My Reply To A Substack Reader’s Question
Lance Rosen
What Will Trump Do To Steal The Midterms? Start With "The Unthinkable"-- My Reply To A Substack Reader's Question-- Question-- ["Lance, sticking with WWII and Nazi German analogies, what are the chances that Trump will try to create tension between himself and Congress by demanding the ouster of the GA Senators (without evidence), and escalate to make a Reichstag fire event, to take away more of our rights?"] My Reply-
What Will Trump Do To Steal The Midterms? Start With "The Unthinkable"--
["The chances are too high. My perspective is to imagine the full array of the absolute worst things he might do, and then make a plan to preempt them.
We cannot limit ourselves to litigation or cybersecurity measures. We will need election lawyers in every State Capitol, but I expect Trump to use a combo of ICE agents and his far-right militias to launch massive violence and voter intimidation at the polls, and to have the FBI at the state election boards to seize ballots. He will try to conduct mass arrests and likely declare an emergency to use the National Guard in various key places under the 1807 Act.
The danger is that we could also see significant counterviolence by provocateurs sent in as a response to whatever Trump does and even armed conflict between ICE and state or local law enforcement in blue cities. Trump will use the violence to justify deploying the military under such circumstances, which is why we have to overdeploy ourselves to keep it all non-violent on our side.
I would also make sure to have a political strategy for when Trump and Johnson try to obstruct the new Democratic Congressmen and Senators from being sworn in, not just his targeting of the Georgia Senators. For example, you know that if Talarico wins Paxton will not concede and Trump will try to install him. Johnson told an audience of MAGA Congressmen at a meeting last month that if they lose, they are going to jail. He vowed to them, "I am your protection." So the plan to suspend Congress and purge their enemies on the Reichstag Fire model is live and operational.They are telling us about their intentions.
The point I have been making is that Trump knows that if they lose both Houses he will likely be impeached again, and he with all of his top cronies prosecuted for a vast number of crimes, both for those in the past and more recently. The entirety of the Project 2025 apparatus, their think tanks and legal foundations, their corporate benefactors, can thus all be rendered vulnerable.
He is prepared to launch a civil war to survive personally. There is nothing he wouldn't do. It will be a mega-January 6th on steroids in which he'll attempt to deploy a combo of military, federal law enforcement, and his armed white supremacist militias at the polls, the state houses, and in the streets. That along with canceling mail-in votes and shredding Democratic ballots.
We should be organizing for landslide victories where we can in order to remove all doubt, not winning by a hair in close races. That depends on creative new kinds of campaign outreach, expanded operations for getting people to the polls safely through a huge turnout. The logistics of bringing voters to the polls are complicated now in places like Houston due to GOP redistricting making them farther away, and we will have to be resourceful.
We will need the full gamut of election security, with the biggest possible polling place presence by volunteers nearby to work with local police to prevent voter intimidation or violence. That will depend mostly on the level of courage and commitment by the campaign volunteers and whether they get cooperation. If I were there organizing I would be visiting every police chief and County Sheriff to talk to them in advance and get a reading on where they stand, to know what we are dealing with. Law enforcement in general voted for Trump. We don't know if they will side with his goons at the polls or not, and we should find out now, not leaving it to chance. (We'll get almost no cooperation in hard red states unless the cities have blue mayors.)
We also should be laying groundwork to launch a nationwide general strike and shut the country down if he does any these things. If I were in leadership at the DNC I would be meeting with the heads of every union and constituency-based organization to make plans. Trump should fear a US market crash and financial chaos if he voids elections and refuses to swear in the Democrats who won. Especially if he tries to jail Democratic leaders for sedition because they are all “communist terrorists,” and fills up detention centers with campaign activists and protesters.
Remember, we are dealing with a literal maniac with dementia and a Hitler-level cult of loyalty in which they are fully capable of doing the worst you could imagine. There will be violence. There will also be a fracturing of both parties leadership in reaction to what he does, though Trump obviously exercises great control over the GOP. His grip has weakened recently but we can't say whether or not he will have willing accomplices everywhere. There are other Brad Raffensbergers out there.
The big question mark is will the military follow orders to shoot or mass arrest their fellow Americans? Have Trump and Hegseth succeeded in purging the disloyal ones at the top? Is there still enough opposition in our national security establishment to rein him in? We don't know, that is the honest answer.
And what will the American people do? Will they be passive and give up, or retaliate against violence with more violence, or optimally be part of organizing something as a strategy which is effective and doesn’t play into their hands.
First is generating the landslide. Second is protecting the voters. Third is legally defending our vote. Fourth will be our political response when they go ahead and void elections, including if necessary a nationwide general strike. Those are the things we can control, with the military being the wild card in all of this.
Blue state Governors and Mayors must be organized to arrest ICE agents at the polls and deploy their state National Guards to arrest white supremacist armed groups trying to act as "election integrity" vigilantes. The Governors of California, Illinois, New York, Minnesota and Pennsylvania in particular will have to lead the way on this and coordinate their actions.
GOP poll workers turning away minority voters based on race or gender must be arrested by local police.
It's not going to be an election. It's going to be a war, because they really are Nazis and their Führer, who sees roughly half of American voters as his mortal enemy, is insane. Our worst response would be to just send in the lawyers and data analysts and make that our strategy. The outcome will depend on a combination of all forms of effective non-violent and constitutional actions, driven by “People Power.”
There is no point in sugar coating any of it. You will see Trump on TV tomorrow night in all of his psychotic hallucinatory malignant glory, and he will be telling all of us what his plan is to end free elections in America, in his typical dogwhistle Trumpspeak.
Nothing, absolutely zero about this midterm election will look like anything which has come before it. We had better get our asses in gear now.
(Photo collage: top, Pickett's Charge, a painting of Battle Of Gettysburg. Bottom, January 6th)