying that only the media venues he specifically delineates are legitimate. But what if it’s now become clear that, as he tears down Americans’ trust in everything they see on the news, and therefore the existence of a base reality in American life, he’s really just marketing his new corrupt corporate venture? And what if, in doing so, he’s not just tearing down American culture but making us pay for it?
And doing all this during a federal election cycle, because that drives more profit to him, both political and pecuniary?
Well, that seems to be where we are.
(42) Mark Zuckerberg’s new AI-training regime is a godsend to Trump and the Republicans, and very much intended to interfere with the midterm elections as Zuckerberg and his company have been accused of doing in the past.
All the above is critical to understanding Trump’s vast election-rigging apparatus, as it places the conspiracy that undergirds it in the context of the AI stock boom, his continued insistence that AI be unregulated—declaiming that it’s no danger to anyone even as those working on it say there’s a notable chance it will destroy all of humankind within a decade—and the fact that (see supra) he’s worked diligently to rake in unprecedented donations from Big Tech titans like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.
When people talk about Donald Trump, Big Tech titans, and election-rigging, they’re usually referring to the fact that Elon Musk is the largest mega-donor in Republican Party history by a factor of five or ten, and appears to have told confidants that he in some way meddled with the results of the 2024 presidential election Donald Trump won. But of course the broader story involving Trump and Big Tech goes beyond Musk’s ever-growing empire and into the work of severely disturbed individuals like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, and others in Silicon Valley who are significantly less intelligent than they believe they are and for that reason exponentially more reckless than a healthy democracy can allow any one person to be.
This all came to a head six weeks ago, when the newly minted Trump lobbyist and toady Zuckerberg, having hitched his professional wagon to Trump’s political career in unmistakable ways, announced that his AI consumer product would train itself on a media outlet so far to the political right that it’s not only run by a close Donald Trump friend but was once considered for purchase by Donald Trump Jr. and/or some of his longest and closest friends (e.g., Tommy Hicks Jr., former co-chair of the RNC). The news that Newsmax, an election-denying propaganda outlet, will be a major basis for Meta AI’s (Muse) understanding of American elections is categorically dangerous to American democracy.
And again, this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Donald Trump has threatened Big Tech so viciously both in public and in private that it’s little surprise that the sort of moral cowards who tend to rise quickly in Big Tech circles—young white “libertarian” men, by and large, who conflate their egos with their ethics, their ambition with altruism, and their profit margins with personal responsibility—are now taking steps in the business world that are spectacularly politically advantageous to the Republican Party they’re now funding in general and their deregulation patron Trump in particular.
More than this, these new developments are spectacularly advantageous to election deniers.
Facebook is one of the largest companies in the world, and it’s used by a significant percentage of Americans—particularly the slightly older generations of Americans who skew politically conservative, are susceptible to digital-age disinformation and scams, and tend to be informed (when they are) by single-source news streams. If these very consumers also now begin using Meta’s AI products, the odds that they’ll be misled about American elections, including the 2026 midterm elections, are far higher than they would be if these Americans were using a responsibly trained AI.
And we mustn’t forget, in light of all this, that Trump has just put Elon Musk and his shockingly shoddy AI consumer product Grok at the heart of another major American institution—besides America’s elections infrastructure—that being the U.S. military.
This means Musk’s “anti-woke” nonsense machine, which was last seen declaring itself to be “MechaHitler,” is now at the heart of the entity that would be central to any future Trumpist self-coup.
(43) In-court live-posting by the media outlet Lawfare has confirmed that the new DOJ-FBI indictment against two former FBI agents, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, is more than just another example of the second Trump Administration aggressively using “lawfare” against domestic political opponents during a federal election cycle (while falsely claiming and decrying exactly that same activity falsely by exactly those same opponents).
Cross-examination by the agents’ lawyers has now established that in fact the federal criminal investigation into their past conduct began within 24 hours of Donald Trump giving his now-infamous July 2026 mid-midterms-cycle televised rant about alleged Chinese election interference. That rant was intended to (a) discredit the results of the 2026 midterms, (b) open up a pathway to future false claims by Mr. Trump of Chinese interference on behalf of the Democratic Party, and (c) further obscure his attempted past criminal collusion with the Chinese Communist Party.
What this means is that a new, high-profile, DOJ policy-violative indictment is much more than just standard cynical and hypocritical lawfare, but was coordinated with the most significant disinformation campaign Donald Trump himself has launched in the 2026 midterm election cycle.
(44) Trump has declined to confirm he will accept the 2026 midterm election results.
This breaking news development matters.
Why? Because we can’t claim that it’s mere rhetoric. The man who said it previously incited an armed rebellion against the government of the United States—a bloody attack that killed several, injured well over 100, caused millions of dollars in damages to the U.S. Capitol, and stands as one of the darkest episodes in post-Civil War U.S. history—and he incited that armed rebellion precisely because he wouldn’t accept a loss in an election. America needed Trump, at a bare minimum, to commit to honor the results of the midterm elections, and he very publicly declined to do so. (His claim that he’ll accept the results if they’re “honest” is literally meaningless, given that he’s repeatedly said that the only way Democrats can win is by cheating—meaning that any Democratic victory in the 2026 midterms is already, by Trump’s own accounting, definitionally not “honest”).
ABOVE: CNN reporting on this topic.
But it matters for another reason as well. It matters because Trump well knows, from his own and the nation’s experience, that rhetoric like this leads to violence, election denialism, threats against elections officials, threats against politicians, threats upon polling places, frivolous post-election litigation, notorious election crimes (see, e.g., this and this), mass refusal by Americans to recognize a legitimately elected American government, and more. Refusing to do what every prior president has done—say that they will accept the election results because it’s already presumed that if fraud is ever proven that statement understandably becomes invalid—is Trump’s way of signaling to his people the opposite: it’s okay to cause election-related terror and chaos, before the voting and during the voting and after the voting, whether you have any evidence of wrongdoing or not.
That’s what happened after the 2020 presidential election, and it’ll surely happen now, too.
(45) Trump’s handpicked Fed chair is playing election-year politics in ways we have never seen before.
Readers will be aware of the wild saga that led to Trump getting his chosen Fed chair on a party-line congressional vote (the only exception to this was a Democrat with a severe mental illness, a lingering brain injury, and untreated personality disorder). The saga involved not one Fed board member threatened with a baseless criminal indictment but two—Jerome Powell (link) and Lisa Cook (link)—and attempts to meddle with the independence of the Fed that rattled global markets for months.
So now Trump has his man, Kevin Warsh, atop the Fed. And guess what’s happened:
Federal Reserve officials agree that inflation needs to return to the central bank’s 2% annual target. Instead, the war with Iran has sent gas prices soaring, and price increases are starting to spread beyond the gas station. Last month, that prompted Fed officials to raise rates for the first time in three years to cool the economy and bring down inflation.
Yet this month, even with the inflation picture worsening, the Fed is widely expected to hold rates steady at its Wednesday meeting.
Would that still be the case if the midterms weren’t just six days away?
At his 2:30 p.m. press conference Wednesday, Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh is likely to face questions about political pressure if the central bank does keep rates unchanged. The Fed’s independence is a cornerstone of its monetary policy decisions. However, in an election year, that independence inevitably comes under the microscope.
Outside of the pandemic, when rates were kept at near-zero levels, the Fed adjusted rates within two months of Election Day in four out of five of the most recent election years.
….
If the Fed does hold rates steady as expected, Warsh may have to work harder than usual to convince Americans that the political calendar played no part in its decision.
“Tightening cannot appear to be a move against the administration, while holding cannot look like accommodation,” EY-Parthenon chief economist Gregory Daco said in a note last week.
One would have to be willfully naive to not worry about what Trump has wrought here.
Whether the Fed is cowed by him or not, the mere fact that he threatened to imprison two of their number, made noises about ending the independence of the Fed altogether, and forced through a highly partisan nomination for Fed chair when more than almost any entity the Fed requires bipartisan support and confidence in D.C. and around the country makes Trump’s mercurial fascism a poison infecting every Fed call.
In other words, Trump’s Fed-related election-year tampering already happened.
Now all we can do is speculate about the fallout.
(46) Trump’s harassment of election officials just days before a major federal election is without precedent—and seems engineered to provoke needless mistakes Trump can thereafter make political hay with.
It’s widely understood that elections officials have one of the hardest jobs in local, state, or federal government, a lesson most Americans learned well when the inner workings of our elections were exposed to the nation and the world during the 2021 election crisis Trump incited.
So if there’s one thing America’s leader absolutely cannot do, it’s harass state elections officials at the very moment they’re working 18- to 20-hour days preparing their teams for a national election.
So guess what Trump is doing?
Sending subpoenas to elections officials in 13 battleground states. Subpoenas that have deadlines and legal consequences for missing them. And if you’re wondering why these couldn’t have been sent months and months and months ago—even if 1015—that’s a good question to ask. But the answer is obvious: it wouldn’t be the degree of federal harassment Trump and his agents are looking to subject hardworking civil servants to, and it wouldn’t get the news coverage these subpoenas are getting. That news coverage helps advance Trump’s pre-midterms rhetoric about elections officials having something to hide; this false narrative will be critical to Trump invalidating this election cycle before all votes are in, as votes are being counted, and between now and the next Congress is seated in January 2027.
(47) There are lies a political candidate can legally tell, and lies that constitute a form of election tampering. Trump has made the latter a mainstay at his midterms rallies.
Imagine if Trump were to say something (else) that is utterly odious at a midterms rally, like, for instance, if he were to make the claim that all trans persons in America want to victimize American children sexually. Such an obscene lie would of course be both morally grotesque and of only dubious value politically—given its obviously ethically irresponsible hyperbole (and beyond hyperbole)—but it would be covered by the First Amendment. So it would not be seen as a form of Fraud. Donald Trump, president or not, or any American politician for that matter, is allowed to express deranged and bigoted viewpoints in public as long as they don’t imminently incite a criminal act.
But what if the man in charge of the federal government—who’s more gregariously than any of his predecessors made clear that he personally directs and is familiar with the major federal criminal investigations underway at the FBI and the major federal criminal prosecutions underway at DOJ—repeatedly indicates in nationally televised rallies that he has used federal taxpayer resources to investigate systemic crimes against American children and found that not only are certain crimes now routinely happening but are in fact being actively sponsored (and exclusively, too) by Democratic politicians?
And what if every word in the proceeding paragraph were a vile lie? What if nothing like what the president claims his investigations have uncovered has ever happened, and he’s only in the position to convince tens of millions of voters otherwise because his Oath of Office—which this particular form of lying would seem to flagrantly violate— puts him in charge of sufficient federal investigative resources that the idea that he and his team might uncover a novel breed of wrongdoing domestically is plausible?
Below is one example of what we’re talking about here:
Some version of this premeditated disinformation has been presented by Mr. Trump to the voters of the United States at every one of his midterms rallies—most of which have been nationally televised on taxpayer-funded airwaves. Note here that Trump is very clearly not just expressing a fear about something he thinks could happen, but stating as the President of the United States that he knows for a fact that something dire is indeed happening to America’s children, and happening on a regular basis. He then goes on to indicate that this purported mass violent mutilation of children too young to make medical decisions for themselves is being actively sponsored by Democratic politicians, voting blocs that are associated with the Democratic Party, and laws on the books in multiple jurisdictions that have been—and will surely continue to be—advanced by Democratic politicians if they’re elected in the 2026 midterm elections.
Of course, all of the foregoing Trump claims are lies. Frauds. None of it is happening; none of it has ever happened; neither Donald Trump nor anyone at the FBI or DOJ has ever received any information whatsoever indicating that this has happened anywhere, and indeed there’s no danger of this ever happening at any point in time anywhere in America from now until eternity. So the question then becomes, at what point does President Trump abusing his power and violating his Oath of Office to intimate that federal investigations are underway—or have already happened—that in fact are totally imaginary become not just an impeachable offense but also an election-rigging?
Proof contends that we’re already at that point—and that if, for instance, a Democratic president were to fraudulently say at 25 consecutive pre-election rallies that federal investigations have found that Christian evangelicals are regularly drinking the blood of circumcised Jewish children, every Trump supporter in America would deem that premeditated domestic psyop it to be not just a criminal Fraud but an illegal attempt to alter the outcome of a federal election… and using the Office of the President to do so, no less. So why is Trump allowed to do this? Why are journalists and voters and politicians and courts left with no better a response than to simply “fact-check” him?
(48) Breaking news has Trump now called for an entire Senate election to be called off, all opponents to the candidate he endorsed tossed from the ballot, voters precluded from being able to cast any ballots at all, and a Senate seat simply awarded to his chosen office-holder. Yes, all of that really happened just tonight.
Proof began this report by noting that what the Peltola campaign allegedly did in Alaska was unethical and profoundly wrong, even as there is no evidence yet that it was illegal—that would require the sort of cash payments Republicans have offered to “ghost” candidates under other circumstances (see supra)—and certainly the MAGA “movement” has no moral standing to complain about any of it. Proof also, in the earlier-written introduction to this report-series entry and introductions to prior entries in the series, has underscored that Donald Trump (a) has no sense of history, (b) no shame, (c) no aversion to hypocrisy, (d) no interest in proportionality, (e) no awareness of (or willingness to learn) the fine points of the state and federal statutes he loves to declaim about, and (f) virtually no grasp of the facts of any developing situation beyond the one he needed to acquire to try to cynically yank the situation to his own venal advantage. This author has also often noted that Trump has no ethical code, no moral framework to which he describes, no coherent ideology—political or otherwise—and no principles. He’s a moral cipher in an oddly shaped business suit.
So of course he’s calling for the 2026 Alaska Senate race to be cancelled.
Of course he’s calling for Mary Peltola, whose knowledge of her staff’s actions is still unclear, to be imprisoned.
Of course he’s demanding she be tossed off the midterm ballot along with the bona fide Republican candidate who shares the first and last name of the GOP incumbent.
Of course he wants all Alaskan Senate votes invalidated.
Of course he’s making clear that neither he nor his agents at DOJ or in Congress will accept the results of the Senate contest in Alaska if the Democratic candidate wins.
Of course he’s not acknowledging that it was the Republican Party, under his own leadership, that invented and perfected this particular form of “election ratfuckery.”
Of course he’s pretending to know all the facts just hours after the story broke. Of course he’s saying that the recent Times report on Peltola confirms everything he said in his personal lawyer’s recent filing in federal court in Alaska—which not only preceded these new revelations but isn’t actually necessarily changed much by them (as the standing legal question is whether it is legal for two men with the same name to be on the ballot at once if the one who’s an incumbent is clearly listed as such and middle names are used to distinguish the two similarly named individuals; it seems very clear that there is nothing at all illegal about any of that, either pre-Times report or after it).
Given how predictable all this is, what makes it newsworthy isn’t so much that Trump has said all of the foregoing—because, again, of course he has—but that the “seal has now been broken” (as it were) on Trump demanding that certain federal elections be cancelled in 2026 not because the law requires it but because he believes his political team is going to lose that particular contest. Trump is not just trying to pre-invalidate a very possible Peltola win, in other words, but lay the groundwork for using the same rhetoric with respect to other races where the Democrat might eke out a win, whether or not there’s any legal basis for the remedies he’s demanding. And frankly not only is there likely no legal basis for any of his filings in Alaska to date, but it’s actually not at all clear what new developments would have to arise there to actually invalidate Peltola or the non-incumbent “Dan Sullivan” as candidates.
Even Trump is arguing only, for now, that certain Peltola staffers may have lied on federal documents, which not at all coincidentally may be the most common crime he and several members of his family and administration have committed between 2016 and the present—and never once has anyone said that it means they can’t be in office.
Heck, all three of Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court Justices stand accused of committing Perjury with respect to their plans for abortion rights—among other things (Brett Kavanaugh, for instance, also stands accused by members of the public of lying about a series of sex crimes)—and nothing has ever happened on that score or ever will. If Sullivan didn’t lie about his name, didn’t lie about the signatures and/or payments required to get himself on the ballot, and hasn’t actively misrepresented his identity or his eligibility for office, it’s not clear that any of what the Times reported would be handled as anything more than a congressional ethics referral for Peltola if she’s elected. As bad as the allegations are, they pale in comparison to dozens of offenses for which members of Congress—and Mr. Trump himself—have exhibited no interest in seriously looking into at all.