For two years, President Donald Trump and his allies have done everything imaginable, and some things unimaginable, to subvert the midterm election.
The latest headlines have been about his administration’s criminal probe into the Alaska Senate race and its attempts to get California to set aside 20,000 ballots and more in Washington state, while the Supreme Court delivers yet another ruling that boosts the Republicans’ money advantage.
In other words, it’s a continuation of what’s been happening steadily over the past two years, in which we’ve seen runaway redistricting, taxpayer funds used for Republican campaign ads, flagrantly unconstitutional attempts to federalize elections and sabotage mail-in voting and constant lies about noncitizens committing election fraud.
The breadth of the election subversion is staggering. To give you a sense of it, I list below 54 ways in which Trump and his allies have stacked the deck in this election — a full deck of falsely dealt cards, jokers and all. No doubt I’ve missed many, but this is my stab at a comprehensive list of the methods by which Trump, MAGA devotees in state government and, frequently, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court have attempted to insulate the Republican majority from the will of the voters.
I tally these up not only to document for posterity the greatest effort to subvert an election that a presidential administration has ever undertaken, but also to show the extraordinary achievement of civil society in overcoming this sabotage.
His unprecedented actions have inspired an equal and opposite reaction, a countermovement of state and local officials, nonprofits and hundreds of thousands of volunteers that has largely defeated his assault on elections. Though his work to discredit the election will undoubtedly continue, and likely intensify, after Election Day and before the vote is certified, this movement is well positioned to push back against whatever he may come up with.
No question, Trump’s constant attacks on election integrity have left a mark. Majorities of Republicans expect a substantial amount of noncitizen voting, ballot tampering and voting machines changing votes. But he has failed to destroy faith in our democracy.
A survey by the academic research group Bright Line Watch reported this week that confidence in the election on both the right and left has improved from its low early last year. Seventy-three percent of Democrats, 67% of Republicans and 85% of elections experts believe that votes will be counted as the citizens intended.
There is good reason for the confidence. The extraordinary size of the early vote (much of it in-person, likely to avoid Trump’s well-advertised threats to mail-in voting) has lessened Trump’s ability to cause mayhem on Election Day. As of Thursday afternoon, a stunning 43.6 million Americans had already voted, according to the University of Florida Election Lab, and turnout is on track to rival the massive 2018 showing for Democrats, which saw the highest midterm participation in more than a century.
Another reason for confidence is the arsenal of democracy activists staged across the country. Mark Blumberg, executive director of the just-launched Rule of Law Project, tells me that “a staggering number of lawyers” are volunteering to help elections officials and municipalities battle the anticipated onslaught from the Trump administration. Blumberg, who did election-protection work at the Justice Department for two decades, says “the response to the threat is extraordinary.”
At Indivisible, a leader of the No Kings movement, co-founder Leah Greenberg tells me the group has trained 11,000 people for its Election Defense Corps in seven key states and continues to add volunteers. “I’m quite optimistic,” Greenberg says. Trump, she says, “is throwing spaghetti at the wall,” and “most of that has not succeeded so far.”
It’s not that anybody expects the Trump administration to behave itself. “I will never bet against their ability to surprise us with something that is somehow both evil and insane,” Greenberg says. But she is confident the democracy movement has a “flexible, fluid, rapid-response capacity” in place to deal with whatever shenanigans occur.
That is key. The administration may be conspicuously lacking in legal merits and on the facts, but it seems to have an endlessly replenishing supply of diabolical ingenuity.
Let us, then, explore the 54 ways in which Trump and his allies have already tried to stack the deck for Republicans in the midterms:
He threatened a federal takeover of the election and sounded unfounded alarms about the voting system:
1. Trump, directly contradicting the Constitution, which gives elections power to the states, declared that “States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”
2. He announced: “We should take over the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
3. He gave a prime-time address to the nation in July purporting to show “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” but then failed to deliver any new evidence.
He threatened to send federal police or troops to polling places and to meddle with the counting of votes:
4. Trump declined to rule out sending ICE or federal troops to polling places on Election Day, saying he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.” Some FBI agents worry they will be forced to interfere, MS NOW reports.
5. Todd Blanche, the former Trump criminal defense lawyer who is now attorney general, declined to rule out an attempt by the DOJ to interfere with the counting of ballots.
6. Trump’s Justice Department preemptively sued to block Alaska from certifying its election results — but only if the Republican loses. Trump said he personally ordered the lawsuit.
He used, and promised to use, government funds for partisan advantage:
7. Trump offered voters a $5,000 bribe — to be paid to every American adult, but only if Republicans win the election.
8. With his administration struggling to find instances of fraud, he dangled an award of $1 million to anyone who reports and proves voter fraud — an offer aimed at producing distrust rather than payouts.
9. He tried to withhold federal counterterrorism funds from states that didn’t change their election procedures to his liking.
10. He used $22 million in taxpayer dollars, pulled from the Department of Homeland Security, on campaign ads.
11. The FBI released a two-minute, partisan video attacking “democratic socialist leaders” and specifically condemning Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan. (It took the video down after complaints.)
He tried to wrest 15 House seats from Democratic control with a nationwide mid-decade redistricting:
12. The administration successfully argued before the Supreme Court for the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act’s protections of minority voters, giving Republicans an additional House seat in Louisiana.
13. The administration successfully backed Alabama in another Supreme Court case that reduced minority voting power and shifted another House seat to Republicans.
14. After Trump said Republicans were “entitled to five more seats” in Texas, the administration successfully argued before the Supreme Court for the Texas mid-decade redistricting that was intended to shift the five House seats to Republicans.
15. The administration unsuccessfully backed an effort in Missouri to shift another House seat to Republicans.
16. His administration unsuccessfully argued at the Supreme Court against a California redistricting that shifted five House seats to Democrats.
17. He opposed a Virginia redistricting, rejected by the Supreme Court, that would have shifted four House seats to Democrats.
In all, the extraordinary mid-decade redistricting war he launched was calculated to shift a net of nine House seats to Republicans, after including Democratic retaliation.
The Justice Department, jettisoning its tradition of avoiding politically charged moves on the eve of an election, went on a partisan spree in October:
18. It raided the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), a frequent Trump target.
19. It indicted former FBI Director James Comey, loathed by Trump for launching the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, for a third time.
20. It brought dubious charges against two former FBI officials over the Hunter Biden laptop investigation.
21. It tried and failed to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump aide who testified about the president’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump tried to disrupt the use of mail-in ballots:
22. Trump issued an executive order that attempted, by fiat, to give the federal government control over mail-in balloting. The Supreme Court shot it down.
23. The Republican National Committee, under Trump’s control, attempted — and failed — to overturn state laws allowing the counting of mail-in ballots if they are postmarked by Election Day.
24. DOJ sued to force California to set aside more than 20,000 mail-in ballots from alleged noncitizens. It brought charges against only 28 of those people, and some of those weren’t election-related charges.
25. DOJ did something similar in Washington state, alleging 400 possible noncitizens cast 1,500 votes in elections going back, apparently, to 1994.
He tried to seize state voter rolls under the guise of culling noncitizen voters:
26. The administration filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia trying to force them to release their voter data. So far Trump has lost 27 straight district-court rulings in these cases.
27. Trump claimed in a televised address to the nation in July that the Department of Homeland Security had found 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote, but the administration has produced only a bit more than 180 arrests — and none of those appears to be part of an organized attempt at election fraud, a Washington Post analysis found.
28. Trump claimed to have identified 16,000 noncitizens who were registered to vote in Nevada (part of the 278,000 he alleged in his address to the nation). The administration then reduced that number to 185 — and Nevada found that all of those were citizens.
29. The Trump Department of Homeland Security, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, began providing citizenship verification for states to use on their voter rolls, even though the database is error-prone.
30. The Justice Department sent letters to all the states threatening criminal prosecution of election officials if they count any ballots cast by noncitizens.
31. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened election officials with fines and prison time if they didn’t change their elections policies to suit the administration.
32. DHS is keeping up a pre-election drumbeat of arrests (but notably not convictions) of noncitizens for voter fraud — a brazenly mendacious attempt to portray the handful of cases as a widespread phenomenon.
He and his allies got the Supreme Court to further rewrite campaign-spending laws to favor Republicans:
33. The administration backed an attempt by the GOP, blessed by the Supreme Court, to eliminate federal limits on party spending in coordination with candidates — a shift that overwhelmingly benefits Republicans.
34. The Supreme Court approved a bid by the Republican National Committee to secure cheaper television ad rates for parties.
These rulings, combined with others going back to Citizens United in 2010, allowed billionaires and the AI and crypto industries to dominate the election. Even though Democrats have more than four times as many donors as Republicans, Republicans enjoy a half-billion-dollar spending advantage — much of that provided by one man, Elon Musk.
Trump and his allies attempted a flurry of changes making it harder to vote, particularly for Democratic constituencies:
35. The Supreme Court upheld a Republican effort to restrict the use of student IDs to receive a ballot in New Hampshire, making it harder for a strongly Democratic group to vote.
36. Trump repeatedly pushed, unsuccessfully, for passage of the SAVE Act, which would require a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote — which would block millions of eligible voters from registering.
37. Trump issued an executive order — shot down in court — requiring people to show a passport or other citizenship document in order to register to vote with the federal voter-registration form.
38. Republican officeholders led the way in implementing 47 new laws in 22 states that impose voting obstacles in 2026, the Brennan Center for Justice reported. These include ID requirements and reductions in polling places.
39. To cite just one example, GOP-run Tarrant County, Texas, in the Fort Worth area, closed 92 of its 316 polling places for 2026, including all the voting sites in one zip code that is three quarters Black and Hispanic.
40. The Justice Department reached an agreement with North Carolina that forces more than 100,000 registered voters to reestablish their eligibility to vote.
41. A last-minute change to rules for mail-in ballots by North Carolina’s GOP-controlled Board of Elections has led to 6% of ballots being rejected, Common Cause North Carolina reports.
42. The DOJ is deploying 1,000 election observers — a record number — to polling places on Election Day, raising fresh concerns about interference.
43. The DOJ election monitors raised eyebrows during this year’s primaries, including in Wyoming, where they tried to inspect voting machines and interview voters inside polling places. The state’s Republican governor protested the “aggressive” and “disruptive” actions.
His Cabinet officers and senior administration officials went to unheard of lengths to politicize their offices:
44. The chair of the FCC, Brendan Carr, threatened to punish broadcasters who air “suppression polls” — which Trump tends to define as polls that don’t show his side winning.
45. Carr has also been investigating networks over the political content of their daytime and late-night shows, while leaving right-wing talk radio untouched by such scrutiny.
46. Blanche, the attorney general, has been stumping for Republican candidates — jettisoning the long-standing expectation of nonpartisanship in those posts.
47. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has also trashed the nonpartisan tradition of his position and has been touring the country and touting Republicans.
48. Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, sent a letter to Minnesota hours after the killing of Alex Pretti by immigration agents demanding that the state turn over its voter rolls to the federal government if it wanted ICE to leave — in effect, a ransom note.
Trump tried to sabotage the organizations that protect election security:
49. The administration temporarily stopped election security activities by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and attempted a massive cut in its budget. Musk’s DOGE slashed CISA staff, including election security advisers.
50. Trump attempted to punish law firms, and extracted concessions from several, in part because of their work on voter protections.
Trump used the power of the state to cast more doubts on election integrity by attempting to revive the lie that he won the 2020 presidential contest:
51. Trump pardoned the roughly 1,500 Jan. 6 offenders involved in the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. He also pardoned people involved in the 2020 “fake electors” scheme.
52. The FBI, on orders from an election denier in the DOJ, raided elections offices in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized its ballots from the 2020 election.
53. The DOJ has tried to get access to the Dominion Voting Systems equipment used by two Missouri counties in 2020.
54. FBI agents took hard drives and servers from a Republican audit of Arizona’s Maricopa County 2020 election apparently to use the debunked information to cast suspicion on the election.
Without a doubt, there will be many more in the coming days and weeks that are as astonishing as the previous 54.
But he will not prevail. With our votes already cast, and with those we will cast through Tuesday, we will prove that, despite Trump’s best efforts, American democracy remains resilient. To borrow Trump’s phrase, let’s make this vote “too big to rig.”
Dana Milbank is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
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