Community organization of citizens is needed. Some thoughts:
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Before the elections, they’re going to try and purge eligible voters off the rolls, especially ones they consider likely democratic voters. (Part of what DOGE accomplished was acquiring and collating detailed government records on everyone and ways to query that data for their purposes, like this one). So people who get purged may need help a) finding out in time that they were purged and b) getting re-registered, which could mean help with trips to offices and funds for fees so if needed they can get their birth certificate/marriage license or other required documents.
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Everyone should vote early if they can. We don’t even know if the Post office can be trusted with mail ballots either, so if you’re in a vote-by-mail state, if possible, take your ballot to the election office ahead of time and hand it in personally. Either way, we need to organize rides to/from the election office for anyone who needs them so as many people as possible can vote early and minimize the number of people having to go to the polls on election day. That way if they do seize ballots from some stations, fewer votes would be lost.
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Scouts in the areas near the polling places to call in any locations ICE shows up at and monitoring/reporting what they see back to the central group, who could send people there to record them.
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Then we need ideas how to make sure people can still safely get in to vote if ICE is there, without disrupting anything, if that’s possible. Maybe some civil rights lawyers or ACLU would have advice. In any case, documenting what they do is important. There are laws on how close people are allowed to a polling station but we could have multiple people filming from different angles and of any doors in/out. It would be good if the elections office could have cameras installed inside the locations, at least ones in “swing” districts where feds would be likely to try and interfere.
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Governors need to call up their national guard, and place them around their state’s vulnerable election infrastructure, with orders to prevent illegal interference in their local elections.
ICE can probably outman and outgun any local police department, outside of major ones like NYPD or LAPD, but not the national guard.
Trump would be forced to bring in the actual military to steal the election by force. At that point, he either has the support for a coup, or he doesn’t.
Nothing to see here. Move along!
So this article has a narrow scope, it only considers two ways Trump might interfere:
This interference could take many forms. But recent events have increased experts’ level of concern about two possibilities in particular:
- That the Trump administration will try to seize ballots and voting machines from key jurisdictions before votes have been fully counted.
- That Trump will deploy ICE or other federal agents to the vicinity of critical polling places, so as to deter turnout among voters in general — and those with undocumented family members, in particular.
So for context, the people who don’t think Trump will succeed are:
Wendy Weiser, the VP of the Brennan Center,
and Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar and prior Biden-era deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s civil rights department.
For context about the Brennan Center:
The Brennan Center for Justice is an American liberal[2][3][4] nonprofit law and public policy institute. The organization is named after Supreme Court justice William J. Brennan Jr. The Brennan Center advocates for public policy positions including raising the minimum wage, opposing voter ID laws, and calling for public funding of elections.[5][6] Its operations are centered at the New York University School of Law. The organization opposed the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, which held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by nonprofit organizations.[7][8]
The stated mission of the Brennan Center is to “work to hold our political institutions and laws accountable to the twin American ideals of democracy and equal justice for all”.[9] Its president is Michael Waldman, former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton.
So why does the article say the attempts will fail?
“There is a very high risk that the administration will use every tool at its disposal to get voting machines or ballots in the course of an upcoming election,” the Brennan Center’s Weiser told me. “But I don’t think there is a high risk that they will succeed.”
“I think every magistrate judge in the country would understand the difference between a search warrant to seize materials for an election that happened five years ago and a search warrant to seize election materials from an election in progress,” Levitt said. “I understand why people are worried. But it’s not remotely the same.”
So Weiser and Levitt think rule of law will prevail and the courts will not grant Trump the authority to seize election materials during the election.
What about ICE?
Even just having ICE presence at polling stations could deter certain voters, it’s hard to say what the aggregate effects of these measures might be, from the article:
Their reasoning is simple: If ICE is harassing residents and causing traffic jams in heavily Democratic precincts, fewer Americans will make it to the voting booth in those areas. And voters with undocumented family members may be especially likely to stay home.
“Trump wants to project ICE as an all-powerful force everywhere,” Levitt said. “And they are, as Minneapolis is proving emphatically, not. There simply aren’t enough ICE personnel to blanket a modestly large city. We live in a big country. And it is hard to control through fear.”
Even in the Twin Cities — where Trump deployed some 3,000 immigration enforcement agents — ICE’s presence seems to have mobilized Democratic voters, rather than deterring them. In a special election on January 27 for Minnesota House district 64A, the Democratic candidate defeated her Republican opponent by a 91-point margin. In 2024, a Democrat had won the seat by 66.6 percentage points.
“There is clearly an effort afoot to interfere in our elections and that is something that people should be alarmed about,” Weiser said. “But this can be thwarted. And it must be.”
So the argument is that ICE doesn’t have enough manpower for this strategy to work across the US, and attempting to use ICE this way could backfire and result in stronger Democratic wins like we saw in Minnesota.
What isn’t mentioned are other ways Trump could attempt a coup or election interference that might ignore the constitution - the two individuals who are doubtful Trump will succeed are assuming the law will be respected and followed, and they don’t consider other possibilities.
Isn’t the most foolproof method -and one that Trump has floated previously- just to not hold the elections?
not sure why you think that’s “foolproof” - he has no authority to do that, and it seems tantamount to a coup to stop elections without constitutional grounds
Didn’t the Brennan Center come up with scenarios in his first term but didn’t anticipate an angry mob ransacking Congress as one of them?
that would be good to know, but based on their analysis here I would absolutely not be surprised that they just ignored extra-judicial methods like a full-on coup …
Also, ICE doesn’t need to be everywhere, they need to be at a few dozen key locations in swing states.
Yeah… People seem to be forgetting that bush stole an election via the brooks brothers riot in one county. With just how fucked up the American electorial system evolved it only takes one country to vastly change the course of American history.
As far as the courts, just in the last couple years we’ve seen the judicial branch is more than willing to reinterpret history and law to empower the current administration.
The bigger the blowout is, the less marginal risk that any given precinct being fucked with can alter the outcome in his favor. Even greater reason to mobilize the vote as much as possible.
The electoral college also has nothing to do with the midterms.
It’s important to identify threats, but it’s also critical not to aggrandize their power and make them appear invincible. They are desperate to instill defeatism into the ranks of their opposition. But their bravado betrays their weakness.
They absolutely rely on the obedience of various pillars of support throughout society to retain their power and legitimacy. Those pillars can be convinced and/or forced to cease their obedience and in some cases to actively provide support to the opposition. None of this is new or unique to America. Tyrannical regimes have been removed from power many time through nonviolent mass movements. We can learn from them if we choose to.
yes, I do think they under-anticipate the way that ICE could be used surgically - just flipping a few elections could be crucial …
I’m concerned that they’ve already undermined trust in the elections so much that neither side will accept a losing outcome as legitimate. The larger attack on democracy has already succeeded. I hope I’m wrong.
So the argument is that ICE doesn’t have enough manpower for this strategy to work across the US
Anyone who doesn’t understand this, has no idea how much goes into everyone voting in person within the same 12 hour period…
What I think he’ll try, is claiming Dem states aren’t competent to run elections and appointing his own people to run, and rig, the elections in blue states.
And he’ll specifically target states run by neoliberals he knows won’t fight back.
Cali has a shit ton of electoral votes, and Newsom would prefer Republicans steal the election if he’s not the Dem candidate, so he’d probably just make some token complaints, have an intern post some memes, and then let it happen hoping it gives him a shot at 2032
What isn’t mentioned are other ways Trump could attempt a coup or election interference that might ignore the constitution
There really aren’t any other ways which don’t fall into either “entirely protected speech” or “instigation of civil war”.
Trump is free to claim his party won the midterms, and even file nuisance suits in the courts. And we shouldn’t assume he wouldn’t try to just declare who won or try and interfere with the formation of the much-bluer 120th Congress. But all permutations are either things he’s as free as anyone to do, things that likely won’t work, or things that would start a civil war.
Trump literally instigated an insurrection … I don’t know why “starting a civil war” doesn’t seem like a straightforwardly likely path for him … in particular I think that will be most likely at the end of his term, just like last time. The question is whether his coup will be successful this time, even though it failed last time. He has been more careful this time to appoint positions with loyalists (think JD Vance rather than Mike Pence), and has been purging the military with this in mind.
We are far from being confident that Trump won’t succeed in another coup attempt.
At least I take comfort knowing that even if he does succeed in a coup, he doesn’t have much life left - it won’t be as bad as when the fascists won in Spain (36 years of fascist rule under Franco), or as bad as Stalin’s rule (29 years).
Trump is 79 years old right now, he is very likely to survive the next 3 years (the rest of his term), but the average life expectancy of men in the US is 76 years, and his life expectancy is probably less than a decade.
This is a cult of personality, I find it unlikely MAGA will have much success post-Trump.
We are far from being confident that Trump won’t succeed in another coup attempt.
This entirely depends on what you mean by “succeed”.
Would you consider the Confederate States of America (nominally founded during and extinguished by the 19th century US civil war) a “success”?
a secession is different than a coup, a coup is successful if there is a transfer of power (or the constitutional transfer of power fails, like when Trump tried to prevent Biden from taking office) … and yes, even if Trump led a coup and was in power for a short time like the short life of the Confederacy, I do think retaining power after his constitutional term would be a “success” in the sense that I mean
and I do think the Confederacy successfully seceded from the Union, even if it didn’t last long
and in a broader sense the Confederacy succeeded in many ways even if we acknowledge they lost the war - after Lincoln’s assassination, the South was met with appeasements and there was a failure to integrate or enforce rule of law in the South … from the perspective of Black lives at the time, I would say the South definitely succeeded in maintaining their power and control, and we see this even in the ways that massacres of tens of thousands of Black folks in the South after the civil war went unpunished: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedmen_massacres
I think it’s a rhetorical distinction, but an important one to be aware of.
It would be terrible for us to waste time arguing over whether or not “Trump can succeed!” when we both agree that any such success is likely to be short lived, lead to immediate violence, and most probably result in a violent removal of his administration from power.
(Not to say that we necessarily agree on those things – just that it’d be a waste of time arguing if we do.)
Agreed on most of that - but I don’t know that violent removal of his administration from power after a successful coup is the most likely outcome - the US military was in the hands of other side in the case of the Confederacy … a successful Trump coup would maybe lead to schisms within the military or between state National Guards and federal forces (maybe), but it’s also possible Trump just takes and holds power and there is no domestic military force that is willing or able to remove him. Maybe California and other states would band together, but I’m not sure they would have the military to fight off the US military if they are loyal to Trump after a coup.
It’s possible Trump’s coup will be more like what happened in Russia, where they find a way to do it without much bloodshed by undermining the democratic institutions of elections, media, etc. so that it all appears to be constitutional and legal, but the government has clearly become autocratic.
How close is the Levitt family tree to the Leavitt family tree?
not sure, but I doubt it’s that close
It’s not going to fail. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think we will see the outcome we’d like to see.
We must assume it will. We know these people are incredibly incompetent and of the 3 estimated tracks I theorized (in risk planning), Trump is somewhere between the lowest and middle tier of inflicting tyranny.
Game Theory is that we must be viligent and also assume they will be legit and drive turnout for Democrats.
(to those who criticize the AIPAC Dems and what not, now is the time to get involved in Dem primaries to get more progressives in).
I don’t know about competent but brazen for sure. Think they won’t try to steal the election by straight up bombing high density liberal areas? Oh, they definitely would.
heory is that we must be viligent and also assume they will be legit and drive turnout for Democrats.
(to those who criticize the AIPAC Dems and what not, now is the time to get involved in Dem primaries to get more progressives in).
Technically, the best time to start building primary candidates was immediately after the last election. The second best time is now.
Those incredibly incompetent people managed to turn America into a full-on dictatorship. Those incompetent people are murdering people in broad daylight with impunity. Those incompetent people are illegally deporting citizens live on camera, those incompetent people are getting away with the largest sex-trafficking pedo-ring in history-
At what point are we going to stop calling them incompetent and start accepting that they’ve efficiently undermined the history- and future, of the largest superpower on the entire planet all within 6 months.
It’s over already. We lost.
This is a miserably defeatist attitude and it helps no one. If you’re not going to say anything useful, then just stay out of our way, please.
^ EVERYONE BE VERY WARY OF COMMENTS LIKE THIS SPREADING DEFEATISM, APATHY.
It’s over already. We lost.
This is bullshit, and I can think of 100000 ways it could be 1,00,000x worse than it is.
It is a completely and utterly non-constructive mindset and intended to prevent action and resistance. At BEST, it is just completely ignorant and short-sighted. The only thing this mindset does is help the fascists. Please, don’t help the fascists.
It’s over already. We lost.
You only lose if you refuse to fight. Look, I know it looks hopeless. I’ve been fighting for energy transitions for 25 years, if you think I don’t know what hopeless feels like? I have good news for you though. The future didn’t always look this dark once. That also means you don’t know how bright it might be around the next bend. I will probably not live to see victory if it happens; and it may never happen. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth going down fighting anyway.
In the frame of reference of the grand scope of the universe, everything anyone anywhere has ever done is inconsequential. But in the frame of reference of right here, right now, what you chose to be, matters. It matters to everyone around you, everyone you care about, and it matters to you. MY fight isn’t over until I choose for it to be over or someone takes me out. Is yours?
The take away isn’t that they’re not incompetent, they absolutely are, it’s that the bar to getting away with all of that was way lower than anybody ever thought. All those checks and balances, laws and conventions, and distributed powers ultimately mean nothing if someone controls enough of the government and the one thing Republicans have been highly competent about is making sure a majority of every branch of government has been packed with loyal Republicans. Once that was done nothing else mattered, it’s Calvin Ball from here out so it literally doesn’t matter that they’re all knuckle dragging morons.
At this point there are only three possible ways of fixing this. In order from best to worst the first possibility is that MAGA doesn’t feel bold enough to outright ignore the midterms and they lose their majority in at least the legislative branch. The second possibility is that they fuck with the midterms so obviously that the military feels compelled to actually follow their oath to defend the Constitution and stages a military coup to oust MAGA. The third and worst possibility is that the military fails to act and it’s up to regular citizens to stage a revolt which would likely lead to a second civil war. Best case scenario in that case is that the military either sits things out or else fractures and sides in part with each side. Worst case the military sides with MAGA.
The only opportunity is for 3 Republican House seats to switch, then impeach.
I can tell you are not a serious person, as you pretend impeachment means anything.
I don’t understand how the emoluments clause is not an open and shut impeachment case.
As we saw with his first two impeachments, impeachment is not removal. So long as the cult of personality continues to support him, so too will the Republican Party.
It’s going to be same as the last elections. Media will claim left is winning and followers of pop news will eat it up.
Trump will be trying to steal the election in lots of different ways simultaneously. This article doesn’t even get to the ID law he’s trying to pass, where your birth certificate must match your current ID, or you have to also supply all intervening name changes (such as through marriage and divorce).
Also, trump is using facial recognition software and other data that will allow them to pull non-trumpy voters out of the lineup for additional time-consuming harassment over their ID. Voting times may be cut off.
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