It’s the Election, Stupid.
Keeping Watch on Trump’s Every Election-Related Move
Of the many ways that Donald Trump, abetted by the U.S. Supreme Court, has laid waste to the executive branch and ransacked civil society, one Trump target above all others requires our constant vigilance and hair-trigger sensitivity.
That is federal elections—and the prospect that Trump will try to achieve in pseudo-legal fashion what he failed to accomplish through brute force after the 2020 election he lost to President Biden.
Democracy can weather a lot of damage and unlawful conduct at Trump’s hands, but if he succeeds in taking control of the machinery of elections, it could be a fatal blow.
That’s what makes a quiet New York Times report from last week so deeply alarming. According to the article, senior Trump-aligned officials are pushing DOJ lawyers to consider bringing criminal charges against state and local election officials—accusing them, without basis, of failing to secure election-related technology.
The initiative isn’t backed by new evidence, credible data, or any coherent legal argument. There doesn’t even appear to be a relevant federal statute that would apply.
So it’s not about truth or justice. It’s a political and ideological ploy, reportedly incubated in the Project 2025 workshop—part of Trump’s longstanding broader effort to delegitimize democratic institutions and seize autocratic control.
As readers of this Substack know, I generally think the best way to unravel a Trump scheme is to start with the lie that always forms its foundation. That’s not hard here: it’s the same, repeatedly discredited but inexhaustibly pressed canard that elections are rife with fraud, including votes cast by undocumented immigrants.
It’s bogus. The 2020 and 2024 elections were remarkably secure, and there’s no reason to suspect 2026 and 2028 will be any different.
More than 60 court cases, state audits, and bipartisan election officials confirmed 2020 was secure. Even Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called it “the most secure in American history.”
But with Trump, the goal isn’t to advance facts—much less convince a court. It’s to inject fear and chaos into our institutions and force them to lean in to his advantage. And there’s no real counterweight—only the abstract values of truth and institutional integrity, left to fend for themselves.
Election workers are civic-minded citizens—often retirees or first-time volunteers—who step up to help the democratic process run. In 2020, hundreds of thousands of Americans participated. They weren’t political insiders or activists. They were neighbors, teachers, church ushers. They believed in the process.
Trump is trying to extinguish that belief—and cow them into leaning his way. The message is simple: help run an election that Trump loses, and we will come for you. Make a close judgment call for the wrong team, and you’ll be sorry.
What makes this latest maneuver so dangerous is that it aims not just to relitigate 2024 but to pre-rig 2028. If Trump can scare off honest poll workers and install loyalists, he won’t need to overturn the results. He can subvert the process from the inside.
This gambit isn’t just about contesting the last election—it’s about shaping the next one. If he can drive out honest officials and replace them with loyalists, he won’t need to fight over the outcome. The process will already be tilted. And even short of that, he can succeed simply by pressuring officials into siding with him in borderline situations—out of fear of a possible federal indictment if they don’t.
We’ve seen this script before. After the 2020 election, Georgia workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss were targeted by Trump and Rudy Giuliani, who spread the grotesque lie that they had stuffed ballots from a suitcase. It wasn’t true. But the damage was real: threats, harassment, psychological trauma. Freeman had to leave her home. Moss quit her job. These are the people Trump would have you believe are criminals.
The most similar inside strategy Trump pursued last time around came in the final weeks of his presidency, when he attempted to weaponize the Justice Department to help overturn the 2020 election. In early January 2021, he leaned on DOJ leadership to sign a letter falsely suggesting the Department had found substantial fraud in Georgia and other swing states.
The aim was to give Republican-controlled legislatures the cover to toss out Biden’s win. As Trump notoriously put it: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputies refused. When Trump threatened to replace Rosen with a loyalist, Jeffrey Clark—the very official who had drafted the misleading letter—the rest of DOJ’s senior leadership threatened to resign en masse. That high-wire act of institutional pushback likely forestalled a full-blown constitutional crisis.
But that was then. The Trump team of 2025 won’t be filled with reluctant public servants—it’ll be stacked with loyalists eager to execute the plan. With Bondi, Blanche, and Bove (or Bove’s successor if he is confirmed to the court of appeals) waiting in the wings—and Project 2025 providing a ready-made instruction manual—there’s every reason to think DOJ would not just cooperate, but lead the charge. What was once a red line is now a roadmap.
And disturbingly, the tactic may be working.
All over the country, election administrators are stepping down. Positions that once flew under the radar have become flashpoints. If Trump can intimidate law firms and cow universities into silence, what chance do local election offices have?
Ironically, this is the same DOJ that has all but dismantled its own Voting Rights Section—shrinking it from over 30 attorneys to just a skeleton crew—and has let the Biden administration’s voting rights lawsuits languish. And yet now, it appears ready to leap into action, chasing imaginary cybersecurity lapses while ignoring actual voter intimidation and suppression.
If the Department of Justice no longer functions as a nonpartisan guardian of the law, the burden shifts to the rest of us. We can’t afford to tune out or stand down. The stakes are already visible. Across the country, election officials are resigning in droves. Offices that were once low-profile and nonpartisan have become hotbeds of threats and suspicion. Trump has already browbeaten major law firms and entire universities into submission.
So be it. It falls to the rest of us to maintain laser focus on federal elections and not permit Trump and company to gain a toehold—through any entryway.
Trump remains a clear and present danger to democracy, and seizing control of the election process remains the most direct path to authoritarianism. Criminalizing poll workers isn’t just another zany headline from the Trumpverse—it’s a test run for a longer, darker project. That is the prism we need to apply to developments that might otherwise get tossed into the weekly pile of Trump outrages.
It’s not alarmist to worry that Trump, having failed to overturn the last election through brute force, is now laying the groundwork to capture the next one through pseudo-legal means. If the Justice Department becomes the tip of the spear—targeting election officials not for fraud but for imagined cybersecurity lapses—it would mark a dangerous escalation in the project to warp our institutions for authoritarian ends.
We’ve already seen what it looks like when Trump tries to overthrow an election from the outside. What should terrify us now—and keep us on high alert—is the prospect of his doing it from the inside by weaponizing existing legal tools.
That’s not just a crisis for the next election—it’s an existential threat to the republic itself.
Talk to you later.
Like most of felon Trumps illegal acts over the last ten years, he does them in the open and in daylight!
This does not make it right, but it does make one wonder why there is so little push back from Americans!
Are people OK with this destruction of our Democracy by Trumps incompetent enablers?
This seems like projection... Why aren't more people talking about the data that THIS WILL HOLD substack has collected and laid out with all of the spider web of connections to the people that helped fund the current administration during the campaign? I implore everyone to subscribe to THIS WILL HOLD to follow their series on anomalies that have been identified in many aspects of the 2024 election, and pay attention to the Rockland lawsuit that is requesting a hand recount due to data anomalies identified by Election Truth Alliance. We shouldn't shy away from this just because we don't want to seem like he did in 2020 with questioning the election results!