An array of experts has been warning us for some time now. In their view, there's a radical, antidemocratic plot afoot, cooked up at the highest levels of the Trump executive branch—drawing in the Department of Justice, the leadership of the intelligence community, and possibly even the Pentagon—to tilt November’s midterm elections to Republican candidates, so as to ensure that the president’s party retains control of the House and Senate.

According to this chorus of Cassandras, the scheme, like many complicated plots, may have been in motion for a year—or far longer. And lately, they say, preparations have been ramping up in earnest. In June, Trump replaced his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, appointing an acting DNI, Bill Pulte, a loyalist who has long sown doubt about election integrity. (Remember when Gabbard showed up in Georgia in January, the day the FBI conducted a raid to seize 2020 ballots? Pulte, apparently, has been applying parallel pressure by pushing to reveal the names of intelligence officials accused of concealing from the president alleged evidence of 2020 election interference.)

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This month, Trump dismissed the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan federal agency created to help states administer elections, currently leaving precisely no one in a position of authority for polling-place workers to contact should anomalies arise in November.

Next, the president delivered a national address in which he claimed there was evidence of foreign meddling in the 2020 election by a relatively unfamiliar culprit: China. Whatever its stated purpose, the assertion seemed designed to cast a pall on the elections four months hence. The following day, Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin declared that balloting overseers in every state could face jail if they failed to cooperate with the administration’s efforts to change election policies.

These recent actions, while ominous, are only the latest salvoes. Lawmakers, election experts, legal scholars, columnists, and journalists have been shouting from the rafters that Team Trump has been busy laying track. Former Democratic senators Richard Gephardt and Tim Wirth, who have set up the civic group Keep Our Republic, have gone so far as to call these activities nothing less than a “rolling coup,” one that has been slow, strategic, and incremental. Jonathan Alter, a veteran political analyst, has used the same phrase on his Substack. Michael Tomasky, in a new essay in The New Republic, asserted, “It Can Now Be Plainly Said: Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’Etat.”

Those on Capitol Hill have been sounding their own alarms. In April, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) put Postmaster General David Steiner’s feet to the fire at a public hearing. “Now we have this new rule,” she warned, “that states have to turn over their voting rolls…You are a pawn in this…. You are being used as part of a much bigger story that this president is trying to play out, where he does not believe that elections that he loses are valid elections.” Steiner deflected direct pressure on whether the agency would immediately withhold ballots, noting it was only a proposed regulation and that the USPS would act “in accordance with whatever rule is in effect at that point in time.”

In June, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), expressed concerns that incoming DNI chief Pulte had the potential to interfere with the balloting process. As Warner told CNN: “You’ve got a guy who [is] loyal only to Trump, and he’s going to have all 18 [intelligence-related] agencies to oversee…. What he could do is take a single piece of intelligence that may not be corroborated or make something up and say, ‘Country X is going to interfere or is sending people to encourage noncitizens to vote,’ and [have] that be used as an excuse for Trump to bring in ICE, federal troops, close down elections, seize polling stations.”

Also in June, Slotkin, Senator John Hickenlooper (D-CO), and several lawmakers presented the Protect Our Polls Act to prevent men and women in uniform from monitoring or influencing the act of voting. “President Trump has made it clear he’ll win elections by any means necessary,” Hickenlooper noted. “He already sent the military into our cities to intimidate Americans. The polls are next. We need to pass these safeguards into law before November.”

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As a lawyer, presidential historian, and longtime observer of constitutional crises, I’d like to take a few steps back and sketch the maneuvers that critics say could amount to a grand vote-rigging scheme. I also want to examine the motives that might drive it—and the legal counterweights that still stand between the administration and potential interference in the midterms, which are less than 100 days away.

First stop, the Constitution. It is critical to understand that elections in the United States—unlike, say, those in France—are run bottom-up, not top-down. The Elections Clause, Art. 1, Section 4, Clause 1, gives the states primary authority to set the “Times, Places and Manner” for holding elections, while allowing Congress to “make or alter such Regulations.” As Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett asserted in June—in a pivotal decision that allows states to accept mail-in ballots for up to five days after voting ends—responsibility for the mechanics of congressional elections belongs, by default, to the states.

This matters because President Trump’s attempts to establish national rules for federal elections by executive order have been consistently—and, frankly, easily—rebuked by the courts. The Constitution allows primary authority to Congress to override state mandates. Congress has done so before: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is the most familiar example. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known as the “motor voter law,” and the Help America Vote Act of 2002, have likewise created national standards for voter registration, including a uniform federal form requiring applicants to attest to citizenship under penalty of perjury. Federal criminal law already bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

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Trump’s defeats in court help explain his fixation on the so-called SAVE America Act, short for “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility.” The president has even admitted, however grudgingly, that only Congress can create new election standards. The proposed bill, already considered by a somewhat skeptical House, and even more wary Senate, fuses two of Trump’s favorite obsessions: illegal immigration and voter fraud. Illegal immigration helped carry him to victory in 2016; alleged rigged elections powered some of his political messaging in 2024.

If enacted, the SAVE America bill would make states demand documentary proof of citizenship—passports, birth certificates, and the like—before voters could register or update their registration, and would require the corresponding paperwork to be presented in person to a local board. The effect would be to all but eliminate voter-registration drives. In truth, it is a solution in search of a problem: Noncitizen registration and unauthorized voting are rare to the point of being infinitesimal. But the politics behind such accusations, however alarmist, are potent. Take, for example, last week’s revelation in New Jersey that a computer software error—since corrected—may have allowed some 400 noncitizens to vote in recent state and local elections. As soon as the glitch was announced, Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, groused, “Democrats keep claiming this never happens…. Enough excuses.”

For all the executive orders quashed, and all the sniping on both sides of the aisle, is there a chance that Congress, in the end, will play along with the administration? Repeated pushback on such efforts, especially from the Senate, suggests it will not. Elections that are actually “free and fair,” in the eyes of many a wise politician, appeal, most of all, to the voters themselves. And legislators realize they need real voters—in the real world—to win elections.

Here, then, is where the story turns thorny. If Congress chooses not to support initiatives to curb certain types of voting or certain types of voters, Trump and his surrogates have other options.

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First off, they have been using what many observers consider an authoritarian formula to attack democracy itself: attempting, through public pronouncements and a flurry of activities, to slowly and steadily degrade voters’ confidence in election integrity; raise the specter of criminal indictments of enemies; increase the rhetoric against “violent left-wing extremists” and “communists”; and take endless swipes at the free press.

Secondly, the administration’s recent moves fit a pattern. Remove election guardians and guardrails. Weaken intelligence channels that might deter foreign interference. Use strong-arm tactics, such as the confiscation of old ballots, to intimidate officials and possibly serve as a dress rehearsal for federal muscle-flexing in future elections. Threaten prison time for those who refuse to comply. Announce to America’s adversaries that US elections are vulnerable, thereby inviting the very interference the administration decries. Then, theoretically, use that alleged foreign interference as a pretext to cancel elections, invoke the Insurrection Act, or send troops or ICE agents to the polls.

It could all play out, as several pundits have remarked, very much as Hemingway famously described bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. Some catalytic event—a Reichstag Fire analogue, or another January 6, or a bogus declassification purporting to show foreign hackers changing votes—could be used to manufacture a phony rationale for emergency action. Last week, David French, in The New York Times, laid out a scenario in which the current, GOP-controlled Congress, citing election improprieties, might refuse to seat elected legislators who have actually won their November races. Any of these situations could provoke civic unrest, potentially violent, against a perceived suppression of the will of the voters, which is the bedrock of representative democracy. There has also been much debate, of course, about the purported use of the military or police at polling stations.

This is where the courts become indispensable. Few Americans know that federal criminal law specifically restricts the use of armed forces at election sites. Section 592 of Title 18 makes it a federal crime to deploy troops or armed personnel at any place where an election is held. This applies to federal officers, military forces, and anyone acting under federal authority.

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The Posse Comitatus Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1385, points in the same direction. Born of the post-Civil War settlement, it bars the use of federal military personnel—including today’s Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Space Force—to impose or execute domestic civilian law. In plain English, the military is not a national police force. American law treats voting as a civil act, not a security operation. Last year, a federal court ruled that President Trump’s use of the National Guard around Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act because the troops had been deployed for civilian law enforcement without express congressional authorization. US District Judge Charles R. Breyer ordered the administration to stop using soldiers in California for arrests, searches, traffic or crowd control, and interrogation.

Nor should the Insurrection Act provide legal cover. That law permits mobilizing troops only to suppress rebellion or enforce federal law when states cannot or will not do so. It does not authorize routine election administration, and it does not override election-specific anti-intimidation statutes. Using troops to run, monitor, or tally elections would be legally indefensible absent an actual insurrection preventing people from voting.

So, yes, while some suggest we may be watching a slow-moving coup in the run-up to the 2026 midterms, the United States is not Germany in 1933. It still has genuinely competitive elections, a mostly independent judiciary that has repeatedly ruled against presidents of both parties, a federal system in which states administer elections, a free press, and opposition parties with full legal rights. At least for now.

A reminder. After the 2020 votes were tabulated and the Electoral College cast its ballots, dozens of courts rejected election fraud claims for lack of sufficient evidence, and state officials from both parties certified the results. Congress ultimately counted the electoral votes and, despite the disruption and violence of January 6, the presidential transition occurred. Two weeks later, Joseph R. Biden was sworn in as the 46th commander in chief. The outgoing president, Donald J. Trump, was a no-show at the ceremony.

Why, then, is Trump, who won yet again in 2024, so obsessed with the SAVE America Act and the machinery of federal election oversight? What would be the underlying motives for a Trump cadre to potentially try and wrest control of the midterms?

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The simplest answer is the most unsettling: The president has shown, time and again, that he will go to unprecedented lengths so as not to relinquish power. He was, in fact, impeached by the House for the second time for “incitement of insurrection.” He was accused, by a vote of 232 to 197, of encouraging supporters to interfere with the certification of the presidential election, and, as Vanity Fair put it that week, “repeatedly refused to take adequate action to stop them.” The Senate then voted to acquit him.

Commentators such as Canadian journalist and filmmaker Paul Jay, founder and former CEO of The Real News Network, have described the 2021 insurrection as a dry run for future attempts to subvert American democracy. In Jay’s account, the week of January 6 was not merely a riot but a tactical probe—a test of the resolve of police, security agencies, and democratic institutions.

Trump also has obvious reasons to fear a House, and perhaps a Senate, that is run by Democrats. Democrat control would mean committee gavels, subpoenas, document demands, and public hearings into his second term. The Epstein investigation would find new oxygen. So, too, would inquiries into the billions that the president has amassed in the past two years. Not to mention the foreign business entanglements of his family members. Or investigations of the damage suffered by those whom the Trump administration has gone after in what some have characterized as a wide-ranging “retribution” campaign.

As journalist Jonathan Alter recently pointed out, “Mr. Trump never made any secret of his intentions, explaining to Republicans in January of 2026 on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, ‘You’ve gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me.’”

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Although Democrats remain seriously divided, dozens in the House have, in fact, threatened a third impeachment trial over matters as grave as Trump’s military operations against Iran. The Brennan Center for Justice has argued that the administration’s unilateral strikes, launched without congressional authorization, violate the Constitution. “Unaccountable war-making was one of the chief dangers the Constitution’s framers sought to prevent,” Katherine Yon Ebright of the Brennan Center wrote in March. “That’s why they took care to give the power to declare war to Congress, not a president modeled on the British monarch.”

None of these safeguards should be taken for granted. The Supreme Court has proved unpredictable, if not unreliable, when it comes to providing checks on executive authority in the age of Trump. One has only to reread Chief Justice John Roberts’s landmark 2024 immunity ruling in Trump v. United States. The High Court, in the words of Vanity Fair’s Cristian Farias, “effectively shut down a criminal trial accusing Trump of masterminding his disruption of the [2021] transfer of power.” The result: Since the start of his second term, Trump has been basically free to pursue any and all executive actions that he or his counsel can argue were undertaken in an “official capacity.”

An authoritarian formula, indeed. Under Trump, the expansion of executive power has shown an unnerving ability to mutate as conditions change. Those who cherish democracy must stay alert. Vigilance remains the first defense. But the essential act is simpler still: vote. Vote early, if you can, because early voting makes election-day obstruction that much harder to pull off.

In a season of Cassandras, the most radical thing a citizen can do may also be the most ordinary.

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