On Monday a former National Security Agency official issued a warning: President Donald Trump does not care about his public image because he plans on stealing the midterm elections.
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“Everything he’s doing suggests someone who doesn’t care about public opinion,” Ben Rhodes, who served as Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications under President Barack Obama, told MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace. “I mean, Nicolle, announcing essentially an insider trading scheme where hedge funds can buy access to Truth Social posts, really, so they can make money off of trades on Trump’s war — I mean, it’s a policy designed in a laboratory to be deconstructed by [Sen.] Jon Ossoff [D-GA] and motivate Democratic voters.”
Referring to Trump’s repeated claims that there is no affordability crisis in America, that he does not think about Americans’ financial situations and that claims of high prices are a “Democratic hoax,” Rhodes observed that “Trump’s midterm election strategy is not to lower prices, is not to even talk about affordability. Trump told us his midterm election strategy last week: it’s to steal the election. It’s to say that there’s a combination of foreign interference and domestic fraud. He’ll try everything he can to disrupt voting itself. So we have to be worried about ICE agents or military even at polling sites, based on some trumped-up fake threat, based on some trumped-up fake threat. We have to worry about ballot boxes being seized before votes can be counted. We have to worry about Donald Trump saying, the minute the elections are over, that they were stolen.”
He added, “And this time around, he has a Justice Department led by, you know, Todd Blanche and Kash Patel, people who will go along with that and echo whatever he says. … He’s got a guy that’s in line to be the director of national intelligence who won’t even say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.”
Rhodes concluded, “This is happening before our eyes. This is not a conspiracy theory. He gave a primetime address last week telling us that his midterm election strategy is to steal the midterm elections, not to contest them and win them for Republicans. And so I think, number one, we have to be calling that out and telling people what to expect so that they see it before it happens. Number two, we have to fortify state elections, right? The elections are still run by the states in this country, not the federal government, and we’re going to need to be driving that principle home. Number three, I hope the Democrats win by a decisive enough margin that it just looks ridiculous and absurd for him to be contesting this at all. That matters, Nicolle.”
Speaking with AlterNet in June, the Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the good government nonprofit Common Cause identified a number of signs that Trump plans on stealing the midterm elections. These included trying to restrict mail-in voting, threatening to send ICE and radical groups to polling locations, gerrymandering in a partisan way, purging eligible voters and pushing for voter ID laws.
“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
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He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”
Vicuña continued that many of these efforts are also illegal.
“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña wrote. “You’ve seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail.”
He concluded, “In terms of the president’s authority to order around USPS, it’s illegal. In terms of USPS’s authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”
George F. Will, a conservative columnist and former adviser to Republican President Ronald Reagan, broke down in February how Trump’s loss in the 2020 election to Joe Biden is beyond reasonable doubt.
“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote for The Washington Post. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”
Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”
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