Here Are 19 - Yes, 19! - Ways Trump and Republicans Are Plotting to Rig and Steal the Midterm Elections

Here Are 19 - Yes, 19! - Ways Trump and Republicans Are Plotting to Rig and Steal the Midterm Elections Note from our Editor-in-Chief: This week, we are running our ‘Start The Steal’ series, with three months left in the 2026 midterm elections. The president and his allies are conducting a scorched-earth campaign to rig the coming elections, and we believe it’s the biggest story in America right now. To keep reporting this story the way it needs to be told, we need yoursupport. In this new age of American authoritarianism, independent media is more important than ever. Subscribe tozeteo.com › subscribe) and never hit another paywall. And read on for Part Two of our special series, below. – Mehdi • •Donald Trump departs after a Cabinet meeting at Camp David on July 31, 2026. Photo by Nathan Howard - Pool/ Getty Images. They’re Trying Everything • Before he came back to power, Donald Trump’s legal and political advisers were already hard at work drafting legal memos and policy papers about how to blackmail blue states into giving in to his authoritarian, heads-I-win-tails-you-lose demands on election policies and administration. • As we approach the high-stakes 2026 midterms, the president, various departments in his administration, and GOP allies across the United States are waging nonstop warfare on election integrity and voting rights, fueled by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election that he lost. • It’s a mammoth effort involving the gerrymandering wars, voter suppression bills, closing polling sites, the seizure of election records, voter purges, and Trump officials vindictively targeting election officials. The list goes on, and on. In the closing days of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump campaigned on letting Americans die if Democrats didn’t cave to his crank policy demands – and he somehow won. On the campaign trail, he vowed to use presidential power to withhold emergency, life-saving aid and federal disaster relief if blue states didn’t do what he said. He would, in his own words, “force it down” his enemies’ throats. Throughout Trump’s second term, his policy team, led by Stephen Miller, has weaponized virtually every lever of the federal government to extort Democratic states into submission. Sources with direct knowledge of the matter described to Zeteo how senior Trump advisers decided early on, well before Election Day 2024, that this vindictive, mafia don-style approach to federal aid would be applied to Trump’s crusade to tear out the guts of American election administration and replace it with a system built to rig elections in Republicans’ favor for decades to come. Drafts of policy and legal memos aimed toward this end, the sources added, were written by then-future administration appointees months before Trump had reclaimed power. Just a few days after he was inaugurated as president again, Trump announced he wanted to condition California wildfire aid on whether the solidly Democratic state submitted to his election crackdown and adopted his restrictive voter-ID rules. During the violent, deadly siege of Minnesota, the Justice Department suggested that the blue state needed to hand over its voter rolls to the feds, if the state wanted the brutal occupation to end. Ho