Trump’s elections Chimera

The plan to subvert 2026 is already underway

The Greek mythological three-headed monster, Chimera.

There’s a three-headed monster heading for our elections.

The combined forces of the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are shaping up to be the Trump administration’s election subversion Chimera (that’s the fire-breathing lion-snake-goat hybrid creature from Greek mythology) in 2026. While the administration has flagrantly abused the federal government’s law enforcement powers from day one, in the past couple of weeks those abuses have become more explicitly about laying the groundwork for undermining elections.

Think about it. In just the last two weeks:

• The attorney general of the United States told Minnesotans that the federal government would only withdraw DHS agents from their communities if the state turned over sensitive voter data to the DOJ.

• The director of national intelligence (DNI) and the FBI served a Fulton County, Georgia, elections office with a warrant for their voting equipment and records.

• The attorney general, DHS secretary, and DNI planned to appear before a gathering of secretaries of state in Washington, D.C. — likely to claim before the nation’s top election officials that our elections are rife with fraud — before backing out at the last minute.

• The president himself, building upon prior musings about “canceling” elections, twice openly expressed his desire to “take over” and “nationalize” elections, contra the Constitution.

The administration is showing its hand. We should pay attention. The 2026 midterms are already underway.

Weaponizing DOJ and DHS is all about elections

Here at If you can keep it, we’ve been warning since the start of President Trump’s second term about the increasing politicization and weaponization of federal law enforcement, exemplified by retaliatory prosecutions and lawless crackdowns in American cities.

Both are corrosive to the rule of law and liberal democracy in and of themselves, it’s true. But what has become increasingly clear is that these escalations are crucial components of the Trump administration’s effort to entrench itself in power ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Everything is about the elections.

The New York Times’ David French hypothesized how these entrenchment strategies may play out in his column this week:

Now, in October [2026], Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which rapidly expanded throughout the year, is running large-scale operations in Democratic-controlled cities. Hundreds if not thousands more American citizens have been caught in the dragnet. So have thousands of lawful residents.

…

As a result, nonwhite citizens are reluctant to go anywhere near ICE, and rumors of ICE conducting operations near polling stations spread like wildfire. Thousands upon thousands of citizens choose to stay home rather than risk arrest to vote.

During early voting, reports of citizens discovering they’re no longer on the voting rolls have multiplied. Most of them have Latin-, African- or Asian-sounding names. The voters named Smith or Jones have had no problems. But if you’re a Gonzalez or a Diallo, then you’ve been purged.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. has raided several election offices in blue cities in swing states. Lawmakers in red states have moved to take over election administration in certain blue cities, citing the president’s raids and indictments as justification.

(Read the whole thing.)

These are not the paranoid fears of frequent Trump critics. The president’s long time adviser Steve Bannon said on his podcast Tuesday, “You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November.”

And Republican Senator Thom Tillis cautioned that stationing federal law enforcement at voting locations could “have a chilling effect on even U.S. citizens going to the polls because they don’t want to be detained and have to prove citizenship.”

The president and his allies are clearly setting up what will be the Next Big Lie: There is widespread non-citizen voting corrupting our elections. This will be the justification for DHS presence at the polls and baseless DOJ investigations that churn up “evidence” that will be used as a pretext to attempt to invalidate election results. Indeed, Bob Bauer warned yesterday, “[T]he DOJ may be quietly preparing to adjust its law enforcement guidelines to more closely align with Trump’s view that ‘nationalization’ is required to address widespread fraud.”

Along the way, the administration will seek at every turn to use law enforcement intimidation to attempt to scare protestors, journalists, and ultimately voters into silence. As we get closer to Election Day, the DOJ’s use of weaponized political prosecutions is likely to focus more and more on individuals and organizations who are involved in electoral politics and are viewed as political opponents.

Election deniers are in charge

Top administration officials are ready to use their agencies’ authorities to propagate the Next Big Lie, starting by bolstering the president’s false claims about the 2020 election.

Reportedly, DNI Tulsi Gabbard is the administration’s chief 2020 conspiracy investigator, which involved accompanying the FBI on their Fulton County raid at the president’s request, a government source told The New York Times. (The president is now claiming that Gabbard actually went at Attorney General Bondi’s “insistence.”) According to the Times’ reporting, Gabbard also played go-between between the president and the FBI agents that conducted the raid, arranging a phone call in which the president asked the agents questions and praised their work. Gabbard is steeped in election conspiracies and appears to be looking to curry favor with the president by being his election denial point person in the executive branch. As The Bulwark’s Will Sommer put it:

[Gabbard] is tasked with producing a report that could presumably be used to justify federal restrictions on this year’s midterm elections. Her mere presence there suggests that this “investigation” is headed in the maximally crazy direction.

There’s little doubt that this renewed push to prove the 2020 election was stolen serves primarily to further undermine Americans’ faith in our elections.

Having the power of DOJ, DHS, and ODNI at the tip of the spear is particularly dangerous because they’re charged with upholding the law and keeping all Americans safe. Whereas other agencies are limited to enacting regulations, levying civil fines, and withholding grants, the Chimera agencies can arrest people, prosecute them, spy on them, detain them, or otherwise muster government capabilities against Americans. When agencies are that powerful, it’s particularly essential that they operate in a way that adheres to law and builds trust. But what we’re seeing is the exact opposite of that. That’s all to say that there’s a reason these agencies make up Trump’s three-headed elections monster and not, say, the EPA, the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Education.

The election denier-in-chief himself isn’t slowing down. As part of his unconstitutional calls for “nationalizing” elections, the president suggested that there are 15 states in particular that the administration views as the worst offenders and whose election administration the federal government should take over. It’s not hard to imagine that the president might be thinking about the states with the most competitive Congressional races in November, which also conveniently include some of the president’s favorite blue state foils.

So while the DOJ-DHS-ODNI Chimera is emerging as the tip of the spear of the White House’s midterm subversion efforts, make no mistake: The orders come from the very top. And the administration will use every possible mechanism at its disposal to hold onto power. The past two weeks have made that clear.

How we push back

To be clear, much of what the administration is planning to do is already explicitly illegal. Courts have already ruled against many of the administration’s efforts to abuse power, and there will continue to be robust legal pushback against attempts to use federal law enforcement to interfere with the election. But litigation, while necessary, is unlikely to be sufficient.

It’s vital that state and local officials understand the ways in which the federal government might try to abuse power to interfere with the election and be prepared to refuse to cooperate and resist where they can. One example: As our colleagues Izzy Gray and Sara Chimene-Weiss wrote a couple of weeks ago, states should hold firm and refuse to comply with the federal government’s attempts to strongarm them into giving up their citizens’ private data. States must resist the administration’s efforts to gin up “evidence” in support of their election conspiracies.

Also at the state level, legislatures should pass universal constitutional remedies laws that give citizens more tools to pursue accountability when their rights are violated by federal agents, a solution that is gaining steam as bills have been introduced in nine states.

Giving people more tools to defend their rights can help neutralize the culture of fear and intimidation that the administration is seeking to create and keep the pro-democracy coalition on the field in 2026.

Congress must exercise its oversight powers and the power of the purse to reign in DHS abuses, including insisting that federal law enforcement not be used to interfere in elections. Progress is being made on this front too: Democrats have included restrictions on law enforcement presence near sensitive locations like polling places in their list of demands to fund DHS.

And of course, ordinary Americans can continue to use their voices to make it clear that we will not accept the administration’s attempt to rig our elections and take away our votes.

We know the administration will try to interfere with the 2026 elections by any means necessary. They’ve already put their plans in motion. But their success is by no means inevitable. Just like the mythological monster, so too can Trump’s elections Chimera be defeated.

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The Washington Post falls victim to the Orbán playbook

This week, The Washington Post laid off 300 employees, a third of its staff. Shuttered or gutted are the Post’s tech, local, international, books, and sports beats. The cuts have left many media critics calling time of death on the once-revered institution.

Ultimately, the Post’s fate is the expected outcome of autocratic capture and the Orbán model of co-opting or sidelining independent media.

As our co-founder Ian Bassin wrote back in 2023,

[Autocratic capture is] a term we started using a few years ago to describe the phenomenon of authoritarian leaders trying to use the regulatory powers of the state to force private actors to toe a political line. If “state capture” or “regulatory capture” is the process of moneyed interests buying improper influence over government, “autocratic capture” is the opposite: government using its power to coerce political loyalty from moneyed interests.

In the Post’s case, owner Jeff Bezos has significant business interests beyond the paper toward which he wants favorable regulatory treatment from the Trump administration. Thus, his makeover of the editorial page to a more Trump-friendly point of view, ending political endorsements (because they would very likely have been of candidates who oppose Trump), and now gutting the newsroom can all be framed as shrewd (necessary, even) business decisions rather than ideologically-motivated surrender to authoritarianism.

Ben Raderstorf warned us about the coming threat to independent media before the 2024 election:

Democracy and autocracy are locked in an existential struggle in this country. By extension, that means the same is true of independent journalism and authoritarianism.

In the end, only one of the two will survive.

While The Washington Post has clearly fallen victim, that doesn’t mean the rest of our media (or our democracy) has to. What happened this week is a reminder that it’s more important than ever to support independent journalism.

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What else we’re tracking

• Republican former election official (and former Protect Democracy client) Stephen Richer debunks the Next Big Lie about non-citizen voting: What’s really driving these bogus claims of voter fraud.

• “We call on people of faith to stand by your values and act as your conscience demands”: Read Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde and 153 Episcopal bishops on the moral crisis our country faces and how faith communities should respond.

• The New York Times editorial board has begun tracking 12 markers of democratic erosion in the U.S. As we warned in the Authoritarian Playbook for 2025, the Times finds this week that with the brutal DHS crackdowns against protestors in Minnesota, Trump’s stifling of dissent reaches a new level. In case you missed it, Amanda Carpenter wrote about this last month.

• Let’s not sportswash Trump’s authoritarianism: Protect Democracy’s Jon Steinman and Michael Angeloni for The Bulwark ahead of tonight’s opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics.