Trump is rigging our elections
Today, while much of the country was celebrating Mother’s Day with long-distance phone calls, brunch gatherings, and visits to resting places carrying flowers, the President of the United States locked himself away inside the White House and instead chose to spend the day rage-posting his grievances on social media. Hour after hour, he sat with his phone, firing off demands, threats, and self-pity while the rest of the country was sharing love, memories, and gratitude.
He didn’t hold back. He spent the day attacking the media and his political opponents. He blasted Supreme Court justices who ruled against him, even ones he personally appointed, while threatening to “pack the court.” He promoted his ballroom construction project, lashed out at Fox News and a member of Congress in the same breath, and declared, “The Radical Left Dumacrats must fail — Our Country is at stake!” before turning toward something even darker: laying the groundwork to undermine free and fair elections this November by announcing he would have an “election integrity army in every single state to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote.”
What he posted on Truth Social today was in response to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s announcement of a bipartisan election task force that includes former Attorney General Eric Holder and election lawyer Marc Elias:
“Palestinian Chuck Schumer is hiring Eric Holder, famous for handing guns to Mexican cartels under the Barack Hussein Obama administration, as part of a Democrat-led ‘Election Integrity Group’ that will no doubt try to suppress Republican voters, and interfere in our Elections. Furthermore, Marc Elias, a terrible lawyer with a horrible track record, is also involved. This is the same disgusting individual who was responsible for the fake Russia dossier from a foreign nation to meddle in the 2016 Election, which I won in historic fashion. The Democrats are totally unhinged and we will not allow them to threaten the integrity of our Elections.”
He then added: “During my Historic Election in 2024, when I won every single Swing State, and decisively won both the Electoral and Popular votes by wide margins, the Republicans had an Election Integrity Army in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote. We will be doing the same again in 2026, but it will be much bigger and stronger.”
And as much as Trump is hot-headed, we must take this threat seriously. He said there would be a big and strong army in every state during the elections.
He did not say who these people will be or how they will be deployed, who will train them, what they will be told to look for, or what authority they will have. He did not say whether they will be in uniform or in plain clothes, or if they will be armed. And that vagueness is the threat. Because when the President of the United States tells his most radicalized supporters that there will be an “army” in every state to protect his version of the election, he is not issuing a policy. He is issuing an invitation. And the people who showed up at the Capitol on January 6 are listening.
What he calls defense is actually offense. Schumer’s task force was created to protect voters from suppression and interference. Trump reframed that protection as an attack, then announced his own partisan force as the response. This is a move straight from the authoritarian playbook: accuse your opponents of doing exactly what you are about to do, so that by the time you do it, the public is too confused to tell the difference.
And we already know what an “election integrity army” looks like when it is deployed, because we have seen it before.
In 1981, during a gubernatorial election in New Jersey, the Republican National Committee launched something called the Ballot Security Task Force. They put up posters in Black and Latino neighborhoods that read, “This area is being patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force. It is a crime to falsify a ballot.” They stationed armed, off-duty police officers and private security guards at polling precincts in minority communities. The message was clear: if you come here to vote, you are being watched, and you might be in danger. The Democratic National Committee sued. The case was settled, and the RNC was placed under a federal consent decree that required them to get court approval before running any poll-watching operation, specifically to prevent voter intimidation. That decree lasted 35 years. It expired in 2018, during Trump’s first term. And the moment it was gone, this exact playbook started coming back.
By 2024, Lara Trump, then co-chair of the RNC, said the expiration of that consent decree “gives us a great ability” in the election. The RNC announced it would deploy more than 100,000 volunteers and attorneys across battleground states. A Trump campaign spokesperson used the word “soldiers” to describe the poll watchers they intended to deploy. They eventually claimed to have recruited over 200,000. And in multiple states, they specifically recruited white suburban volunteers and sent them to monitor polling places in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods. In Arizona in 2022, two armed men in tactical gear and balaclavas stood outside a ballot drop box in Maricopa County, filming voters. In a Wisconsin special election in 2024, police had to remove poll observers who were challenging every single absentee ballot. In Texas, partisan poll watchers stalked voters and confronted election workers.
That was the version with some restraint. That was before the consent decree had fully faded from memory. What Trump announced today is a scaled-up version of all of it, run from the White House, backed by presidential authority, and justified by the lie that Democrats are the ones cheating.
This is another authoritarian takeover move, focusing on elections. Not in one dramatic moment. But in layers. Redraw the districts. Restrict the ballot. Deploy the watchers. Challenge the results. Throw it to the courts you’ve stacked. And if any one piece fails, the others are still in place. Right now, the Republican Party is building all of them at once.
And on the same day he announced the army, he also made clear what he intends to do with the courts if they don’t obey. He posted a long, rambling attack on two of the conservative Supreme Court justices he personally put on the bench. Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett had joined Chief Justice Roberts in February to rule that Trump’s tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were illegal. The ruling stripped billions in tariff revenue and forced the government to begin processing refunds. Trump has not let it go. He wrote today that Gorsuch and Barrett “have hurt our Country so badly” and said, “With certain Republican Nominated Justices that we have on the Supreme Court, the Democrats don’t really need to ‘PACK THE COURT’ any longer. In fact, I should be the one wanting to PACK THE COURT!”
A sitting president threatening to pack the Supreme Court because two of his own appointees followed the law. He named them publicly and accused them of disloyalty. And he went further. He noted in the same post that he recently became “the first President in History to attend a Supreme Court session,” and that this fact “did not go unnoticed by the Court.” That was not a historical footnote. That was a message: I am watching you. I know where you sit. And I will be watching when you rule on birthright citizenship next.
This is what happens when a man believes the courts belong to him. The elections belong to him. The Justice Department belongs to him. The military belongs to him. And anyone who acts like they belong to the Constitution instead of to him is a traitor. He said it again later that evening about Fox News, of all places, raging that they allowed Congressman Ro Khanna to speak on air and calling him a “sleazebag” and “scum.” Even his own propaganda network is no longer loyal enough. The circle of acceptable loyalty is shrinking to a point so small that eventually the only person inside it will be the man himself.
And then, after the sun went down, came the memes. A flood of them. One after another, shared from accounts called “Trumps Army” and “Women For Trump” and “I Stand With Trump 47.” “Trump Is Without a Doubt the Greatest President We Have Ever Known.” “Donald Trump is Now Ranked Among the Top Three Presidents in U.S. History.” A doctored image of his face being carved into Mount Rushmore with a caption about America’s 250th birthday. “The Greatest of All Time.” “Thank God for Trump.” And then, between two glorified images of himself, a promotional post for his ballroom, with his own commentary: “It is going up fast!!!”
On the day meant to honor mothers, the President of the United States turned his feed into a shrine to himself. He was not posting to the country. He was posting to his own reflection. And the contrast between the man in the White House and the millions of mothers across this country who spent the day being thanked for their selflessness, their sacrifice, their love, was another revealing look into his presidency. Mothers give. He takes. Mothers protect. He threatens. Mothers hold families together. He tears a country apart. And the relentless posting makes you wonder if he was threatened by so many women, mothers getting attention today? Attention, he would rather be focused on him.
And the fact that Trump used the word “every” when talking about his planned election army is where we need to start thinking when we are brainstorming ways to end this authoritarian takeover. Every single state means every single one of us has a role to play in stopping this. We have a midterm election in November, and right now there are Republican members of Congress in every district who are watching their phones, their inboxes, and their town halls to decide whether they are going to stand behind what is being built or put some distance between themselves and the regime. They are reading the room. We are the room.
If you have a Republican representative or senator up for re-election, contact their office this week. Tell them you saw the “election integrity army” post. Tell them you want to know whether they support deploying partisan forces to polling places in their state. Tell them you saw the threat to pack the court and ask whether they support a president attacking justices by name for following the law. Make them go on record. The ones who stay silent are choosing a side, and we need to make sure their voters know which one.
We also need to plan to be the opposition beyond what we do online. He must vote, which I know most everyone of us plans to do. But we can do more. We can help others register to vote. Drive someone to the polls. Volunteer as a poll worker, the real kind, the trained kind, the kind that operates inside the rules and protects every voter’s right to cast a ballot in peace. Support independent media. Share what you read. Push back on the lies, online and in person. Every conversation matters. Every share matters.
And I want to take a moment to thank every single one of you who makes this work possible. The paid subscribers who allow me to write every night and keep these posts free for everyone, including those who can’t afford to pay. The readers who share these posts. The people who leave comments, who send messages, who tell me they read every night. You are why I can keep doing this. And you are proof of something we forget on the hardest days: there are more of us than we know. We don’t wear red hats. We don’t have a billionaire propaganda machine telling us what to think. But we are here, paying attention, and we are not going anywhere.
And I want to end this by answering a question I often see from readers who worry that if we lose the midterms, all hope is lost. I want to say this for all to read. Even if the worst happens, even if they cheat, suppress, or rig the election, hope is not lost. Hope is a choice we make every morning when we get out of bed and decide to keep telling the truth. It is a choice we make when we keep showing up for each other, when we keep voting even when they make it hard, when we keep speaking even when they try to make us afraid. They cannot take that from us. They can only take it if we hand it over. And we are not handing it over. Ever. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: I’m back to birdwatching. This one was loud. I wish I knew what he was demanding!
Sources:
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/trump-says-send-election-integrity-214017420.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-rnc-vote-monitor-election-integrity-rcna148557
Stay strong guys, it’s so hard seeing what’s happening from so far away.
He has a complete addiction to money , it’s all he thinks about and he knows that keeping it flowing is his whole raison d’etre.
If necessary organise car loads from your district to vote together, make sure all paperwork is in place before the end of October. Help more vulnerable neighbours to the polls and if there are unpleasant “armed forces “ manning the polls make sure your local police are also present to keep them away from the voters.
America is beginning to sound more like Russia than the relaxed charming country I know and my heart bleeds for you.
Stand strong and come up with ways to dodge Trumps horrific games.
Not only 1981 was rigged, but also 2020 was a sad moment not mentionned in this article: And of course, I don't mean it the Trumpian way:
Remember the TV debate on October 6th, 2020: "Proud boys.... stand back and stand bye". Doesn't that sound like an army?
Then came Election Night when even Fox News finally called Byden the winner of some swing states... Then the call to Georgia Election Supervisor Brat Raffensberg: "I need to find 11700 votes....." But the result was clear!
The next stage was January 6th: "Fight like hell or you won't have a country anymore"! The attempt to overturn a democratic result!