Eric Levitz writes:

Ever since the United States entrusted its presidency to a would-be insurrectionist in January 2025, many Americans have feared for the integrity of their nation’s future elections.

And not without reason. President Donald Trump made his contempt for democracy clear on January 6, 2021. Shortly after retaking office last year, he pardoned the rioters who’d stormed the Capitol in his name, gutted the agency that protects America’s voting infrastructure from cyberattacks, attempted to unconstitutionally deter the counting of many mail-in ballots, and threatened to prosecute officials who had faithfully administered the 2020 election.

If concerns that Trump might unduly influence the 2026 midterms aren’t new, however, they’ve grown markedly more plausible over the past two weeks.

In late January, the FBI seized 2020 election records — ballots, voter rolls, and scanner images — from a government facility in Fulton County, Georgia. This raid represented a new frontier in the president’s use of federal law enforcement to advance his conspiratorial claims of electoral impropriety.

Meanwhile, as ICE agents brutalized and killed protesters in Minnesota, US Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote a letter to that state’s governor, Tim Walz, in which she appeared to propose a bizarre quid pro quo: If Walz wished to see “an end to the chaos in Minnesota” — and, implicitly, a pullback in ICE operations there — he should give the Department of Justice access to his state’s voter rolls.

If the subtext of these actions was unclear, the president spelled it out this week. In an interview with his former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, Trump said that Republicans in Washington, DC, should “take over the voting” in at least “15 places.” [Continue reading…]