Trump and congressional Republicans took a big risk by including some seriously unpopular measures in the just-signed budget bill. Many of them, notably cuts in food assistance and health care, and the effects of health care cuts on small rural hospitals, will hit red states especially hard.
The press has been filled with stories about the jeopardy this poses for Republican legislators who face re-election in 2026. These alarmist stories presume a relatively free and fair election. Can we assume that will occur?
Progressives have comforted themselves by pointing out that most of the swing House seats are in blue or purple states where Trumpers are not in control of the election machinery. But lately, the Trump Justice Department has begun an effort to intimidate state election officials nationwide.
The New York Times recently reported that senior DOJ officials, presumably in concert with the White House, have directed department lawyers “to examine the ways in which a hypothetical failure by state or local officials to follow security standards for electronic voting could be charged as a crime, appearing to assume a kind of criminally negligent mismanagement of election systems.”
The department has contacted election officials to demand information on voting in at least four states. Colorado is a particular target, since Trump is obsessed with the case of Tina Peters, a former county clerk who is serving nine years in prison for tampering with voting machines in an effort to prove that the machines had been used to rig the 2020 election against Trump. The president has called Peters a “political prisoner.”
For nearly six months, we have watched what appears to be an inexorable slide to outright dictatorship, as one after another of the firebreaks has been breached. We are left with the hope that Republicans will be repudiated at the polls in 2026. In a democracy, the ultimate firebreak is the right of the citizens to throw the rascals out. But that, in turn, will depend on whether the courts—notably an increasingly compliant Supreme Court—are willing to defend the ultimate check and balance of free elections.
What we’ve seen in the past few weeks isn’t encouraging. In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all prospective voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship. In April, a district court judge enjoined DHS from carrying out Trump’s order. Since then, however, the Supreme Court has ruled in Trump v. CASA that district court decisions do not apply nationwide. So the Trump order on proof of citizenship in voting could be revived.
Trump is pursuing his characteristic strategy of flooding the zone, in this case demanding voter information, threatening election officials with prosecution for even technical violations, and deterring voting by demanding proof of citizenship, while targeting naturalized citizens on another front.
In 2024, some vigilante Republican county officials and activists tried to overwhelm voting centers and poll workers in blue states. For the most part, it didn’t work, in part because the Biden Justice Department was there to prevent intimidation. This time, Trump will control the Justice Department response.
Trump doesn’t have to depress voting or accurate counting all that much to keep legislative control. That’s how dictators simulate continued democracy.
With these multiple assaults and the Supreme Court’s increasing complicity, the high court has to be considered a slender reed.
In these posts, I confess a slight bias toward hope. We may yet have free-enough elections in enough places in 2026. And the Supreme Court may yet remember that its prime job is to defend the Constitution. If not, full-on fascism will arrive.