Can Trump Steal the Midterms? Six Takeaways from Our Election Investigation 75%
By Matthew Cooper87%
7/16/2026, 10:19:11 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Quote-first Misdirection, Anecdotal, and Ambiguity (Equivocation), with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 65.5% saturation with 562 hits. Analysis detected 2,783 faulty-reasoning hits from 858 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 67.2% and a BS Rank of 75% (5,308 of 21,180 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 74.90% of the article peer group.
On Thursday night, President Donald Trump is scheduled to address the nation and will reportedly repeat his false claim that the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was stolen.
Reports indicate that he’ll focus on, among other things, the Chinese acquisition of (publicly available) voter files and returns from Georgia, a state that Trump narrowly lost but sought to have its results overturned , despite the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state insisting that voting was entirely above board.
The address makes a recent piece, “Trump’s Election Subversion?
Which Ones Are Concerning, and how you save democracy” by Washington Monthly Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps, even more timely.
Here are six key takeaways from what Epps calls “the most important midterms since 1862.”
As president, Trump has the power to disrupt the midterms .
While Trump’s demand for Congressional passage of the SAVE Act, which would (likely unconstitutionally) impose new barriers to voting, is stymied in the U.S.
Senate, he has formidable power over federal law enforcement and has already begun using it to disrupt or distort elections .
On June 11, FBI agents fanned out across Ohio to seize the records of a non-partisan non-profit that supports liberal causes and conducts voter registration drives.”
This Spring, Epps notes, “when FBI agents seized the 2020 election voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, they were joined by Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence.
The DNI has no role in domestic politics.”
His Acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, and FBI Director Kash Patel have shown unwavering enthusiasm for pursuing false election claims, with Patel personally overseeing the bureau’s extensive investigation into Trump’s 2020 accusations and directing more agents to examine voting in Georgia.
But midterms are hard to subvert .
“A Trump coup attempt is unlikely to succeed, and there will be one hell of a fight before it happens,” wrote Epps, who makes the point that the diffuse, federalist system of elections makes it hard for even a villainous president to subvert the will of the people in the midterms.
Unlike January 6, 2021, when the certification of the Electoral College vote offered a single chokepoint that Trump-supporting rioters tried to exploit to derail Biden’s election and might have succeeded but for the unwillingness of then-Vice President Mike Pence to participate in derailing the count, there is no such chokepoint in a midterm election.
Trump would somehow have to distort voting in 435 separate House elections and 35 separate Senate elections, which is not easy to accomplish.
Trumpian incompetence makes a coup less likely .
Could this presidential team really steal an election?
Epps has his doubts about their competence, despite the presence of savvy operators in the administration such as Stephen Miller, the presidential adviser: “Much of his team, though, has a kind of Keystone Cops quality : JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel, Mullin, Todd Blanche, who have bungled efforts to obtain grand jury indictments, impose lawful tariffs, conduct immigration operations, build a ballroom, or arrange a Fourth of July concert.
These are people who literally can’t paint a swimming pool.”
An unpopular Trump can’t count on GOP allies.
To pull off a coup, he’d need the cooperation of politicians who may not be on board.
“History suggests that when an incompetent underling asks a professional politician to risk their future to help an unpopular leader commit a daylight robbery, the underling hesitates,” Epps notes.
“And it might not take much reluctance to derail the Trump express: The New York Times recently reported that Vance and Miller wanted to respond to protests in Minneapolis by invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law—but were stymied by one obscure right-wing White House lawyer who protested against this gross violation of the Constitution.”
Trump has torn up the Justice Department, but civil society groups are ready .
Epps notes Trump’s second-term decimation of the Justice Department’s ranks and its losses in court on many key civil liberties cases.
He contrasts this with “powerful forces—civil society groups and state governments—are mobilizing to oppose these schemes in court….
These groups have run up an impressive score against this administration in areas including the use of the military in Los Angeles, Portland (Oregon), Minneapolis, and Chicago, as well as attempts to change election laws by fiat.
They live for these cases, and they are good at them.”
There is a lot that citizens can do .
The piece contains a sidebar by Washington Monthly Editorial Intern Samanta Powers detailing the many actions that citizens can take to promote safer elections, including availing themselves of many groups that will be working to ensure voting is safe, accurate, and fair, and ways you, as a citizen, can sign up to be a volunteer at the polls.
For instance, Veterans and military family members interested in serving their community this November can join Vet the Vote to be matched with local poll-worker positions.
The post Can Trump Steal the Midterms?
Six Takeaways from Our Election Investigation appeared first on Washington Monthly .
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