This long-running Trump lie is a cancer — and it will soon be uncurable

Over the past decade, I’ve been one of those crazy conspiracy theorists who believes our elections have been rigged, all right … but not by the Democrats, as Donald Trump persistently claims.

Who knows what Elon Musk was able to pull off with his Starlink satellite system in 2024? It seems to me the 2016 and ‘24 elections could well have been manipulated at the electronic level, to hand victory to Trump. It honestly isn’t so far-fetched. Will it ever be provable? Probably not. But that doesn’t make it any less possible/probable.

Beyond that, it’s downright miraculous how every time the Dems win, it’s only through “voter fraud,” but when the Republicans win it’s all perfectly legit — according to them. And this is how you murder democracy. When neither side trusts election results, that’s pretty much the end.

What’s interesting this time are the great lengths to which Trump and his enablers are going to pre-rig the 2026 midterms, taking no chances on making it happen after the fact. They learned that lesson the hard way after losing the White House in 2020 and then turning the earth upside-down to try to change that result, over and over and over, without success.

About those great lengths. This week, we saw subtle hints that may soon metastasize into lawless action.

“We should take over the voting in at least 15 places,” Trump told right-wing podcaster (and ex-FBI Deputy Director] Dan Bongino. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The supposed need for this lay in Trump’s claim without evidence that in 2024 there were “states that are so crooked … that I won that show I didn’t win.”

Trump doubled down in an interview from the Oval Office, saying the federal government should “get involved” in elections and usurp state laws by exerting control.

If states “can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over,” Trump said.

Nationalizing voting would enable the Republican party to falsify ballots as it saw fit. And after the FBI seizing ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, and Attorney General Pam Bondi making turning over the voter database from Minnesota a condition for pulling ICE out of the state, it’s clear that part of the strategy this time is to control the voting apparatus, on the pretext of protecting the system.

It is of course the Republicans that are perpetrating the swindle, knowing all too well they stand little to no chance of winning the midterms in a straight fight. So they’re trying to take it away from the states and put the fate of the republic in the hands of a corrupt and compromised Department of Justice.

Let’s say there are enough complaints about election results that the DOJ orders U.S. Marshals to confiscate all voting machines and paper ballots for “review.” Claims of fraud, sabotage, or concocted “irregularities” could stop results being certified.

The goal seems to be to throw the midterms into chaos, sparking a barrage of litigation that will wind up in the hands of that group of partisan bozos known as the Supreme Court.

We all know how things have turned out with them lately.

The table is being set. Congressional districts continue to be gerrymandered, so far with limited success. But there’s talk of placing armed and masked ICE agents at polling places in Blue States, as a way to intimidate voters. And there is Trump’s persistent threat to invoke the Insurrection Act — the looming danger of martial law as a ploy to cancel elections outright.

It's a pre-response to the near certainty that the Republicans lose the House and possibly the Senate. It’s nearly always the case that the party out of power dominates the midterms, and that goes quadruple under an administration working so hard to perpetrate a fascist takeover.

What’s particularly alarming is that Trump leads a group of sycophantic dolts and MAGA cultists who will do anything for Dear Leader and pay no attention to what might be legal, the rule of law being so quaintly outdated.

Who is going to stop them from interfering with the elections?

Let’s say the Supreme Court makes one of its famous shadow docket decisions, except this time the ruling aims to stop Trump grabbing voting apparatus state by state?

He will insist it’s being done to “save the country” — and continue.

Furthermore, Republican incumbents who lose House and Senate races might simply refuse to step down, backed by Trump, because the vote was “fraudulent.” There will be no evidence, of course, and such an action would invalidate the nation’s entire political structure — but that seems to be the abuser-in-chief’s goal anyway.

Who is going to enforce things from going off the rails? If the judiciary’s decisions are ignored, it would be left to decent Republicans to do the right thing, and intervene.

I hear you laughing from here.

I say all of this not to spread despair, but to appeal for everyone to be on red alert. This is where things look to be heading.

The only things that might prevent this are:

1. Republicans finally locate their spines.
2. We the people rise up in sufficient numbers that the system holds.

Trump can be successfully opposed. The truth-telling opposition must be active on all fronts, including social media and the street. The louder and more insistent it gets, the greater Trump’s decline will accelerate.

• Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
• This column was updated on 8 Feb. 2026, to correct an error regarding AG Pam Bondi's request for voter information in Minnesota.