Podcaster Joe Rogan, who gave Donald Trump a boost with an interview and endorsement before the 2024 election, has called Trump out for continuing to claim that the 2020 election was stolen without providing any real evidence to back them up.
A lack of evidence hasn’t stopped Trump and Republican legislators from using election lies to justify restrictions on voting and other efforts — like abusive partisan redistricting — to rig the 2026 elections in Republicans’ favor.
Those efforts are likely to intensify as Republicans panic over the Democratic sweep in state and local elections this month and Trump’s approval rating sinks.
Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election showed us that he is willing to subvert democracy. He and his allies promoted false conspiracy theories, intimidated state and local election officials and pressured Vice President Mike Pence to abuse his power to stop Congress from affirming the election results.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has let his authoritarian impulses run wild, abusing his power to intimidate the media, persecute his political opponents and punish entire states for voting Democratic.
Trump pushed Texas and other red states to redraw their congressional districts, to make them even more favorable to Republicans — then cried foul when California voters fought back by voting to do their own round of partisan redistricting in response.
He appointed a 2020 election denier as the Department of Homeland Security’s top election integrity official. He issued an executive order attempting to assert control over elections, which has been blocked by courts.
Trump judges on the Fifth Circuit, meanwhile, overturned a Mississippi law allowing the state to count absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day as long as they were postmarked on or before that date — something that many states permit but Trump wants to ban.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, which leaves open the possibility that this bad ruling will be overturned. But given the majority’s track record on voting rights, it’s hard to be overly optimistic.
In short, there are a lot of good reasons to be concerned — and vigilant — about Trump’s plans to disrupt our next elections.
Trump has already made huge cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, which has helped local officials protect and secure their elections. Trump’s cuts run directly counter to Republican claims to care about election integrity. But it fits neatly with a strategy of undermining confidence in elections so that people will be more susceptible to fake fraud claims.
There’s more. Shortly after this month’s rebuke by millions of voters, Trump issued a mass pardon to “any U.S. citizen” involved in Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.
The pardon covers lawyers who promoted lies and false conspiracy theories, as well as people who took part in the certification of false slates of electors from battleground states to try to prevent Congress from affirming Trump’s defeat.
While Trump’s pardon doesn’t have a direct impact on consequences people are facing under state law, it could be used to bring pressure on local officials to drop prosecutions. And it sends a signal to the MAGA activists that have taken positions as state and local election officials that Trump will have their backs if they bend or break the law to give him the election results he wants.
Journalist David Graham interviewed election experts and officials for a recent story in the Atlantic. He found widespread concern about potential interference in the 2026 elections, including intimidation of the media and pressure on local election officials — a “whole smorgasbord of ways that Trump can undermine the integrity of the elections.”
Graham envisions a scenario in which Trump falsely claims victory for Republicans on election night, uses right-wing media and the Justice Department to pressure local officials to stop counting ballots in close House and Senate races and then responds to protests by invoking the Insurrection Act to send military troops into cities.
Before Trump came back into power, that might have sounded far-fetched. But given what Trump has already unleashed on American cities, it is all too plausible — especially given Trump’s record of claiming phony “emergencies” to justify illegal abuses of power.
Indeed, as Graham reported, MAGA “election integrity” lawyer Cleta Mitchell told a conservative talk show in September that presidents are limited when it comes to elections, “except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States.”
“I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward,” Mitchell said.
The midterms are less than a year away. Make sure your voter registration is up to date and your family is election-ready. Consider volunteering as a poll worker or with groups working to protect our elections.
We can’t say we haven’t been warned.
