Chris Brennan column in USA Today:
They’re building the machine now to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections 15 months from now.
And those machinations are built on two lessons learned from 2020: Attack the election with everything you have before it happens, and stock the Trump administration only with officials who will do exactly what he says on elections, no matter what the law says.
Trump’s team of election deniers, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, represent both of these lessons.
The first they learned in 2020, when they failed while trying to help Trump overturn a free and fair election. It was all so careless and chaotic back then, a dizzying series of unsubstantiated claims and discombobulated news conferences punctuated by judge after judge tossing out Trump’s challenges as meritless.
I was reminded recently of a news conference I attended at Philadelphia’s airport on the day after the 2020 election. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, then working as Trump’s lawyer doing work that eventually got him disbarred, was the ringmaster for the election deniers that day. And Bondi was right by his side….
Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at The Brennan Center for Justice, told me that Trump and his team appear to be building a “pretext” on the false claim of rampant election fraud as justification for their potential meddling in the elections. They’re systematically removing “the brakes” that protect democracy during the voting process, she said.
“They’re taking aim at all of the brakes that applied before. And they’re starting earlier,” Weiser said. “That just shows you he’s laser-focused on interfering in elections here by any means necessary. Bend the rules. Throw out the playbook.”
David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who founded The Center for Election Innovation and Research, has been hosting monthly webinar meetings with hundreds of state election officials since March. Those officials – Republicans and Democrats – have plenty of questions and concerns about the “unprecedented level of federal interference in state election processes,” he told me.
“They’re not sure where all this is leading,” Becker said. “They hear the rhetoric coming out of the White House. They hear the continued false statements about past elections and election security in the United States.”
It’s worth noting here, as Weiser told me, that presidents have no role in running or overseeing elections in America, except for enforcing voting laws passed by Congress. And Becker noted that Congress, now controlled by Trump’s Republican allies, has not authorized the DOJ intrusions into state election systems.