Recommended Reading: Ground Games
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Authoritarian Intentions
Speaking frankly, unless you’re an American nazi, it’s not doing any good to pretend that Swine Emperor Trump intends to conduct free and fair democratic elections across America throughout the 2026 and 2028 election cycle. This is, after all, a fascist would-be dictator, who attempted a coup to stay in power after losing a 2020 election he tried as hard as possible to overturn, and a Trumpenreich executive branch that is codifying into official government policy President Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. You don’t have to take my word for it that Trump intends to rig the next round of American elections either, the fascists behind the regime’s agenda openly admitted as much in Project 2025.
While I’ve touched briefly in our regular editions of The Skinny on Trump’s ramblings about serving an illegal third term, it’s been a long while since we’ve checked in on Downmarket Mussolini’s ongoing attempts to rig American elections, for either himself or other fascists in his party. I understand that many people are looking at a term-limited seventy-nine year old bloated nazi windbag running a cult of personality, and counting on time or circumstance to nip this problem in the bud. Unfortunately, that’s a pretty shortsighted position in my opinion. Nobody knows when the reaper will finally come for Donny the Dictator, but this larger fascist movement’s stated ambitions to permanently rig the American electoral process on behalf of the authoritarian right clearly represents a threat that will exist beyond Trump’s political career or lifespan.
As such, I think a recent New York Times report that Pork Reich officials have told Justice Department lawyers to explore whether or not they can criminally charge election officials for failing to “safeguard” their voting systems should probably be generating more alarm than it is. After all, one of the central planks of Trump’s Big Lie is essentially that election officials who preside over districts he lost in swing states that went for Biden are corrupt minions, working to rig the election for his Democrat opponent. Trump’s self-motivated fantasies about corrupt election officials were exposed as nonsense in court, but now that he’s President, his Justice Department has the power to enforce those lies as if they were real. For more details, let’s turn to The New Republic’s senior legal columnist, Harry Litman:
The Little-Noted Trump-DOJ Move That Should Scare the Hell Out of You
“Democracy can weather a lot of damage and unlawful conduct at Trump’s hands, but if he succeeds in taking control of the machinery of elections, it could be a fatal blow.
That’s why a barely noticed story in The New York Times last week was so worrisome. As reported by the Times, unidentified senior administration officials have directed DOJ lawyers to explore the possibility of federal criminal charges against state or local election officials deemed to have failed to adequately safeguard computer systems.
Tellingly, the initiative isn’t grounded in any new evidence, data, or legal theory. It’s not about truth or justice. It’s a political and ideological ploy, reportedly incubated in the Project 2025 workshop—part of Trump’s broader effort to delegitimize democratic institutions and seize autocratic control.”
I can literally hear you groaning “not this bullcrap again” through the screen, dear reader, and I absolutely share your exhaustion. Yes, as far as I can tell Donald Trump is actively re-litigating the Big Lie to rig future elections for the nazis; a group otherwise known as the modern US Republican Party. I should note that I chose Litman’s article here precisely because its written from the perspective of a “sober moderate legalist” liberal who clearly fetishizes the American democratic process; in other words, suggesting Trump is trying to rig the upcoming election cycle isn’t any sort of “radical left” alarmism. Of course that comes with drawbacks, and I categorically reject Litman’s assertion that a threat to democratic rights in an oligarchy controlled by reactionary billionaires somehow supersedes all the other civil and human rights the regime is openly violating in importance; I imagine migrants being kidnapped and shipped to concentration camps in South Sudan might quibble with that statement too.
With that noted however, I think we can all agree that sham elections that can only be won by Trumpenreich nazis would be a fucking disastrous outcome for American society. If you want a good example of how that type of political system would function, take a look at Russia under Vladimir Putin. Sure, Russia has elections, but since they’re rigged hard enough that only Putin can win, I don’t think there’s anyone in the broader antifascist coalition in America willing to argue those elections are “democratic” in nature.
In terms of the operational mechanics of what the Trump regime is trying to do here, it’s not hard to see that this whole scheme is basically a reanimation of every white supremacy-infused election conspiracy theory the larger right wing coalition behind the Republican Party has been pushing for decades, with a special emphasis on Trump’s 2020 Big Lie propaganda. You don’t direct the Department of Justice to start investigating for ways to prosecute election officials unless you’re trying to send a message that ballot box victories against Der Führer and his party won’t be tolerated. Without actually saying it out loud, the regime is essentially arguing that corrupt election officials are rigging the computers for their opposition, and threatening criminal prosecution for nebulous enough crimes that they can pretty much target anyone who serves up an election result Trump does not like. No, that’s not hyperbole – Litman agrees here too:
“Now, with the backing of a major-party nominee and the muscle of right-wing media, Trump is threatening to turn that isolated smear campaign into standard operating procedure. The message is simple: Help run an election that Trump loses, and we will come for you.
And, tragically, it may be working. Across the country, election officials have resigned in droves. Offices that were once nonpartisan and low-profile have become hotbeds of threats and suspicion. Trump has already browbeaten major law firms and entire universities into submission.”
Please keep in mind that this intimidation and operational stacking of election boards is part of a much larger project, fueled by both the Big Lie and Project 2025, to control the election process across the country by this same fascist movement and political party. Taking control of the electoral process by controlling or intimidating election boards around the country was a big part of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Those efforts continued throughout the next election cycle, and strategies to expand those efforts on a national scale have been published by the fascist thinktanks that set the Trump regime’s agenda. None of this is hypothetical, and they’re now adding the full force of the fascist state and American legal system to the scheme; Trump, the Republican Party, and the larger fascist movement in America have no intention of allowing the American public to vote them out of office this next election cycle.
Theory Made Practice
Alright, so we now know Trump’s Justice Department is threatening election officials across the country with federal prosecution based on fascist conspiracy theories about voting systems integrity; a redux of “The Big Lie” that fueled Trump’s political rebirth after losing the 2020 US Presidential election and the failed coup (autogolpe specifically) on January 6th, 2021. Whether the Trump’s fascist minions in the Department of Justice ever charge anyone with this nonsense or not, we know they’re actively trying to take over election boards, and the election process more broadly, all over the country. All that’s left is to watch them put that control into practice, and I think this Common Dreams story is a good enough place to start on that front.
As recently reported in the Washington Post, Trump’s Justice Department lead by Attorney General Pam Bondi “has taken the unusual step of asking at least nine states for copies of their voter rolls, and at least two have turned them over.” These efforts appear to be particularly focused on Colorado, a former battleground state that has been increasingly shifting towards Democrats, where a local Republican operative is pushing to allow the federal government to physically inspect their voting equipment.
‘The 2020 Playbook on Steroids’: Trump DOJ Requests for State Voter Data Spark Alarm
“Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, called the Trump administration’s efforts “the 2020 playbook on steroids.”
“This all is part of a bigger ploy to further undermine our voting in this country,” warned Griswold. “They are actively in a power grab.”
Even some Republican election officials responded with alarm to the Trump administration’s requests for voter data and access to voting equipment.
“To me, it felt like they were wanting to intervene before 2026,” Justin Grantham, the Republican clerk in Colorado’s Fremont County, told the Post, referring to the upcoming midterms.
Carly Koppes, a Republican clerk in Weld County, Colorado, said she rejected requests for a federal inspection of election equipment.
“That’s a hard stop for me,” said Koppes. “Nobody gets access to my voting equipment, for security reasons.”
To bring us back to the beginning of our story, the situation in Colorado is a pretty good example of why Pam Bondi and the Trumpenreich Justice Department are looking for ways to prosecute election officials who don’t go along with Trump’s fascist conspiracy bullshit and attempts to seize control of the election process. Even though the fascist right has already been quite successful at stacking election boards in even deeply-blue counties with (presumably) Trump-humping Republicans, folks like Justin Grantham and Carly Koppes show that this doesn’t guarantee cooperation with Trump’s anti-democratic agenda.
I think however the larger point to remember here is that absolutely none of this is actually about maintaining election integrity, and therefore none of the regime’s actions have to be moored to the truth in any tangible way. For example, they’re not asking to look at Colorado’s voting equipment because they think they’ll find something fishy. Rather, they intend to point to the investigation itself and any possible charges against Colorado election officials brought by Pam Bondi, which the Trump regime itself is creating whole cloth, as evidence that there is something fishy about a Colorado that doesn’t go full fascist in the next cycle of elections. The ultimate results of those investigations and potential trials are largely irrelevant to the Trump regime’s current goals of interfering with, and ultimately rigging the US electoral process.
This then brings us to the regime’s ongoing obsession with obtaining access to voter rolls, attempts the Trump administration has made through a wide variety of methods, including the Department of Government Efficiency, formerly run by Elon Musk. Obviously, analysis isn’t prophecy, but both the Trump regime and the larger Republican Party have aggressively been pushing conspiracy theories about undocumented migrants or deceased Democrats voting, so it doesn’t really take a genius to figure out they want to use those voter rolls to generate trumped up accusations of widespread voter fraud, and then use that as a justification to purge or otherwise disqualify huge numbers of people likely to vote against them in upcoming elections. The fact that they can also feed all that data into the digital panopticon Palantir is building so Trump can find all his political enemies, is pure gravy for the Trumpenreich and Downmarket Mussolini.
For much of the past month and a half, we’ve all partaken of an American political discourse openly asking “why doesn’t the Republican Party care about harming their own voters?” in the face of an upcoming election cycle. I believe the answer to that question is that the Trump regime feels pretty confident about its ability to ensure that they can’t lose political power in any future rigged elections.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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