Midterms are Now the Eye of the Storm

After a year in which they were overwhelmed by the Trump regime’s flood-the-zone strategy, the news media and the public now recognize that protecting the integrity of the midterm elections is the critical battle to be fought this year. Winning back the House and Senate are the surest means to ending the authoritarian takeover.

In one year, Donald Trump and the authors of Project 2025 have shown that the checks and balances of the Constitution have so far proven inadequate to protect against people in government who would willfully disregard the laws of the land. The damage they have wrought has been swift and nearly incomprehensible in scope.

They have:

• Militarized our cities. Reels of video evidence and firsthand reporting inform us that ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents are flooding the streets not to enforce immigration laws but to harass and terrorize law-abiding members of the community. The “worst” and “most violent” criminal immigrants are clearly not the target; law-abiding members of our communities, including US citizens and young children, are.
• Violated election security protocols. The FBI seized ballots from the Fulton County, GA, 2020 elections, resurrecting the lie of a stolen election while violating chain-of-custody rules and establishing a dangerous precedent for the upcoming midterms.
• Dismantled and handicapped federal agencies from performing vital, congressionally-mandated tasks. Fulfilling a promise to traumatize and villainize public servants working in the federal government, Trump gave free rein to Elon Musk and his DOGE staff to decimate the federal workforce. Musk’s mandate was best exemplified when he wielded a chainsaw onstage at CPAC.
• Corrupted the functioning of government for personal gain. Trump has used his office to add at least $4 billion to his net worth since his reelection. He has pardoned criminals who invested in his cryptocurrency, settled meritless lawsuits with tech media companies for $90 million, and took an unusually high fee from Amazon, a tech company with several reasons to curry favor with the president, for the right to produce a documentary on his wife, Melania. And his businesses have initiated projects in countries that now seem to receive most-favored-nation status from the US government.
• Betrayed all Americans, but especially the officers who defended the Capitol on January 6. On the first day of his second term, Trump pardoned all who participated in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, including those convicted of assaulting police officers. Six of the pardoned have since been charged with child sex crimes, two others have been charged with rape, and two of the pardoned killed people while driving drunk. In all, at least 33 have been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for crimes unrelated to Jan. 6.
• Betrayed our allies abroad. For decades, the Soviet Union and then Russia sought to undermine the alliance of Western democracies. Trump’s antagonism toward the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and NATO, along with his threats against Greenland have done the job.

Their flood-the-zone strategy has mostly kept the scandal-seeking media in a perpetual game of whack-a-mole and the country off balance and disoriented. Yet, over the last couple of months, Trump’s hostility to extending healthcare subsidies, his invasion of Venezuela, his threats against Greenland, and his defense of the murders of two US citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis have given the media headlines with enough staying power to galvanize public opinion and encourage more Republicans to break with the White House.

As more of the country grows wary of Trump’s power, the November midterms are emerging from the torrent of news-making as the central story of the coming months. In January, several media outlets, including the Washington Post, The Guardian, Democracy Docket, and VoteBeat, ran stories on the likelihood that Trump would interfere in the elections. Writing in the Post, Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez explained that Trump is “openly fearful that a Congress controlled by Democrats could investigate him, impeach him, and stymie his agenda.”

At the end of January, the New York Times editorial board warned, “The sanctity of the 2026 elections is indeed under threat. And the reason is Mr. Trump.”

The editors went on to recommend a number of actions their readers could take to help ensure the integrity of the elections. Two days later, as if in response, Trump said, “The Republicans should say, we want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.”

Trump still insists on the lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election, but it is clearly he who is most desirous of rigging the midterms.