With only nine months before the 2026 midterm elections, Donald Trump and his loyal MAGA administrators are directly threatening what little democracy ever existed in the United States.
Trump’s Many Lies
Even in 2016, before his electoral college victory over Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump dishonestly projected a narrative that the election would be fraudulent and rigged by his enemies in the supposedly Democratic “deep state.” When this didn’t happen and he got the election that he wanted, he dropped that narrative.
Four years later, only hours after he decisively lost the 2020 election (by about 7 million votes), he said “frankly, we did win this election” and began the systematic lie that shaped so much of what followed. First Trump tried to steal the 2020 election through official channels by putting forth “alternative slates of electors” of people loyal to him from various states he claimed that he won. When that didn’t work, he used the lie to appeal to his supporters to “fight like hell” which motivated the January 6 attack on the capital. It became clear after further investigation that he not only riled up his supporters for violence, but he and the slimy characters close to him simultaneously worked through the courts and the political system to overturn the results. Even after 62 court cases (many in cases presided over by Trump appointed judges) and several forensic audits in various states, these investigations found zero evidence of the rigging he claimed. Yet he continued to advance the lie that the election had been stolen.
Since then, he has continued to spew the right-wing mythology that Democratic cities with large Black and Hispanic populations are all corrupt, that they don’t run elections properly, that they allow undocumented immigrants to vote or manufacture votes, etc. He has sued two-dozen states demanding that they turn over their voter rolls to his federal government. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently demanded that Minnesota turn over its confidential voter information in return for pulling ICE and CBP out of the state. Fortunately, the officials in Minnesota said “no” to this ransom. And just last week FBI agents raided the election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, the county that is home to Atlanta, a Democratic stronghold with a large Black population. There, under the watchful eyes of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (who is supposed to be in charge of national security threats coming from foreign nations), they took dozens of cases of ballots and other voting information from 2020. And in recent days Donald Trump has openly suggested that the federal government should simply take over the running of elections.
All this from a man who has openly joked about being a dictator and in a recent interview said that his personal morality is the only limit on what he can and will do.
The Right Wants to Kill Democracy
The danger isn’t only from Trump himself. He’s almost 80 years old and really only cares about himself and his ego. But his younger followers and reactionary politicians who do have a long term vision for dominating the United States – such as Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Tom Cotton, Tucker Carlson and other lower level followers – want to continue to blast ahead as they have all year. And, since many of these followers have ignored court orders and in some cases actually clearly committed crimes over the past year, they are starting to become aware that even a moderate Democratic administration will aggressively begin prosecutions in order to punish their lawlessness.
These criminals and manipulators will undoubtedly use any levers they can to manipulate the elections. This has led even more conservative commentators to realize that what little democracy ever existed in the U.S. is in real peril.
The possibilities are obvious. Without showing any evidence, his FBI could now begin saying that the paperwork confiscated from Fulton County proves that there was fraud, and that it’s all proof that the 2020 election was stolen by deep-state Democrats. By continuing to illegally detain and threaten U.S. citizens and filling up detention camps, he can keep thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, from voting. He can send ICE and CBP agents to the homes of poor, working class, Black and Hispanic voters, questioning their eligibility or the legality of their voter registration, and making them scared to vote or even leave their homes. On election day he can send ICE and CBP agents, all heavily armed, to voting sites to “monitor” the vote, adding another layer of intimidation and threat of violence. His former advisor and right-wing influencer Steve Bannon recently threatened exactly this!
This would all likely happen in states or cities with larger Democratic voting majorities, or large Black and Hispanic populations. Loyal governors from Florida to Texas could purge voter rolls without public notice, as they’ve already done in the past, and keep tens of thousands from voting. Not to mention the nationwide gerrymandering and redistricting schemes that are already well underway. These and many other tactics could easily stop or deter tens of thousands, maybe more, from voting. All of which could spell the end of even the sham democracy that we’ve all lived with throughout our lives.
Because we should be clear: the United States has never had a true democracy, where working people have a real voice in making decisions about what we produce, how we work, whether or not to fight wars, whether we want to preserve the natural world around us, and our lives in general. The system has – from the start – been shaped and guided by the ruling capitalists who grow wealthy on our backs, and who then ignore our needs and desires. They do so by managing the system in ways that profit them, while using the Democrats and Republicans and tightly managed elections to give us the illusion that we have a real say.
But even that sham democracy is now under real threat. If Trump and his reactionary supporters have their way, we will be slipping toward a more openly authoritarian period. Then we will be in an even deeper hole that we were before, with even less ways to minimize the damage they can do or get rid of them, and even more violence and repression coming our way.
We Can Stop Them!
But that outcome is not preordained. Despite the violence and chaos he has unleashed, Trump is not all-powerful. He has not consolidated power outside of the Republican Party. In fact, he is extremely unpopular and in some ways very weak. So is much of the MAGA project, which is losing much of the popular support that it once had among sections of the population.
What little democratic rights and breathing room that we have under this system are worth defending! Those of us who want to preserve what little democracy we have are the vast majority of the population. Millions are currently turning away from this president as they see Trump’s hypocrisy and hatred, and as they witness the violence and the terror that his administration has unleashed. On virtually every policy, Trump’s approval ratings are at dismally low levels. It is clear that in any fair midterm election or vote of any sort, Trump and his political movement will likely be hugely outvoted.
But we know that the right-wing apparatus and hard-core MAGA supporters will do everything they can to stop that from happening. And we can’t settle for just handing the government back over the Democrats, who have helped Republicans preserve this system for more than 150 years. We can’t continue to settle for just preserving the sham democracy that we still have.
While it is necessary to engage in defensive struggles to maintain whatever democratic rights we might have today, we need to also lay the groundwork for our own offensive struggles to fundamentally change things so that we can really be in charge. We need to go much further by organizing ourselves in truly democratic, bottom-up ways that allow us to have meaningful say over our own lives, our own communities, and our planet. To do so, we need to do the hard work of connecting with each other and finding ways to build our power outside of the electoral system, in ways that can truly represent our needs and desires. We can do this in our neighborhoods, in our schools, in our workplaces, and in our unions and our other working-class organizations.
But we can’t settle for what’s gotten us here. The system needs to go, and we need to build a real democracy in its place where the majority actually rules – the workers.
