Stealing the Midterms
Even the mainstream media is starting to notice something is up
Three days ago, even Ezra Klein noticed that Trump does not seem to care about winning the midterms. As I pointed out in one of my first Substack posts, written on October 1, 2025:
Here is how you know that things are already very bad. Politics involves in part attempts to persuade by the manipulation of information, sometimes deceitful. That is, all politics involves at least partly soft propaganda. Soft propaganda is an attempt to manipulate people into changing their minds by bending or masking reality. The use of soft propaganda by politicians in a democracy is regrettable. But it is just life. Hard propaganda is something different. Hard propaganda is a message of raw power – it is the message: whatever you think about what we are doing, you are powerless to stop it. Politicians in a democracy regularly direct soft propaganda towards their own citizens; it is one of the jobs of the media in a democracy to call it out. Hard propaganda is not an attempt to change minds by the use of (for example) misinformation. Hard propaganda is a flex of power – it is a message democracies do not direct against a domestic opposition party. It is only a tool a democracy employs against external enemies.
We are now clearly seeing the Trump regime directing hard propaganda against the domestic political opposition. Trump is explicitly saying he is going to crush his political opposition using the instruments of the state. He is saying he will imprison his political opponents just because they are political opponents. He is sending the military into US cities with the clear message that protest will be crushed. Senior members of the Trump regime are saying openly they will annihilate Democratic politicians, their organizations, and their supporters. This is not an attempt to persuade an audience. This is the kind of flex of power an actual democracy would only employ against its external enemies. This is fascism.
Since the summer of 2025, Trump and his cohort have been acting they have a plan to win the midterms without having to broaden their popular support. In fact, Trump has never tried to broaden his popular support, instead waging war against states that voted against him, and denouncing those who vote against him as domestic threats. We can now see various elements of this plan fall into place. At its heart, the strategy involves massive gerrymandering. In addition to Trump’s call to GOP controlled states to change their maps before the election, one can be certain that the Trump regime expected the Supreme Court they share with the oligarchs to lay a heavy finger on the scale via the elimination of the Voting Rights Act.
It has been a truly distinctive feature of Trump’s regime that it has not even attempted to broaden its popular support, instead directing “hard propaganda” against its domestic opponents.
The question now is what other tactics does the Trump regime have in store, in case their SCOTUS charged authoritarian attempt to gerrymander the country to a Midterm victory looks like it will not be enough? Here are some of the most obvious possibilities:
1. Use ICE to intimidate (non-white) voters at the polls (highly likely)
2. Use legal challenges to contest any even moderately close results, relying on Trump’s Supreme Court as a reliable backstop for this kind of move (highly likely).
3. Interfere with election results, e.g. by altering the vote count (likely).
4. Reducing security around polling machines to enable external altering of the vote count (this is already happening).
5. Use the Iran war to cancel or delay the elections (somewhat likely).
6. Use a terrorist attack to cancel or delay the elections (highly likely if there is such an attack).
A country’s authoritarian present always draws on its authoritarian past; therefore, we should have expected that key to the Trump regime’s tactics would be to use the Trump court to restore central elements of Jim Crow (interracial marriage remains safe, I would think into the future). And we have to see the war on Iran in the context of Trump’s long held belief that war, specifically against Iran, is a potent tool to steal an election.
In this context, I think we can see that, from Trump’s perspective, a lengthy war with Iran is not necessarily something to be avoided.