Be optimistic about the midterms, but be unsurprised if Trump pulls a coup
Things are looking up for pro-democracy forces in the midterms.
When Donald Trump has to travel to Alaska in the campaign’s final month to try to save a Senate seat, it’s a sign that the dictator’s magic is wearing off, even among former true believers. According to a recent Pew poll, only 67% of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 approve of his performance as president, down from 83% at the start of this year and 95% early in his second term.
It seems likely that Democrats will win the House and they could even take the Senate, with strong candidates in red states like Kansas and Iowa.
That’s encouraging. But it’s also scary. Because when authoritarians like Trump see a dramatic slide in support, they often respond with further abuses of power and even violence.
Trump has already tried to overthrow democracy once. He didn’t succeed, but he wasn’t punished either, so why wouldn’t he try again? He has built ICE up into a dangerous thug army and installed even more compliant underlings, including a defense secretary who specializes in performative violence.
Both the 2021 attempt and a potential new one would be what is called a “self-coup”: when a sitting leader overturns an election result or makes another power grab to retain or expand their power.
Trump has kinship with another authoritarian who participated in a self-coup: Delcy Rodríguez of Venezuela. The only difference is that Rodríguez’s power grab was successful. She was a key ally of President Nicolás Maduro when he stole his country’s 2024 election, and when U.S. forces later seized Maduro in a deadly raid ordered by Trump, she was happy to take over and help the U.S. regime steal Venezuela’s oil. It won’t surprise you to hear that no elections are currently scheduled there.
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There are several ominous signs as our own elections approach. I often criticize major media for not taking the Trump threat seriously enough, but they’ve done a decent job of covering Republicans’ sneaky maneuvers:
Homeland Security officials are targeting voter registration groups with investigations, and may deploy undercover agents to “disrupt activities.”
ICE agents are already showing up near polling places.
Tina Peters, a former Colorado official who did prison time for election misconduct, met with Trump at the White House to discuss “election integrity” and the possibility of a federal seizure of ballots.
For the first time in more than two decades, observers from an international election-monitoring group won’t be present during midterms voting… because the regime declined to invite them.
At a rally last week, Trump said: “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right, Russ? He’s going to be one of the very important people in the history of our country, in my opinion.” The “Russ” in question is Russell Vought, who heads the Office of Management and Budget – not the kind of agency you’d expect to be a major player in an election crackdown. But Vought had a major role in Project 2025 and is pushing Trump to seize more power.
Trump’s “Justice” Department is seeking to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for telling the truth about the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Homeland Security investigators raided Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home on Monday, about three weeks before Election Day, disregarding the general policy that investigators go quiet on matters involving candidates this close to an election.
So what can we do to safeguard democracy?
Participate in the No Kings nationwide day of action this coming Saturday, Oct. 17.
Volunteer to campaign for pro-democracy candidates. It’s not too late.
Remind your less engaged friends and relatives to vote.
Support organizations waging legal fights for fair elections. It’s possible that Democrats could win both houses of Congress and the regime would accept the result, but their rhetoric doesn’t offer much hope for that. So expect legal challenges and conspiracy theories if the Republicans dislike the results.
Don’t assume that the resolution of individual election disputes in court will be the end of the problems. Retired Judge J. Michael Luttig has warned that Republicans might refuse to seat some Democrats when the new session of the House begins on Jan. 3.
Get psychologically prepared for the possibility that Trump will invent some sort of national emergency to delay or disrupt the voting or the seating of a new Congress. If that happens, it will be time for concerted resistance. University of California, Berkeley, professor Neil Abrams wrote an article for The New Republic about how “nonviolent rebellion” worked in Serbia and Minnesota and could work if Trump tries to steal this election.
I’m not trying to be alarmist, but I am trying to be realistic. This is an opportunity for us to be the kind of Americans our descendants will be proud of.
This week’s media atrocity
ABC News blew it by publishing a clearly flawed story about a company linked to Donald Trump. Jr. that has been getting government contracts. The article contained factual errors and failed to give the company a chance to comment. People may think the only reason journalists seek comments from the subjects of stories is for the sake of fairness, but it’s also a chance for them to save you from yourself if you’ve got facts wrong.
After defending the story for a while, ABC deleted it from its website (in the business, we call that “unpublishing”), and later reposted it with a tamer headline, no byline, and corrections made. In this time of rampant corruption by the Trumps, the last thing we need is a major news outlet giving credence to Trump’s lies about “fake news.”
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